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Well, seems like this legislation has done wonders for the sealion population at least
3·6 months agopeople will panic and not take their meds.
Yeah, this is exactly what I wouldn’t want anyone to do. From the article,
The Advocate spoke to Dr. Joshua King, medical director of the Maryland Poison Center at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, and Dr. Masha Yemets, a clinical toxicology fellow at the same institution, to gain insights into the risks associated with fluoxetine and diphenhydramine…
Both said they couldn’t comment definitively on Benedict’s death — “Without the full autopsy report and associated toxicology data, we couldn’t comment about the medical examiner’s determination,” Yemets cautioned — but they agreed that both of the medications reported to be in Benedict’s system are commonly taken and pose a low risk of dangerous interactions when used correctly.
…
Regarding young people being prescribed antidepressants such as fluoxetine, in addition to those possibly using diphenhydramine for allergies, King emphasized the need to avoid causing alarm among patients and their guardians. Discontinuing prescribed medications due to fear stirred by individual cases might lead to more harm than the medication itself, he noted. “It would be more dangerous if someone were prescribed this medication for depression and heard about this case and said, ‘This is dangerous. I’m going to stop taking it,’ and then ended up having a complication due to untreated depression,” he said
[Bolding added]
Republicans: “Communists are a threat to our national security! We must publicly interrogate and badger and slander anyone who has ever had communist sympathies!”
Republicans: “These civil rights protesters and Black Panthers want to overthrow America with mob violence! We need more law and order, police batons and fire hoses and attack dogs!”
Republicans: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists, we are going to bomb and smash and shoot anyone who even thinks about threatening us into submission.”
Also Republicans: “You better appease my friends’ unreasonable demands, we wouldn’t want them to do anything crazy here.”
I agree with the ends, but I have my suspicions the ends aren’t going to be as effective as we’ve estimated, because estimating the responses of independent actors to an inducement is really tough even in simple controlled experimental settings, and energy markets are anything but simple. Also, this all just reminds me way too much of when we gave telecom companies subsidies to build out better internet infrastructure in the late 90s and early 00s and they were able to exploit legal loopholes to just take the money without actually building out their networks and serving unserved populations. The companies were dealing with are smart, they’ve been dealing with and exploiting government regulations and institutions for a very long time, and they are masters of having their cake and eating it too when it comes to this stuff.
Moreover, I really think we should not be giving one dime to oil and gas companies under any circumstances, whether its indirectly through these no strings attached tax credits we’re giving to renewable energy companies that are majority owned by traditional energy companies or all the money we’re throwing at carbon capture research that’s probably not going to return meaningfully useful technology in time to matter. With campaign finance and lobbying laws as loose as they are and with these companies’ histories of bankrolling some of the most harmful lawmakers and judges in our nation’s history, we’re basically feeding the monsters we have to fight. Also, it just sends a terrible message to all the other business leaders and corporations of the world if you can literally knowingly destroy the global climate for decades and never face any kind of punishment.
However, the IRA did get passed and those subsidies are out there now, and I think it’s possible they will do some good and that blowing them up now would be really disruptive and damaging to a private clean energy industry that’s currently* our best hope of not completely destroying the environment, so if I could wave a magic wand I would leave everything from the IRA in place and just add a lot more fees and penalties and taxes that targeted the oil and gas industries on top of it. Subsidies of any sort turn my stomach, but I think subsidies plus targeted fees and penalties is our best bet with where we’re at now.
Ultimately, I think we should nationalize all these companies and turn them into public agencies with open records open meetings and elected administrators who hire subject matter experts that guide the administrators’ policy decisions*, but I appreciate that’s a number of steps away from where we are now and I think there will have to be some kind of gradual process to get there.
**This is also what I want to have happen to health insurance, education, housing, and social media (with the stipulation that private market based competition to these public agencies is totally encouraged in situations where it’s practicably possible (e.g. power grids usually require monopolies of certain aspects, but there’s no reason we couldn’t have smaller more specialized private insurance companies in a country with publicly administered single payer universal healthcare))
Yep, a fossil fuel industry whose potential for methane emissions the government has been badly underestimating and which rose in 2023. And instead of holding those companies accountable for any of that, we just decided to hand out a bunch of monetizable and transferable tax credits to renewable energy companies that are being bought by corps like BP, who take the money and just keep on drilling
Nice to see that the opposition did as well as they did, historically sending cops after homeless people is a big winner at the polls but maybe a new generation of voters will be able to get us past that kind of thing some day
Civil rights organizations and advocates for the disabled community opposed the measure and raised alarm bells in 2023 over a last-minute change to Proposition 1 that allows counties to use the bond money for “locked facilities,” where patients cannot voluntarily leave.
American Civil Liberties Unions in California and League of Women Voters of California urged voters to reject the measure, arguing that community mental health services are more effective than institutionalization.
“I think the governor and mayors often just want the encampments to disappear by any means necessary,” said Katherine Wolf, a doctoral student in society and environment at UC Berkeley, who said she voted against Proposition 1.
Wolf said she believes that community programs that provide stability to some mentally ill Californians will lose funding if money shifts to involuntary treatment. Similar to the ACLU and League of Women Voters, she also opposes forcing people into care.
“For them to sneak it in at the last minute after promising all summer that the bond would only be used for community-based voluntary unlocked treatment, I think is really underhanded and I think they did it specifically to avoid objections from the groups and people who they knew would object,” Wolf said
Hell, we already know China used Facebook to do this during the last American midterms (and has purchased all sorts of data from FB), but since they have an older user base that lawmakers figure is more likely to vote than TikTok-ers it’s not getting singled out for this special treatment
e; specified which midterms I was talking about
Once again pleading with Congress to pass the bill, the president touted the deal’s strict border and immigration policies, including the emergency authority it would grant him to “shut down” the border when it becomes overwhelmed. He described it as the “toughest” and “fairest” law that has ever been proposed, and urged both parties to move beyond “toxic politics.”
So, a migrant family might have a perfect case for asylum, but if they happen to show up on a day when the border patrol has decided it’s “overwhelmed,” they get thrown out to the wolves anyway
How is that fair?
Welcome to the American corrections system, abuses like this and worse happen every day and we just don’t normally hear about them because the defendants aren’t famous like this one is
Also, we need to talk about Leonard Leo