I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think there needs to be an enhancement of some sort that recognises an offence, even if minor, was motivated by hate.

Right now, I associate the words “hate crime” with serious criminal behaviour that results in bodily harm or threats to personal safety or destruction of large amounts of property. I think it might need to stay that way to avoid watering down the term.

Rather, there should probably be a new category called something like “hateful anti-social behaviour” to refer to minor transgressions like stealing the LGBTQ books or things like calling all the LGBTQ people you encounter slurs and other forms of harassment.

I’m not sure why you took them literally. They’re making a tongue-in-cheek statement about how Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is able to manipulate the American president seemingly with ease and impunity.

tl;dr “hate crime” has a legal definition and these actions don’t meet that definition. The definition should probably be updated to include this kind of antisocial behaviour.

Pasting an excerpt from my earlier comment:

“Hate crime” is a specific legal term. While unfortunate, the parent commenter is right; stealing books even when motivated by hate is not legally considered a hate crime.

Under federal law, only actions leading to bodily injury or attempts thereof can qualify as hate crimes.

Under Kentucky law (KRS 532.031), criminal mischief is only considered a hate crime if the amount of damage exceeds $500. While the total cost might exceed that, this is counted on a per-offender basis.

“Hate crime” is a specific legal term. While unfortunate, the parent commenter is right; stealing books even when motivated by hate is not legally considered a hate crime.

Under federal law, only actions leading to bodily injury or attempts thereof can qualify as hate crimes.

Under Kentucky law (KRS 532.031), criminal mischief is only considered a hate crime if the amount of damage exceeds $500. While the total cost might exceed that, this is counted on a per-offender basis.

Don’t get me wrong, it definitely should be considered a hate crime and the legislature should change the law to define this action as a hate crime (even if it is a relatively minor one), but under the current law, it isn’t. It’s merely criminal mischief in the second degree.

If I were a prosecutor I would be trying to throw the book at these morons though.

While it does sound unfair, eBay policy requires you to upload a tracking number by policy. If there is no tracking number eBay will treat it as having never been shipped. This is laid out in their policy pages. You can only satisfy the shipping requirement by using a tracked service and the one indicated by the buyer.

It’s a strict logical operation. eBay sides with the buyer unless all of the following are satisfied:

• A tracking number is uploaded within the specified turnaround time on your listing (I believe it defaults to 2 or 3 working days)
• The tracking number corresponds with the buyer’s indicated shipping service (ex. using USPS Ground Advantage when the buyer indicated Priority Mail will fail this requirement)
• The package was shipped to the exact address given to you by eBay
• The tracking status indicates “delivered” or “available for pickup”
• If the order total exceeds $750, you required a signature for the package

If you fail any of the requirements, you are at the buyer’s mercy. It’s strict but it’s fair.

Shipping without tracking is pretty dumb though. I can’t speak for Canada Post but in your neighbour to the south, USPS in my experience has lost about 3% of letters with handwritten addresses and about 1% of those with a computer-printed address.

The Sovereign Grant was some £86 million, which certainly sounds like a lot, but the reality is that heads of state are actually just really expensive no matter whether you have a republic or a monarchy. Maybe you could argue that a president could just quietly exist in the background while people expect a monarchy to be lavish and fancy, at least to a degree. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony associated with the head of state, because they not only represent the government of a country but also serve as a cultural symbol for the nation as a whole.

For comparison, in the US, excluding the policy departments within the Executive Office, the White House Office and Executive Residence and presidential salary budget lines totalled almost $94 million in FY 2025. This does not include the cost of Secret Service protection (paid by the Department for Homeland Security) nor does it include the cost of Air Force One trips (paid by the Department of Defence). And while Brits complain about their monarch not having to pay tax, I think the fact that the American president, or at least the current one, cheats on his taxes is also a somewhat open secret.

I’m American and technically also British despite never having been there (I hold a type of second class citizenship through Hong Kong), and I honestly think £86 million is a bargain for the UK monarchy considering their cultural draw and the fact that they’re not just the head of state of the UK but a dozen other countries as well.

