Scrap wood to nail together? Luxury. Try, "take the nails out of these boards and straighten them, so we can reuse both"

Depending on things, manufacturing your own cut nails in your backyard from free scrap metal may be more efficient and significantly easier than pulling nails. It doesn't help much if you want to reuse the lumber, though.

My dad bought exactly one pound of roofing nails when replacing an entire asphalt shingle roof thanks to child labor.

Did he at least buy new shingles?

They were unused and in the package and they were new to him. They weren't new to the world. And he didn't buy them he bartered for them.

oh, i had my share of that project too. way back then, i found busy work fun. i think it is the true source of my absolute frustration with busy work now. thanks doc, i think we just made a break through!

It feels like it's going to be a pretty lackluster leaf season, with everything going at different times. Note to tourists: if you'd like to bring some leaves home, take as many as you'd like.

^ no idea why this was downvoted. I'm sympathetic to the idea that most real estate boundaries, even though currently enforced by government, are Schelling points that could mostly persist with private enforcement. But that seems like a tall argument for RF frequencies. Sure, if you were right next to the equivalent of an AM/FM station broadcast antenna, you wouldn't want to bother with trying to reuse that frequency. But if you were hundreds of miles away (where its signal is quite low), you could easily reuse the frequency with relatively small power transmitter.

So the current exclusive use of radio frequencies is very much an artifact of government intervention.

So presumably Rand Paul supports impeachment and conviction, right? The Supreme Council has Decreed that the only possible check on this naked corruption is impeachment by Congress, so you either support impeachment or you're just grandstanding.

If the FCC chair was the one engaged in wrong-doing (as Paul seems to believe), they would be the prime candidate for impeachment. In any case, it seems like Paul thinks that the previous administration was also engaging in censorship, and there were no impeachments in that case either, so perhaps he does not believe that censorship is a 'high crime or misdemeanor'.

I think wherever you stand on the left vs. right spectrum, it's clear now that "High crimes and misdemeanors" is now de facto defined only as "stuff we don't like that the other party's guy did." Trump could openly commit treason and probably not even be impeached ny his party, let alone removed.

But I don't for a second believe that the Democratic Party would cooperate with "their" person being impeached now either, except if it was politically advantageous for them (for instance, to remove an unpopular Democrat for an embarrassing misstep when there was a popular VP ready to go). No way would they impeach for crimes of overstepping presidential authority to do something the President from The West Wing would be proud of, for instance.

The House has the sole power of bringing impeachment, Rand is in the Senate.

If he did the thing you ask, he would just be 'grandstanding' on something he has no vote to bring forward, which your statement would appear to damn him for.

This splits hairs. He can still support it, or not. And the message says "supports impeachment and conviction"

I find it odd to blame the impeachment situation on Rand when the ball is in the court of the House. You can have an opinion on something that other people have the control over, but it's not particularly damning if you don't spend your time doing so, given many constituents would probably prefer their senators spend their time on issues they can actually tackle in the senate.

>"supports impeachment and conviction"

As it stands now, Rand has no vote on any impeachment conviction and no ability to bring one, so I don't see the point in asterisking on the "and conviction" as it doesn't change the situation beyond shoehorning a connived reason in to blame Rand for not making a public statement on the non-existent impeachment.

It's called building a consensus. Paul has a hell of a lot more input into the impeachment process than most everyone else in the country.

I'd say it's high time for state governors to start deploying their National Guards to keep order. The federal gangs are deliberately stirring up chaos to create new pretexts for the assertion of federal control. In addition to the obvious problem of the masked kidnap gangs undermining public trust and order, there have been many reports of groups of vehicles with federal plates forming moving blockades on highways, assaulting motorists, etc - seemingly whatever they can do to try and create confrontational situations. A straightforward guess is that these aren't even yesterday's officers with a nominal desire to uphold the law and go home at the end of the day, but rather loser militia types that have been quickly deputized to go into "blue states" and create problems for their perceived enemies.

Deploying Guards would also be a good way to start building some institutional momentum for defending our country - preempting following illegal orders (like what happened in CA), sussing out traitors in the chain of command, and mitigating the dynamic where much of traditional state law enforcement is sympathetic to the destructionists.

Congress and the judiciary are misbehaving as well, otherwise either one could easily put a stop to the destructionists. In fact one might say the manic demented guy barking orders at the rest of the executive is just a deliberate attention-drawing point of a much wider conspiracy.

What I recall from looking into this is that under half of the states had stay at home orders with the force of law. My own perspective was similar to yours - governor issued a "stay at home order" that when you read the details it was really just a strongly worded suggestion. Of course my state was still often listed in national summaries as if the order was mandatory.

But there does seem to be states where such orders were legally mandatory. Were they enforced? Would they survive court scrutiny if someone was arrested for say walking down the sidewalk in open air? Did they have massive escape hatches (eg caring for family members) ? No idea.

