This is exactly it: I know people who, whenever they see something funded through taxes that is anything beyond the absolute bare minimum, start grousing about money regardless of any actual underlying costs.
People wildly overestimate the costs of making things nice; penny-wise pound-foolish stuff.
You need to look at some cities in the south for comparison. The things they can get away with are on a completely different level since they only need to reject water. Stamped designs in sidewalks and other horizontal slabs are a good example, common in lots of "nicer" applications down there (say a pedestrian entrance to a courthouse or something). You'd be a lunatic to do it anywhere with a real winter. It'll spall in short order.
But, the south gets the short end of the stick for non-masonry materials and plant growth. Anywhere shaded harbors mold. Wood rots. So the kind of complex trims and accents you see in for example the northeast are fairly absent in the south.
Unless you're trying to keep colored plastic looking bright the desert is easy mode.
I moved from a place that puts at least some effort into beautification to a place that slaps everything as cheaply and minimally together as possible. Both with significant freeze-thaw cycles.
I'm pretty pragmatic in general. I get the argument in the abstract. But having been on both sides, I know which is better.
But more to the point, the parent used a very bad example to make their point.
I realize this makes me very unusual and this is probably not a good business idea, but I'd be happy to fly pod-hostel style. I don't mind being stacked as long as I get to lie down.
The man who presided over Jan 6th and the fake electors plot is definitely not going to accept an unfavorable outcome to the election now that he has much more power than he did in 2020.
Honestly, I don't get the logic behind opposition to the SAVE Act. In nearly all functional democracies (and many poor-functioning ones), you are required to show a state-issued ID document.
If the failure of the SAVE Act was the only thing allowing a Democrat victory, then there's something seriously wrong with the American democratic system.
I mean don't Americans have at least one document issued by the state proving that they are, you know, American?
"Q: Is it true that under the SAVE Act married women will not be able to register to vote if their married name doesn’t match their birth certificate?
A: The proposed SAVE Act instructs states to establish a process for people whose legal name doesn’t match their birth certificate to provide additional documents. But voting rights advocates say that married women and others who have changed their names may face difficulty when registering because of the ambiguity in the bill over what documents may be accepted."
Nearly every country I know of has solved the married woman name-change issue. The US literally does not have a process to manage official name changes?
It's literally so darn simple everywhere - previous official issued ID, marriage license copy, 2 newspaper ads stating the name change. There might be minor variations here and there depending on the country, but that's all you need to get your name changed anywhere on official documents. The real headache comes in changing previous unofficial documents afterwards, such as certificates, etc.
This is literally not an excuse for the Arsenal of Democracy.
I’ve seen “behind the curtain” in both private and publicly funded research. I can’t think of a single area where private industry isn’t standing on the shoulders of collective advancement. (I speak from experience as someone who holds a degree in one of the fields I’m about to mention.)
The biggest leaps tend to be made as a result of public-private partnerships. For example, essentially the totality of fundamental knowledge relating to aeronautics and aerospace, advanced medicine and life-saving pharmaceuticals (especially drugs for orphaned diseases), and any of the examples already offered in this thread.
Private ownership of scientific knowledge isn’t inherently a bad thing, but locking it up indirectly by virtue of eliminating all public funding for it does nothing more than to invite a new corporatist driven Dark Age.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a fun place to visit on the screen. I guess some people do want to live there.
Consumer Reports is great. I love them. They inherently have a limited testing capacity, and are not even able to look at a quarter of current products in the categories I'm usually looking at.
They're just no substitute for things like Energy Star
There are lots of companies offering product reviews. There is no requirement that every single product be reviewed by all of them. And, there are a million things someone might want to know about a product, there's nothing special about energy usage that justifies a whole special government programme. Otherwise where does it end? Why not demand new taxes to pay for reviews of the GUI friendliness of every single electronic product? Or movies? The arguments being made in this thread would apply to an enormous number of questions someone might ask about a product.
Anecdotally, playing Oblivion Remaster made me nostalgic for Creation. I have a beefy card and ample RAM, but it just runs like crap and I don't think it looks that much better than e.g. Starfield or Fallout 76
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