What the US needs is to abolish all coins except the quarter. Due to inflation, a penny in 1913 is worth about 30 cents now. And somehow they made do with no smaller coins than the penny (the half cent having been discontinued in 1857).
Why are we shuffling these worthless bits of metal around? I’m sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts.
We dropped the penny in Canada in 2012 and I can’t say that I’ve missed it at all. Penny are still charged if your paying by bank or credit card, otherwise price is rounded to nearest 5c.
> If the price ends in a one, two, six, or seven it gets rounded down to 0 or 5; and rounded up if it ends in three, four, eight or nine.
Because the savings would be less than peanuts in the grand scheme of things that the government spends money on.
Because the Left would be galvanized by a million blog posts and academic papers (basically the same thing these days), arguing that it's racist because people of color are more likely to be underbanked and use cash. Yes I realize that's nonsense, but it wouldn't matter.
Because the Right would probably be galvanized too, by complaints that the government was meddling too much in the familiar and somehow ripping people off. Yes I realize that's nonsense, but it wouldn't matter.
It's so hard to make anything happen in U.S. politics today... eliminating pennies, nickels, and dimes wouldn't even make my Top-10,000 list of priorities.
> by complaints that the government was meddling too much in the familiar and somehow ripping people off
It would be about inflation. Just as only Nixon could go to China, it's probably only Republican initiative that can nix the penny--they could brand it as thriftiness.
Unfortunately, zinc is mined in red states and districts [1]. A President would have to lead the charge.
The "left" that you are referring to opposes eliminating cash. The reasons often given in hearsay and by journalists and blog posts are often exclusively focused on "people of color" who are underbanked, but the complaint is much more concisely stated as BEING OPPOSED TO THE PRIVITIZATION OF CURRENCY. Which seems fucking reasonable as shit to me.
I don't understand how there's any advocacy behind abolishing units of currency. I literally never pay for anything with cash and so I never receive any change. I don't see how it's a daily nuisance for some people
A penny costs 2.7 cents to make. We make almost 8 billion of them per year. That's $216 million per year for a money-losing nearly-useless coin. so, it costs you about a buck per year.
Maybe you should start using cash sometimes. Even if you don't have a direct need to participate in the economy without letting the credit card companies know where you are at several points throughout the day, you probably benefit in indirect ways from the fact that such a thing is still possible.
Your perspective makes sense if you accept as good that massive political effort must be taken to do obviously good things against the wishes of special interest groups. But most people would think that the US Mint churning out worthless coins every year at the expense of citizens is an undesirable state of affairs. Wasting other people’s money is inherently despicable.
Not that worthless coins are anywhere near the top of the list of bad and wasteful policies. But if we can’t even solve the obvious low-hanging fruit, we’re not solving those bigger problems either.
It seems like saying if you won’t bother bending over to pick up a penny, how can anyone expect you to bend over and pick up a one hundred dollar bill - one is worth the effort and one isn’t. People regularly make efforts and propose laws to solve bigger issues - the issue isn’t effort as much as adversarial disagreement.
A system that lets minor inefficiencies endlessly accumulate, because the activation energy to address them is too high, is rotten. As for picking up hundred dollar bills, Congress isn’t solving big problems either.
Hard disagree. The infrastructure act is a clear example of solving big problems.
It’s also neither here nor there - an implication that not solving a really, really small problem says anything about an ability or desire to solve bigger problems is clearly incorrect.
First time I went to the states (some 20 years ago), for some reason or other my local bank gave me a heap of $2 notes (also some $20 and $50 ones!) when I asked them for a few hundred dollars, just so I wouldn't have to worry about finding an ATM accepting my card at SFO.
Didn't realize quite how uncommon they were until I tipped someone a couple of them and they angrily asked me for 'real money'!
Not that I use much cash but I haven't seen a $2 bill in the wild for a great many years. I could see how someone might be suspicious of them (even if only because they suspected they'd have trouble using them).
Maybe it's corruption, but my guess is it's just never been important enough to push through. Imagine all the work that would go into phasing out coins, both politically and logistically... all for what?
It's not corruption. It's what I'll call the interest-group problem.
Pennies are an issue a few people care deeply about and most people don't. It's electorally thrifty to accomodate those few, and so electeds do. It's an easy win, particularly in a partisan environment that punishes consensus building as betrayal of one's base.
