mriguy

The entire point of our existing system is to guarantee the perpetual presence of a large population of hard workers with absolutely no legal rights in the labor pool.

If any complaint means you and your family might be immediately deported, you’re not going to ask for a raise (or most government services), and you sure as hell aren’t going to try to form a union. Employers haven’t figured out how to put all workers on that position yet, but it’s not for lack of trying. They get the benefit of a side effect that legal workers are always afraid their job will be outsourced to immigrants, so they too are leery of asserting their rights.

Whipping up anti immigrant sentiment actually helps perpetuate this system, since it lets you put all the heat on the workers and ignore the role of the employers. And just “getting tough on immigrants” (aka giving government more freedom to gratuitously abuse brown people) will never happen, because it would destroy entire industries, as we find out every time some southern state passes, then almost immediately repeals, this type of law.

Actually penalizing employers would require the labor markets to change in ways the Republicans would hate (fair compensation and rights for workers is anathema to them), and the Democrats don’t seem to care enough about to fight for. Probably because of their longterm shift towards dependence on corporate donors. Honestly, unions should be at the forefront of trying to fix this, but they are not very strong these days, and blaming immigrants is always easier than finding good solutions.

TL;DR Working as intended.

Stone ground white corn. Very popular in the southern US. Similar to polenta (which is made from yellow corn) but you can prepare it in lots of different ways.

Now they’ll just change arguments - “China has reduced their emissions so much that now there’s less urgency for us to lower ours”. Heads I win, tails you lose.

No worries. Still interesting!

A system of checks and money orders. And cash.

I’m pretty sure the demographic that talks about “my bitch ex-wife” is mostly in the tank for Trump already.

On the off chance you aren’t joking, no, it’s innocent until proven guilty.

Yeah, I think you’re right.

Ok. Have a nice day.

I have no idea what you are trying to say. Batteries have an environmental impact, but so does fracking for natural gas. You have the impact up front making a battery, but charging it with renewables does not have continued environmental impact. But if you use gas, you’re going to have to use an awful lot of it over that time period to offset the clean power you’re able to use when you have a battery. And that gas has a very high environmental impact, continually, over that entire time period.

I didn’t say batteries have NO impact, but they have less impact than continually mining and burning fossil fuels.

You make the batteries once, and the pollution due to production is spread over the 10-15 year lifetime of the battery. During that time gigawatt hours of clean power sloshes in and out of them. This in contrast to having to produce enough gas to make all of those gigawatt hours once, then throw the gas away as co2 and get more, along with the attendant pollution.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he can and will do whatever the fuck he wants, consequences be damned.

There are never any consequences. Until there are, his whole circus will continue and get worse.