I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon.

One of the practices that the FTC sued Amazon over was their requirement that sellers list their lowest prices on Amazon and outsource fulfillment (and give up a huge cut) to Amazon in order to qualify for Prime and good search results.

The result is that even though most sellers can afford to sell on their own store and keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue, they’re not allowed to actually undercut Amazon’s prices. And so Amazon has shielded itself from price competition, despite engaging in pretty expensive practices (free 2 day shipping for most items and places, free 1-day or even same day shipping for some items in some places). And they did it with contracts instead of actually competing.

Which business leaders were killed on the way to securing a 5-day workweek? Those gains were achieved through direct action affecting business bottom lines: strikes, sabotage, and direct action on the streets, not secret targeting of soft targets.

Put another way: there were two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump in the past year. Do you think that will change his political actions to be more popular?

Do you think that United Healthcare’s next CEO will suddenly forgo profits? What about hospital administrators, pharma CEOs, or any of the other tens of thousands profiting off of this fucked up system? Do you think that a mass assassination campaign will actually happen in large enough volume to change any behavior at all?

You’d take the 2nd choice and hire bodyguards. Sure, you might. But not everybody would.

No, the question isn’t whether everyone would. It’s whether anyone would. And the answer is obviously yes.

So now the position is filled. Did the healthcare system change?

My argument is that no, you can’t kill your way to reform on this one. There will always be another CEO to step into that place.

And the ratio of dead would-be assassins to CEOs would also pile more bodies on.

This is ludicrous. A person faced with unpopular decisions that might send assassins after him is going to make himself harder to assassinate, not less hated.

There’s a difference once they start considering their own lifes on the line.

They won’t. Anyone who has a semblance of belief that their decisions in the job might actually cause their own death just won’t do the job. Instead, it becomes a filter for choosing even more narcissistic/sociopathic people in the role.

And once they’ve internalized the idea that any decision made by any one employee of the company, including their predecessor CEOs, can put them in danger, it’s pretty attenuated from the actual decisions that they themselves make.

It’s a dice roll on a group of people, which isn’t enough to influence the individuals in that group.

We all know that the death of a CEO is a blip in the actual day to day operations in the company. The teams and departments will continue operating as before, and the broad strategic decisions made by the executives aren’t going to factor in a remote likelihood of violence on a particular executive.

After all, if they’re already doing cost/benefit analysis with human lives, what’s another life of a colleague, versus an insurance beneficiary?

They’ll just beef up personal security, put the cost of that security into their operating expenses, and then try to recover their costs through the business (including through stinginess on coverage decisions or policies).

You’re absolutely right and I’d argue it boils down to the fundamental error in OP’s shower thought:

Killing the CEO doesn’t save the lives on the other track. It just adds another dead body to the pile.

Well, efficiently, at least.

You can always heat up a hot air balloon and have it yank a system of pulleys, but you’re gonna lose a lot of energy that way.

Nuclear gets more expensive. That’s worse.

Okay, now solve for local transportation and create a single network that’s highly optimized for both long distance, medium distance, and last mile solutions.

Why does it need to be a single network? A shipping container can go on ship, train, and truck pretty seamlessly, and that combined multi-modal network can connect sources and destinations that no one method is sufficient for.

And once you design an optimized network under your parameters, it starts to look like a hub and spoke model, with high volume arterial routes connecting the hubs, pretty close to how parcel delivery tends to work. And once you have that, you can optimize specific segments, including using hubs connected by air for time sensitive stuff (same day, next day, 2-day service), waterways or rail for really heavy or bulky stuff, and all sorts of intermediate methods or a variety of last mile delivery needs for the specific needs of any given package.

That’s why the county level data makes the trend that much more obvious, because the states tend to clump big groups together. Here’s an example.

There, you can see that Colorado is special in that its rural counties tend to be low obesity, compared to even its neighbors in the Rockies. You also see a sliver of green following the Appalachian Mountains.

And obviously it isn’t the only factor. Poverty is really important, as are lifestyles (and the intentional and unintentional features of any given community in incentivizing or disincentivizing things like walking, regular exercise, eating healthy, etc.).

Altitude is an appetite suppressant.

The trend of altitude being inversely correlated with obesity rates is really obvious from county-level data. That trend persists across multiple countries, but the specific correlation varies from country to country, in a way that suggests that rich countries have a stronger inverse correlation between altitude and obesity.

This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.

Why do you care if the person you voted for wins?

Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you’ll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

One for each comma

The escalation of Starlink not complying comes from that, not the other way around.

I’ve looked closer (at other articles, too). You’re right - the freezing of the SpaceX accounts came from the same order that ordered that Twitter be blocked, and before SpaceX announced it would refuse to comply.

The proper thing to do is to recognize the legally distinct personhood of SpaceX, which isn’t part of Twitter, even if Twitter/X itself is wrong on the law.

The order to block Twitter went to all Brazilian ISPs, and Starlink is the only one that didn’t comply on Saturday. So the escalation stems from the disregard of an order that everyone was required to obey, but the intertwined nature of both companies being controlled by Musk is both part of the reason why SpaceX would even consider not complying with local law in a country it operates in, and why the Brazilian courts seem to be willing to aggressively enforce their own orders.

Edit: I’m convinced. This comment as originally written presented the facts out of order.

There’s that one game that censored “Nasser” to “N***er” which made it much worse.