(Also, the second case is something a car manufacturer should probably be resolving more by not hogging the overtaking lane than defaulting to going 20mph over the limit for extended periods because everybody else does)

A fragmented party system driven by Parliamentary coalition building might actually mean less accountability, since right-leaning independents and ex-Republicans disgruntled at the erosion of democratic and social norms under Trump suddenly have to worry about actual socialists being part of the alternative, and options that genuinely aren't MAGA to vote for who in practice will need to ally with MAGA

So about 1.5 fluid ounces of 40% strength vodka mixed with about 4 of orange juice; a little more alcohol than a regular beer at more than twice the strength.

I think your evident belief you weren't drinking something twice the strength of beer proves my point entirely. And you may well have made the sensible decision to have stopped all that, but I assume at the time the notion of doubles, shots, "on the rocks" or with "just a dash" of cola or lemonade weren't alien to you or more moderate drinkers either. The one thing I can safely say I haven't done with spirits is carefully mix them down to 4-5%

Sure, I read your second paragraph, but as I pointed out in my own post, you might as well express skepticism that people harm themselves faster with beer than with shandy whilst treating not mixing beer with four parts water as edge case irresponsibility rather than how people actually drink it. Every drink is equally safe, diluted down enough...

Yep, great analogy. LVT is the optimum tax from the point of view of maximising production incentives, but actually practical ways of extracting significant revenues from people tend to skew towards "this person/organization has liquid funds available and wants to do something enough to pay the tax on top". (For related reasons LVT-style approaches to taxation work rather well when the finite resource being taxed is something like broadcast spectrums which the average person doesn't own)

As for Single Taxing, convincing the public theres some ethical principle that PE funds buying tech stocks deserve to keep all of the rewards for risking their money on a particular venture and homeowners who lived through the area's dodgy-reputation years don't is a complete non-starter even though anyone with an economics degree can tell you why such an argument might be made...

It doesn't make much sense to determine that because Anthropic continues to insist that Claude is unsuitable for use as some sort of super advanced loitering munition, Lockheed using it to write job ads is as much a threat to national security as a Chinese comms terminal.

It's not like the DoD and their subcontractors and their subcontractors' subcontractors aren't used to all sorts of fine-grained separation when it comes to what is and isn't classified or export controlled under normal circumstances, or that Hegseth taking a break from fantasising about soldiers' testosterone levels for long enough to decry Anthropic's stance as 'woke' makes the decision look like one based on operational effectiveness.

(and yeah, there might be a completely legitimate reason to stop your subcontractors from using HuaweiSpyPens, but determining that ACME Pens is just as dangerous because they refused your neutron flux regulator order looks like a punitive measure, not practical risk reduction)

"Space is cold" is classic zero effort to make, significant effort to refute stuff: proponents imply complete nonsense about vacuums being optimal for cooling and anyone who understands why this is a lie to gull retail investors ends up getting bogged down in "sure, but Boltzmann equations proving it's prohibitively expensive doesn't prove it isn't possible"...

Also you have to pay for them to be launched, which isn't cheap even if you're SpaceX.