Barbershop quartet singer, weight-loser, philosophy student of life

  • 31 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • We (76 and 60) shop with our plastic (credit, never debit). Next cash if it is hand-to-hand, or we can get a receipt. Otherwise check, but we don’t carry a checkbook. I may do PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle, but only if I know you personally – if you’re dealing with my spouse, you’d better take a check or plastic or wait for me.

    to the detriment of literally everyone else.

    How so? It’s an option. The other option may be “no sale.” We grew up on these and we understand them. All the high-tech ways are ever-changing, and we’re never sure where we stand with them.





  • A lot of the comments so far are trying to stay with the negative connotation to exploitation. You exploit your comfortable shoes to walk further each day. You exploit the microwave oven’s ability to more quickly warm your coffee than the stove.

    This is the same with discrimination. You choose the raspberry danish over the cheese danish. This is you practicing discrimination, and it’s fine.

    Any evil in it comes from abuse or impact to yourself with respect to others, that second definition of exploitation in the OP.



  • according to what Congress decides

    That’s the rub. We have checks-and-balance and – from the 10,000 foot level – the current president is the enforcer/executor and, as such, has discretion with how to prioritize his efforts among existing and new laws.

    When Congress makes an agency and tucks it into the Executive Branch, the president is the top of that org chart. Project 2025, in a nutshell, says that assignment gives the president the right to decide how much to do that business – including abstaining to prioritize it. This view is consistent with how other government administration works, who may decide that due to a recession we don’t focus on enforcement on fishing boats this year – for example.

    It may even be the case that no reason has to be given to abstain from giving a duty attention or funding. “Because they elected me and I say so,” for example.

    This would provide a check-and-balance against Congress making disagreeable laws.

    Now Congress should still make those laws if they’re sure they’re right, because doing so would say how a thing is to be done and limit a president’s power to do it differently, but the president seems to me to have the power to say whether and if a thing shall be done when it is placed within the Executive Branch (therefore, within presidential purview).

    We have a judiciary that has been pulled rightward, and we shouldn’t be surprised if we see more decisions aligned with Project 2025 from here on out.

    Even if Project 2025 is right on the law, we have not being doing business that way for decades – especially with federal agencies we consider independent by tradition or expectation. If we want to keep doing business the way that we are, we need to make sure our laws and any new constitutional amendments that need to be written are made. Even if we get an upright and generally good person as president, the points made in Project 2025 should be addressed.



  • I don’t know that I fit any of those label, neatly, but I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that the president is not in charge of everything under the Executive Branch.

    Keep in mind I’m not in charge of anything and I’m not right about anything! I’m nobody here.

    If Congress wants an independent agency, they need to create it and put it under themselves, not under the executive branch (so it seems to me). So even if Trump does not get into office (and let’s make sure that he doesn’t) Project 2025 is still going to be out there and it may be legally right in some important respects. Not paying attention to this reality is how we lost something like Roe v Wade … What the Supreme Court can give, it can take away. There is no such thing as “never going to happen”.

    Please defeat Trump and Trumpism, but take this concept of Project 2025 seriously beyond Trump.