Put another way, keeping the penny won't piss anyone off enough to get one primaried. Killing the penny might.
I imagine it would cost less than all the money collectively spent on minting them and buying and maintaining machinery to handle them. Even better if they got rid of the quarter too. But yeah, I can see why no politician has decided to make this their signature issue.
A better idea, in my opinion, is rebasing the currency, to some form of standard like gold - and ceasing to print pretend money, that only results in currency deflation, and retail inflation.
A gold standard would lead to deflation. Noone wants to get an annual 2 to 5 percent paycut while paying interest on a mortgage on a house that goes down in value every year.
You’re going to have to clue me in, to what it would be deflating?! The word is like a decibel, in that it needs some reference marker…
With the currency pegged to a standard, a penny would actually have more value, than it does now.
I disagree on your mortgage point. The whole reason for rebasing to a standard, is to avoid those issues. Where I think the rub is for most people, is they’d have to disavow themselves of the notion, that a property should go up in value.
We can't mine enough gold every year to keep up with the rest of the economy.
To put it another way, if gold was money, there wouldn't be enough new money every year to buy all the stuff we come up in a year.
By decreeing gold to be money and money to be gold, we would be interfering with the market in a major way: artificially giving the value of gold a massive boost and cutting the value of all other things.
It would be too painful for people to have the currency lose all that value at once, but we certainly need to do something. Fiat currency has proven to be a horrible mistake.
They would if they could. Spain is a weak little country that depends on the US for defense. The US is the most powerful country in history. There is no symmetry.
The US doesn't expel allied diplomats, because they don't care if the French and Spanish and Germans are spying on us, _in general_. Most of the time countries get annoyed at allied spying, they'll make some quiet calls to their ally and have people quietly reassigned, rather than make a big deal about it. As long as the country knows who the allied spies are, that's good enough. What happened here is that the US spies were very clumsy and got caught committing crimes.
You're asking to prove a state secret. That the spanish were caught expelling allied spies is almost as much a faux pas as it is for your spies to get caught.
Also so t forget literally the entire Snowden era. Literally the biggest event geopolitical event between allies in the 2010s. I swear you guys choose to forget these things
The US tried to infiltrate Spanish state security. That's a direct threat to Spanish sovereignty. Imagine if they had succeeded and it led to a manipulation of Spanish policy, against the interests of the Spanish people.
What can Spain realistically do if the USA actually becomes hostile to it? The whole EU has already relinquished its full sovereignty a long time ago. The USA does as it wants and at most, the EU can expell some spies caught in the act as quietly as possible to not anger Big Uncle Sam.
There are many countries to which the US is actually hostile, and which are much weaker than Spain. Venezuela, Cuba, etc. Places like Russia and China also of course exist.
Spain could start trying to compete with the US in South America, they could push some kind of EU South America expansion, some kind of EU analogue of BRICS-for-South-America-but-not-BRICS; and of course, if it truly became a problem they could decide to go much further than that and start being actually hostile themselves, joining with the whole RIC part of the thing.
Why would the US bother? Unless they propose not to engage in diplomacy, the replacement diplomat is going to spy on them too. It isn't like these are rogue actors, the spying is sponsored by their state.
The only reason to even talk about it would be if they want to roll a particular diplomat who is hard to work with or if it was convenient to gin up a diplomatic incident so that they could pretend to be unhappy.
The US does expel diplomats who engage in spying. For example, in 2022 they expelled twelve for spying in ways that threaten US national security.
Even if you try to keep an eye they will of course try make keeping an eye on them difficult. The US feels it can spy-- with people having been found with wigs and whatnot, so to imagine that others can't, even if they are allowed to do things very freely is a little bit strange.
When you say "in 2022" do you mean the ones listed on this page [0]? The "Diplomatic expulsions during the Russo-Ukrainian War" page? I'm sensing there might have been issues at play other than the espionage, which is routine and everyone does.
Notice though that the US specifically chose to give a reason for the explusions as espionage activities. Spain expelled those it expelled over 'Russia's terrible actions'.
I think we can take the reasons for the expulsions as correct.
The reasons are honest insofar as yes, the Russians expelled were involved in espionage. That part that has me tagging you as naive is you seem to believe that this was news in 2022.
