True, but in many cases the product is graded by quality

Well, mostly. Yes, the highest quality product is def. going to go into the name brand stuff. But if everything off the line is high quality for a given production period, then the store-branded and generic stuff is also going to be high quality. So quality on overruns, etc. is going to have more variance than what you'd get from a name brand.

I've never had complaints about Trader Joe's, other than the fact that I really don't buy a lot of prepared foods; I prefer buying fresh ingredients, and making my own whatever when I can. I do remember buying a TJ Islay whiskey once; it was solidly okay. Not great, not as bad as Jack Daniels, just okay.

Mostly, yeah. But being part of the community also means having potentially the same bigotry as the community. Again: I'm in a very, very white town in the rural south; most of the residents are low-key racist, and some aren't even low-key about it.

You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.

This one I would disagree with. I don't think that there should be a general right for citizens to arrest people; the murder of Ahmaud Arbery wasn't too terribly far from me, and that started as citizens trying to arrest a guy for jogging while being black. (Come to think of it, based off police arrests, doing pretty much anything while being black is an arrestable offense.) I think that powers of arrest should be limited to people that have gone through a minimum of two years of training in law enforcement--including law!--and have passed exams to become certified. (So yes, I agree that there needs to be a licensing body that exists outside of the control of the police departments or police unions.)

I absolutely agree that qualified immunity shouldn't exist, or at least, not the way it does now. What is covered should be codified into law, and everything that's outside of that should be not covered. Take, for instance, a high speed chase, where an objectively dangerous person is fleeing police; without qualified immunity, if a police officer lost control of their car and caused harm to a bystander, that officer would be criminally liable. I don't think that's a reasonable outcome, given that the alternative--not pursuing an objectively dangerous person--seems like the worse option. (Yes, yes, they could use a helicopter, but that's not always an option.) But there are a lot of things that do get covered under qualified immunity--like killing someone by tazing them repeatedly while their hogtied in the back of a patrol car--that absolute should not, under any circumstances.

The police problem is genuinely difficult. I think that a lot of it is cultural, with old cops sharing institutional practices with new cops, and perpetuating cycles. I think that kind of culture needs to be broken, so that cops genuinely feel a sense of responsibility, and want to do the right thing in the right way. I don't know what the best way to approach that is though.

Store brands are often made in the same factories and on the same production lines. The differences can be truly negligible.

41.1% of land. Not the places where people actually live. Take Marina City (AKA the corncobs); there's a restaurant on the ground floor of one, and I think House of Blues Chicago in the other, and then, I dunno, a few hundred condos above them? Go into Wicker Park, Logan Square, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Ukrainian Village, Little Village, and on, and on, and almsot every single retail establishment has at least 2-3 stories of apartments and condos above it.

Broadly speaking, failing to put in effort does tend to lead to worse outcomes.

...Unless your parents have the last name "Musk" or "Trump".

Done.

She may never run for president again--or senate--but her days in politics are far from over.

I've known entirely too many alcoholics that have had too many wake-up and come-to-Jesus moments, only to go back to drinking as soon as the immediate crisis is over. Change only comes when the alcoholic wants to change for their own reasons, not due to external factors.

Livers are a limited resource. Wasting a donor's liver on a person that ~~us~~ is unlikely to stop drinking--despite their protestations--means that another person doesn't get one. It may seem like a cruel calculus, but it's the only reasonable way to ration a scarce resource. It doesn't matter if alcoholism is a disease, or you think that it's a moral failing; the end result is the same.

Here's what this means:

If you favor access to reproductive healthcare, you NEED TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER.

The GOP will absolutely vote to restrict access to all reproductive healthcare now that SCOTUS has refused to do so.

So, uh. That glove isn't leather. You don't need to break in a glove that isn't leather, because vinyl isn't going to shape to your hand with oils, etc. the way leather will. Same goes for shoes; unless your shoes are all leather, there's no break in period.

Yes, plastic will melt in the oven. And that's what your glove is. Or was.

Under very, very limited circumstances, maybe. Like you need gas to get to work now, get paid tomorrow, and have nothing in your account? Yeah, maybe, but that's an expensive tank of gas for someone that's that short on cash.

OTOH, I can't count the number of times where my former bank processed my paycheck last--even though it went in first--and then hit me with overdraft fees for buying groceries, gas, paying bills, etc. (This was National City Bank; they ended up losing a class action lawsuit about it, but they still made more money from their theft than they had to pay back out.)

IMO, there should be zero overdraft fees; if the money isn't in your account, the charge is declined. All of this shit should be done in real-time, instead of waiting for a merchant to post at the end of the day. This is the twenty-fucking-second century, and it's not that goddamn hard.

Unless all these Gen Z kids actually fucking VOTE it won't matter, because Boomers fucking do.

Oh, you think the choices are trash? Well fucking vote in the primaries then. Get involved at a local level, and start promoting candidates that represent you. Don't just bitch and moan that the choice is between a codger and senile draft-dodger.

This is fundamentally false.

While it is true that there was inexpensive housing available in the USSR, and that rents were quite reasonable compared to anything that currently exists in the US, and people couldn't readily be evicted if they lacked the ability to pay, it's a flat-out lie to say that that was the "solution" to homelessness, or that it eliminated the problem. Rather, the USSR criminalized being homeless and not being engaged in socially-productive labor; people that were homeless ended up in prisons and were labelled as parasites. The problem that we have now is that the official records simply didn't record the problem, in much the same way that Stalin had histories and photos revised to eliminate people that had become enemies of the state.