Now, one can argue all day about whether it’s appropriate to have a monarchy in the modern day, even if that institution were to be discharged of even theoretical political power like it is in Japan, and whether such an institution is compatible with democratic principles like the rule of law, but that’s something I’m wholly unqualified to opine about.

I am an American. When someone works the schedule indicated, I and my fellow countrymen would call it 40 hours a week, but a European would count it as 35 hours a week.

Did they (the gangs who asked for protection money) actually ever catch the people responsible or blamed to be responsible?

In Europe they don’t count their lunch breaks as hours worked. That’s why the number is lower. If counted the European way then 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday is actually 35 hours a week.

If counted by European standards, the US has a 35-hour work week. Americans are counting their five one-hour lunch breaks to arrive at the “office worker” schedule of 40 hours a week, 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday with a lunch break at 12:00 to 13:00

Americans count their lunch breaks as hours worked. The typical “office worker” schedule is 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday with a one hour lunch break from 12:00 to 13:00. This is 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week, but if you are not counting lunch breaks then it is 35 hours a week of actual “work”.

Or this comment is made by a European who wants to just diss Americans without realising this situation is largely the same in both places… 😇

Edit: Since there appears to be some confusion here, if a worker had a working schedule of 09:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday with a one hour lunch break from 12:00 to 13:00, and you asked a European and an American how many hours a week this person works, the American would say 40 but the European would say 35.

This is probably one of the top 10 dumbest war strategies in history. Make the population of the region you’re eventually seeking to occupy hate you even more, and on top of that, it makes the very foolish assumption that Hamas leadership would give up if they see their Gazans suffer, which is so naïve it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad. Hamas leadership doesn’t give a shit if ordinary Gazans starve. In fact, they probably think it’s all the better for their recruiting numbers, seeing that I have yet to see a single Hamas fighter suffering from malnutrition on the level of ordinary Gazans.

To external observers paying attention, this can only lead one to conclude either Netanyahu is a terrible military strategist or he’s using this “strategy” as a cover to snuff out the entire Arab population of Gaza. For all I know, both are true!

The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let’s take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let’s say the results are in and are as follows:

• Democratic Party: 40%
• Republican Party: 28%
• Libertarian Party: 11%
• Green Party: 8%
• Working Families Party: 6%
• Constitution Party: 4%
• Independents: 3%

For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.

The final distribution:

• Democrats: 4
• Republicans: 3
• Libertarians: 1
• Greens: 1
• Working Families: 1

There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party’s list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.

The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can’t really “vote out” an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can’t gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don’t tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they’d only need to get 10% of the vote to guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they’d still have a good shot at getting one, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.

The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a “local” representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to “punish” them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.

You can do that in the US as well, but it will cost more because you wouldn’t be agreeing to a fixed term. For example, my ISP charges $25 a month for 200 mb/s if you agree to a one-year term, but it’s $40 a month if you do not agree to a one-year term. And there’s also the added inconvenience of having to go to one of the ISP’s physical stores every month and put cash into their kiosk.

They will ask for your name here when signing up, but nothing prevents you from lying about your name if you’re going to be paying in cash. They ask for an e-mail address as well, but you can say you haven’t got one, and they’ll create one for you using their own e-mail service and assign it to you. You don’t actually have to use it, but it is for receiving their bills and notices.

Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don’t typically either pay more or would pay before because they’re on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.

I am not opposed to reading. I will happily read a 1,000 or 2,000-word article to hear new ideas. What I will not do is listen to a 90-minute podcast or read its transcript, which is so long it crashed LibreOffice Writer when I tried pasting it to get the word count, just to understand what CabbageRelish@midwest.social is talking about with the comment that took them twenty seconds to write.

It’s not unreasonable for me to say that if you took less than 60 seconds to write your comment, I’m going to spend a maximum of 5-10 minutes thinking about and writing my response.

Me: People used to pay attention to laws.

You: Yeah, but the law was RACIST when it was first written!

Remember when these words used to mean something?

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Remember when the document this came from used to mean something?

I am not reading through a fucking 10,000 word podcast transcript to find the relevant two paragraphs. Quote some points if you want.

Edit: I actually underestimated this thing. The transcript is so large that it crashed LibreOffice Writer the first time I tried pasting it in to get the actual word count. The transcript is 16,719 words long.