It is the Russian embassy. The US spooks are monitoring it very closely. It is not a serious position to say that they suddenly discovered that espionage was afoot a few days after the invasion. I mean, it is completely plausible that the invasion made them say "we're about to hit the Russians hard, now is the time to disrupt their espionage activities". But the existence of those espionage activities has been a given since for the entire history of Russian diplomatic missions in the US.
The US is certainly not going to expel diplomats for spying under ordinary circumstances. We can see that because places like the Chinese, French and British and whatever other embassies are still allowed to exist. Maybe there are some African or Pacific Island embassies that are incompetent and just exist to chat, I dunno. But we know how the serious players use embassies this has been a thing for centuries.
Doing so would prevent people from striking against unfair conditions, because they would lose the ability to feed themselves, and so would rather suffer bad working conditions. If you care at all about human beings, you should not be able to fire people simply because they voice their concerns about unfair working conditions, etc.
> so would rather suffer bad working conditions. If you care at all about human beings
Or social stability. We came to a consensus on striking workers because before that it was violent. Reprisal against those speaking a common view on despised conditions is how you make martyrs.
> On the contrary, it would simply put both companies and workers on the same standard.
If by “same standard” you mean equal footing, then I don’t see how you’d square that circle.
By definition an employer-employee relationship is asymmetrical, so is landlord-tenant, corporations-consumer, doctor-patient, teacher-student, etc.
In all those relationships one has more leverage than the other.
Which is why, in most developed nations, there are guardrails in an effort to equalize that relationship.
Wait, is that an offer to pay for mine and my families' housing and basic needs? Please let us know, cause most people would absolutely stop working their miserable jobs if they were provided for.
“Free” workers under capitalism used to often not be free to leave the job. As in they’d be locked in, or some big dudes would encourage them to stay, or they’d be in some remote area and paid largely in scrip, and practically unable to quit, or a despotic local “big man” major employer would ensure they’d have to leave town if they upset him, which could include things like “wasn’t back in the bunk house before curfew”. The labor movement is largely the reason capitalists don’t/can’t still do those things.
Striking workers aren’t paid in the first place. Allowing collective bargainers to be fired creates an unbalanced system where employers always have more leverage than workers.
Think about it this way: how do I fire the corporations that I’m forced to patronize? Can you survive modern life without buying a single product from Unilever/Nestle/P&G/J&J? How do you make a video call to your family without Google/Apple/Microsoft/Meta being involved? How do I make a phone call without AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile? Can I buy a microwave that isn’t manufactured by Midea, LG, Panasonic, or Samsung? What about an LCD/OLED panel that isn’t made by LG or Samsung? How do I fly anywhere without Boeing or Airbus? How do I buy a phone/computer without patronizing Foxconn, Qualcomm, TSMC, or Samsung?
Corporations get a captive audience of consumers but they’re allowed to fire people for negotiating the terms of their employment? That doesn’t seem balanced to me.
> Striking workers aren’t paid in the first place.
Mostly correct. But unions save the union dues and pay it back to striking workers as compensation for the lost income from work.
For example union members at Tesla get 100% wage compensated:
> Members at Tesla receive conflict compensation from day one when the conflict breaks out. The compensation is 100 percent of the income you would have received if you had worked. This also applies for you who apply for membership during the conflict and the compensation is paid from day one of your membership.
Thanks to good planning by the union, the workers are being compensated - but the point remains that the striking workers aren't costing the employer any money, which was one commenter's claim for why it's unfair to Tesla.
Lol, nordic states do have one of the highest living standards in the world and are ranking among the top on all important parameters and they do have this union system in place for some decades already, but sure, some strikes will ruin EVERYTHING... I wonder do ppl really believe in such silly things?
The way I would do it is simply: no matter what, the employees get to vote down things their managers do. They can vote to do nothing, have no organizing body, and pay no dues, but they still get to vote, so if they want to prevent their bosses from doing something exploitative to them, they get to.
This model does not put you in a group anymore than being an American citizen puts you in a group by giving you the right to vote on things. In my version it is like how you get to be in a political party if you want to and not be in one if you don't, but you get to vote either way. The right to have some say against your manager's power in your life (short of quitting, that is) should be unassailable.
The fact that quitting is "all or nothing", and often not an option to people because the cost of finding a new job is high and often prohibitive to specifically the people who are most disenfranchised, makes it a poor and almost useless way to exercise power. Unions allow, in principal, for there to be intermediate pressures between "quitting" and "asking nicely".
