“cars kill or injure 5.4 million cats a year in the United States, with 5,399,999 coming at the hands of human drivers. I found estimates of hundreds of cats killed by drivers each year in San Francisco. I’d guess that buses and trains—some of Waymo critics’ preferred transportation option—have probably squashed their share of critters.
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“[H]uman drivers killed 43 people in San Francisco last year, including 24 pedestrians, 16 people in cars and three bicyclists. None were killed by Waymos.” Many women and schoolchildren rely on them because of safety concerns, as a Google search of “taxi drivers and sexual abuse” will reveal.
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A study by Swiss Re, an insurance company with the obvious financial incentive to understand the relative benefits and risks, found the following, per Reinsurance News: “The Waymo Driver exhibited significantly better safety performance, with an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human-driven vehicles.”
Waymo’s data find 11 times fewer serious-injury crashes. Most crashes involving a Waymo were due to other vehicles hitting their taxis. That makes perfect sense given their Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is continuously learning, whereas as it’s increasingly difficult to teach some human drivers not to get behind the wheel after downing some martinis.”
“”The U.S. is our least trustworthy trading partner right now—and I say that as an American,” Price Johnson, COO of Cephalofair Games, told Reason last month. “I can’t trust what the policy is going to be tomorrow, let alone next week.”
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The Yale Budget Lab estimates that Trump’s tariffs will cost the average American household around $1,700 this year.”
“In theory, the CHIPS Act provided a mechanism for the federal government to retract the grant and get all or part of its money back should Intel fail to meet its obligations. It’s not clear whether the federal government would have exercised its option to take the money back, but it was an option—until Trump stepped in.
As the company flailed, Trump met with its CEO, Lip-Bu Tan. Trump first called for him to resign. Then in August, the Trump administration announced that the federal government would just take partial ownership of Intel. Essentially, the U.S. government would purchase a roughly 10 percent stake in the chipmaker, partially nationalizing the company. And funds from CHIPS would be used to do it.
Trump bragged about the deal, saying he planned to “do more of them.” The company’s stock price rose on the news, suggesting that investors liked it. But that’s probably because it was a good deal for the company, at taxpayer expense.
According to public financial filings, the federal government would disburse the remaining funds, about $6 billion, while clearing any obligations for the company to actually complete work on new domestic semiconductor fabs.
In exchange, the federal government would gain partial ownership—as well as all the financial risks stockholders usually have when they invest in companies. Those risks will now be borne by taxpayers.
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Trump gave Intel a federal bailout, removing the company’s public obligations and accountability while loading more financial risk onto the public.”
“From knitting needles to garment fabric to bottles of paint, American crafters work with many materials produced abroad. That has left them particularly vulnerable to Trump’s trade war. Imports from Europe currently face tariffs of 15 percent, and while sky-high tariffs on China are currently subject to a 90-day pause, they still stand at 57.6 percent, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Worse still, Trump has done away with the de minimis exemption, which allowed goods valued at under $800 to enter the U.S. tariff-free.
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Exclusively stocking U.S.-produced materials isn’t an option for most craft stores. “Tariffs impact American-made yarns as well,” pointed out Fibre Space, a yarn store in Alexandria, Virginia. That’s because “American-made goods still rely on materials made in other countries.” Yarn “is an agricultural product,” observes Chadwell, “so certain crops and certain livestock produce the best fiber in very specific climates that aren’t necessarily” found in the United States. Meanwhile, “needles, notions, doodads, [and] bags…can only be produced at much higher prices” here.
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Tariffs prevent all sorts of voluntary transactions that shape lives and culture in big—and often inconspicuous—ways. That means shops that won’t be started, gifts that won’t be made by hand, and hobbies that won’t be taken up. And more immediately, tariffs are punishing business owners who want to help Americans fill their lives with more creativity.”
“As the Senate prepared to vote on the funding bill to reopen the federal government earlier this month, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) warned that passing the legislation would “regulate the hemp industry to death.” Buried deep inside the continuing resolution was a provision that would completely reverse nearly seven years of industry progress—and potentially wipe out small hemp-based businesses.
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Under the new provision, any consumable hemp product must contain no more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC—not per serving or gram, but per entire container.
Paul is right: This new rule is a death sentence to the hemp industry. If allowed to stand, it could eliminate 95 percent of all hemp-derived cannabinoid products made in the United States.
The government should not destroy the livelihoods of countless Americans, and it most certainly should not pull the rug out from under a burgeoning industry less than a decade after giving hemp its blessing.
States are squeezing hemp from one side, and now Washington is crushing it from the other—and small businesses, like Cornbread, are stuck in the middle.”
Defenders are more likely to win longer wars. So, the idea that Ukraine can’t win because the war is going on so long, is backwards. The U.S. revolution was an eight year war.
The Americans were largely getting their asses kicked and were dependent on foreign aid, but in the end, they won.
The aggressor usually sustains more casualties compared to the defender. The defender often gains resolve the longer the war lasts, while the invader questions why they are doing this in the first place. The defender is fighting for their homes, their territory, and their independence, while the invader is fighting to gain something.
“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
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The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
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Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
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The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
“Eight days after the September 2 operation that inaugurated President Donald Trump’s lethal military campaign against suspected drug boats, The Intercept reported that people who survived the initial missile strike were “killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.” On Friday, The Washington Post confirmed that account, saying the commander overseeing the operation, based on an oral directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody,” ordered a second strike on “two survivors” who “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
If that report is accurate, Reason’s Christian Britschgi notes, “the second strike on helpless survivors would add a degree of barbarism to the administration’s anti-drug campaign.” It also would further complicate the arguments that Trump has deployed to justify his unprecedented policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers, which so far has involved 21 attacks that killed 83 people in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Even if you accept Trump’s dubious claim that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with “narcoterrorists,” which supposedly means U.S. forces can legally attack vessels believed to be carrying illegal drugs, deliberately killing survivors would be contrary to the law of war.
“Both the giving and the execution of these orders” would “constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” the Former JAGs Working Group, which consists of lawyers who previously served in the military, said on Saturday. “If the U.S. military operation to interdict and destroy suspected narcotrafficking vessels is a ‘non-international armed conflict’ as the Trump Administration suggests, orders to ‘kill everybody,’ which can reasonably be regarded as an order to give ‘no quarter,’ and to ‘double-tap’ a target in order to kill survivors, are clearly illegal under international law. In short, they are war crimes.”
The former military lawyers add that the situation is even graver “if the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind.” In that case, they say, “these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from [the secretary of defense] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder.””