As a libertarian, I see authoritarianism as the imposition of top-down control, often fine-grained, onto individuals' lives. The reflexive reaching for government/law to solve problems. The war on drugs. Mass surveillance, regardless of its goals or who is in charge. The crushing weight and lack of justice in the criminal justice system. The draconian copyright regime.

This makes the Democratic [establishment] bureaucratic authoritarians, while the current Republican [establishment] are autocratic authoritarians.

Obviously I would prefer anti-authoritarianism - a goal of reducing government control in our lives (including corporate de facto government). I think so would most people, but for being lured in by partisan messaging. Authoritarian singular-perspective narratives always sound so simplistically compelling.

But while the autocratic authoritarians weren't in power, it was all too easy to point to the bureaucratic authoritarians as a creeping problem. So now we have autocratic authoritarianism "good and hard". Between the two, I'd prefer bureaucratic authoritarianism as it at least keeps the worst impulses in check (eg the capricious tariff taxes, the naked corruption/bribes, politicizing departments to go after political enemies, wanton cruelty against immigrants for circenses, etc). The only real question is whether at least some of our institutions will hold out so that we can collectively decide to change course, or if it's just set now.

As far as the mask issue, I want to live in a world where they weren't mandated, but yet most everyone wears one out of enlightened self interest. The traditional Republican message would have been "wear a mask to protect yourself". The fact that it was self-harming contrarianism instead has more to do with edgelordism and foreign influence campaigns.

What you wrote can be even an anarchist view. What’s the difference in your point of view? How should a government solve problems without laws? What other options are there? Besides ignoring, obviously. I’m absolutely not familiar with the tools of an imagined truly libertarian government (AFAIK this never happened).

You can run down the policies of either major party and find topics where they advocate against government intervention, or at least a light touch. So the idea that we could have less government intervention isn't really a unique or rare one.

It's not a matter of imagining some "truly libertarian" government, as that is an artifact of US "Libertarianism" which is itself fallacious (it mostly just renames "government" to "corporations"). It's a matter of which ideals to strive towards.

> Reddit, a whole lot of comments go from Nazi parallels to 'Luigi'.

oof. I certainly understand where Luigi came from, but I'd also say that Luigi represents an escalation that empowers the Trump regime. The general population's latent desire to see some "justice" metered out on the "elites" pushes those elites into cozying up to Trump. Because those elites know that if Trump chooses to go after them, even the masses against Trump aren't going to be terribly concerned with their plight.

This is why people say that "fascism is the failure mode of capitalism." When the rich and powerful get too fat off their structural advantages and society starts coming apart at the seams, capital will align with anti-democratic, anti-freedom, bigoted, and genocidal forces to suppress change rather than relinquish some wealth and power.

They would rather rule over ashes than join us in a little bit more of an equitable society.

I have nagging the suspicion that the knowledge that a good portion of the population wants them dead is a slightly more significant factor in pushing elites to the Republican side compared to the Trump administration's threats.

My point is they're not different factors, they're the same dynamic.

As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years? And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.

Meanwhile Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Part of the pressure are the populist memes that makes the masses unsympathetic to their plights, even though they are the structure of our society.

> As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years?

It's less about the murderer himself, and more about the high level of support he has. "Many of the rank and file in the Democratic coalition want you dead, but not to worry nearly all of them are cowards who'd never do anything about it." is cold comfort.

> And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.

Do I really need to go trough Reddit to find you people calling for the murder of "capitalists", right down to landlords and homeowners?

I'm sure the elites (if we could call them that) prefer to seem like they are being pressured by the Trump administration. It's better for business and it's safer that way. But their compliance comes a little too easy.

You seem to be trying to make this into a partisan thing by invoking some imagined attribution to Democrats, when the outrage against elites is clearly pan-partisan. Also if anything it's rightism that tends to encourage individualist violence (and I'm saying this not as a partisan slam, but as a libertarian who sees the virtues in both philosophies)

You've also completely sidestepped the fact that Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Sure, it's conceivable that some capitulating-institutional leaders were looking for an excuse to bring their institutions to heel, but it's not conceivable that they all were.

It seems like your goal is to absolve the autocratic authoritarians, and justify the elites cozying up to the autocratic authoritarians. So I don't see how continuing this conversation can be productive.

The problem is that it would just be an excuse to turn on the money printer as he's already itching to do. And then it's not like this wannabe autocrat is going to sit idly by through the collapse and hyperinflation.

Also one of Trump's master skills is slithering out of blame. He should have been a one term president after his abjectly terrible anti-leadership through Covid, yet he was able to parlay the chaos he mostly caused himself into an excuse of why he was unable to execute on all his outlandish and contradictory promises.

> The problem is that it would just be an excuse to turn on the money printer as he's already itching to do.

I don't think the OP would consider that a problem, it fact it's probably one the things he's leaning on to get his hoped for utter economic collapse. I can't see it happening any other way.

As for Trump slithering out if it, if there is one thing I do trust about the average US voter, it's the connection between their hip pocket and their vote. It's not a sophisticated or thoughtful connection mind you. If the hip pocket is hurting they vote for the other mob. It's what got Trump elected in 2025.