Because it benefits the public good, the same way you're forced to be part of any country, state, city you reside in.
Also freedom of association is very clearly intended as freedom to associate, not freedom not to associate, so it's a little confusing for you to refer to it.
I believe you are arguing I could always choose not to work. I wish to work for an employer and the employer wishes to work with me. In this hypothetical there is required membership with an unrelated party I do not wish to associate with.
If I wanted to go to a coffee shop and that shop wanted to serve me coffee but the mafia is standing outside saying I have to pay them before I can go in, they are in fact forcing me to pay or turn away.
I've never been forced to become a member of a corporate board. This proposal however is that I be required to join a union. That is the material difference.
True. You’re merely forced to be subject to their decisions, made on behalf of and in the interest of people who aren’t you.
[edit] I’m getting the sense that if we just restructure this so the union exists and does normal union stuff but you don’t have to “be a member” (but do have to abide by its decisions or else leave, as with a board) you’d be ok with it? Like it’s mainly a semantic problem?
I see it as more than a semantic problem, but the problem does boil down to the membership. If they are the lawful structure I'll abide by their decisions, I just don't want to be forced to join.
I hate the idea. I've been in a union once and will never willingly do that again, but it would be more palatable if they couldn't claim me as a 'member'.
Not all unions are great, but the median unionized worker earns more than a non-unionized worker in the same field. So the main reason people wouldn't want to join a union is because they've been conditioned to think they're bad, against their own economic interests.
I feel like you're reducing everything to material conditions. Joining a union would (statistically) help me economically but my objections to being in a union again are all moral convictions. Perhaps workers are optimizing for concerns you do not share?
Yes, I am reducing unions to economic concerns, but I should mention that most people's "moral" objection to unions is conditioned by parties whose interest is solely economic. When the Koch foundation buys airtime on news programs (effectively) to spread the idea that unions are evil and striking is immoral, it's not because they actually care about morals, it's because unions shift the economic playing field in a way that they don't like.
I think that would be acceptable to me assuming I had assurances I wouldn't be asked to participate or be represented by union actions that would be violent. No threats, no breaking things, no vandalism, etc.
Strikes are generally non violent, and the majority of times that they become violent, it's instigated by strike breakers hired by the company (including police). There is over a hundred years of history of this - plenty for you to read if you want to learn more.
This strikes me like the people who (after a big contentious election AKA every election) tell the people whose candidate lost, "if you don't like it, move to another country"
Except I think switching trades (which you would have to do since the union is all encompassing and forces membership) is a lot more onerous than emigrating, and emigration is no slice of cake.
Always remember that historically striking is the friendly alternative to dragging the factory owner and their family from their home, killing them, setting their house on fire and running the factory yourself.
Companies and unions have contracts. It isn’t a matter of what’s legal or not, but what they were able to negotiate for. Organizations should have wide latitude in terms of what sorts of contracts they bind themselves to, and that includes additional requirements for firing union members. It’s all part of the negotiation.
This is false. Labor laws passed in the 1900s in most Western countries give you a right to strike without the risk of getting fired. It doesn't have to be bargained for. There's lots of caveats, but that's the general rule.
A cynic would say that Americans are deliberately kept in the dark as to what people actually had to do in order to win their labor rights, and quite how awful conditions were even for skilled workers.
>They'll bring back company towns if you let them.
In fairness, I'm not actually against company towns, in theory. I'm sure company towns existed in Scandinavia the same way they did here. However, following WWII, when they adopted their current economic model, that same town's residents inherited rights from the larger collective bargaining agreement, allowing them to bargain in good faith with the company that basically owns that town.
You see how their model of basically having cascading collective bargaining agreements that start from the top and empower everyone under it make me less opposed to company towns? However, it works better in countries where most people aren't brainwashed into thinking they'll all be billionaires one day and should look out for the interests of billionaires first.
It's pathetic how your position on violent strikebreakers is so lenient that you don't even feel them worth mentioning. Sort of a testament to how effective American brainwashing is.
It's equally pathetic that you think the role of the state is to expend unlimited funds to keep the enemies of private enterprises incarcerated, even when it would cost us all far more than adopting an enlightened policy regarding collective bargaining.
While it's great you're adopting a less horrendous position, you're still not acknowledging that incarcerating everyone entails massive costs. Costs that far exceed the amount of marginal pay increases that would go to workers in an enlightened legal system that regards collective bargaining rights as a fundamental human right. "Just arrest everyone" works neither on paper nor practice.
Why stop there? Should to back to the good old days of Pinkertons and military having a small scale war with strikers. And corporations knowingly letting workers work in conditions that will kill them to earns a few dollars more.
Only someone ignorant of history can spout nonsense like this.
This should be allowed from time to time so the prols can see what a spectacularly bad idea this is and taste the fruit of their impoverished ideologies.
Every work condition you take for grant--8 hour days, weekends, vacations, paid leave, to name a few--is the fruit of the labor movement, labor organization and strikes.
Consider the Homestead strike [1] where companies hired private mercenaries (ie the Pinkertons) to commit violence to break the strike. People died.
Consider US auto makers [2]:
> Tesla workers earn on average about $55 an hour in wages and benefits, compared to $66 to $71 an hour at Detroit’s Big Three, according to CNN research. If the Detroit automakers come to agreement with the UAW, it will widen the gap between those unionized and non-unionized wages.
Unions benefit non-union members too [3]:
> Each 1 percentage point increase in private-sector union membership rates translates to about a 0.3 percent increase in nonunion wages.
The disdain for unions (by Americans in particular) while being completely oblivious to the benefits they enjoy because of unions has to be one of the most successful propaganda wins of the last century. Siding with the world's richest man over your own interests makes absolutely no sense.
I find it funny how in every example I have ever seen of "companies oppressing poor workers on strike" every single time the workers started it by doing illegal and wrong things, and attempting to force the company to give in by force.
Every. Single. Time.
If someone can give me one example where the poor oppressed strikers were 100% in the right and did not actually start with the violence or credible threat of violence before being set upon by the state/company I would really appreciate it, because so far after going through dozens of such events not once have I found one
To my knowledge, healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente of California haven't burned any buildings down or had a brawl in the middle of the parking lot. The Starbucks workers strike was also non-violent. The most recent Writers guild of America strike didn't seem violent to me, but maybe that's Hollywood. The Oakland teachers union strike also didn't result in bloodshed as far as I know, but also it's Oakland.
Views on collective responsibility for riots have changed a lot. These days, it's only the individual rioters who commit specific crimes that are thought of as bearing responsibility. But before the 1960s or so, a violent crowd was seen as collectively responsible, and it wouldn't have been considered unjustified to treat them accordingly, the way you'd be justified in violent self-defense against an individual rioter today.
I'm not saying they have to be 100% victims, but if you start off by violently assaulting people I'm not going to say that the people stopping you from doing so by force are in the wrong for doing so.
If you want to say a company was evil for sending armed goons to break up a group of armed goons assaulting people or destroying stuff, then you're just plain in the wrong.
>This is like a C# dev trolling a C developer by say “first novice exercise”, HTML encode a UTF8 string. I mean, it is a single line of code in C# so how hard could it be in C?
It’s not like that at all. The difference you’re identifying is that C# has it in the standard library while C does not. But it’s a conceptually intricate problem and implementing it from scratch in both C and C# would actually be somewhat similar, but C# obviously has some convenience features that would make the code tighter.
Linked lists are very simple and GP’s complaint is that Rust makes it very difficult to implement them.
The difference is that both C and C# let you use pointers and make it your responsibility to use them correctly. C# provides the facilities, both in the naked language and in the standard library to not need pointers whereas you need to use pointers to do even trivial tasks and so the standard library makes extensive use of them. Pointers are a core language feature of C so obviously it is trivial to make use of them ( though not at all trivial to use them safely ). Rust’s core principle is that unsafe memory access should be prevented at the language level. Unsurprisingly, a data structure completely reliant on potentially unsafe use of memory will be difficult to implement.
Both C# and Rust include features in their standard libraries so that implementing your own linked lists is unnecessary precisely because you are not supposed to. This is “non-idiomatic” as they say. C does not include linked lists in the standard library because this is exactly the kind of data structure you are meant to create when needed as the language makes it completely trivial to implement them. In C, a linked list is completely idiomatic and many, many C projects use them.
If you write an OS in C, you will almost certainly create a linked list structure. Linux did. If you write an OS in Rust, you do not need to do that.
You’re misreading the rule. Such titles are allowed.
If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
It's such a dumb rule to even have. If the article shows 10 Ways To Do X, then it is pretty accurate. How To Do X sounds like there is one way to do it, and it's being shown.
What happened to the don't editorialize rule, because that's exactly what's being done in the provided example. You're not just shortening an acceptable length title, but you've changed the meaning.
I see you've never submitted anything. I suggest you try a few times, deal with the automatic title mangling, and then come back and tell us how you feel about this rule ;)
What’s funny is prostitution was legal most of the time and in most places in the western world until recently. Widespread prohibition of it is not as much a holdover from medieval times as a recent sex-negative feminist innovation. Which makes sense when you consider that the people punished are usually horny, kind-of-sleazy guys.
It’s probably most accurate to say it’s an unspoken alliance between the two groups—feminists and traditional moralists. But when the church was actually politically powerful, prostitution was much less likely to be prohibited than it is now.
I did a quick Google. Being a pimp was regarded as distasteful and had legal consequences so most rich people running a brothel used an intermediary freedman to manage his investment.
> What’s funny is prostitution was legal most of the time and in most places in the western world until recently.
That attitude towards prostitution closely correlates with those same societies considering women to be property. Anti-prostitution laws and the emancipation of women go hand-in-hand.
This would be awful. Theft and bribery are already prosecuted aggressively. If anything, too much. It’s gotten to the point that high government officials can’t afford to be lobbied. Here they are, some of the most powerful people in the world, paid barely enough to live an hour drive away from DC, having to spend a fair bit of their personal income to go to lunch and dinner with leaders of private industry.
As for criminalizing “waste”, you start to get dangerously close to criminalizing politics itself. Then it just becomes about controlling DOJ and using it to go after your enemies (this is already too true).
The better thing to do would with regards to intelligence agency abuses would be to have more review of the decisions, mandatory discipline of rulebreakers, and prosecution of specific crimes committed for egregious cases. No need to generally criminalize every time a government official makes a bad judgment call.
You seem to be arguing that we have a system where theft and bribery are necessary in some way, and therefore we shouldn't prosecute it aggressively. Wouldn't we rather reform the system such that it makes theft and bribery less attractive?
No, I’m saying the definition of bribery has been stretched so far to include ballpoint pens, a $30 lunch or free attendance at a conference, at the same time that high officials are underpaid, so as to place an absurd financial burden on middle-class people holding high office. No one says that a CEO who meets a potential supplier who buys him lunch is being bribed. But if a politician does that, it’s a crime somehow. Frankly absurd.
Your comment brought to mind the number of IRS employees who are delinquent on their taxes. I think it really comes down to trust. You say that the government is already investigated enough, but I would contend that it's really the government investigating itself. If there is a separate, independent agency that investigates government and employee malfeasance, then at least there can be some check, accountability, and maybe transparency.
I can understand your focus with intelligent agency abusive, but I think the problem is much more systemic, and far greater than simply the intelligence agencies. People who work in the public trust should be held to a higher standard.
"According to the FY 2021 FERDI Annual Report, IRS employees had a 1.35 percent delinquency rate, compared to 4.93 percent for civilian workers throughout the Federal Government."
So IRS employees are now magically exempt from making mistakes in life, just because they're IRS employees? I think it's good that the rate of delinquency is lower for IRS employees, but I think expecting it to be zero is a bit much.
But sure, that should be fixed. Just like the 5% of other workers who should get their tax situation in hand. Just like how all the private citizens who are delinquent should get their tax situation in hand.
I'm not really sure how this oversight agency you advocate would even work. How would it be independent? Who would fund it? How would you ensure that its members aren't biased or influenced in any way? Ultimately these sorts of agencies are staffed by real humans, not automatons with perfect, disinterested software. I agree with the desire for this sort of thing, but I don't think it's at all practical.
> It’s gotten to the point that high government officials can’t afford to be lobbied.
Of all the sad things I’ve read today, this one is surely the saddest. Good thing it isn’t based on a reality I have observed… where do you think those billions “to” Ukraine are really going?
Members of congress are a small subset of government officials.
That they get away with corrupt behavior doesn't mean that people in the civil service should have to be anxious about trivial things. If a government employee can be influenced by something as minor as a pen or lunch, they are in the wrong line of work.
Starlink is probably your best bet for now, which is ~100/~20 depending on your area. I believe you can also multi-home two (or more) Starlink services and get double (or triple etc.) that.
Why are we shuffling these worthless bits of metal around? I’m sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts.