People decided to care about the ethics of fur farming after synthetic materials made fur obsolete. The majority isn’t going to object to the cruelty of factory farming unless they already have a replacement for factory-farmed eggs.

There’s a general concept in civil law that the plaintiff has an obligation to minimize damages, and therefore that he can’t sue for costs incurred due to his failure to minimize damages.

For example, consider a tenant who signs an agreement to rent a house for a year, but moves out (and stops paying rent) after only one month. The landlord may be able to sue the tenant for breach of contract: however, the landlord must mitigate damages by making a reasonable attempt to find a replacement tenant for the remainder of the year. The landlord may not simply let the house lie empty for eleven months and then sue the tenant for eleven months’ rent.

I’m far from a legal expert, so I don’t know if that principle doesn’t apply in cases like this or if the borrowers simply don’t have the resources to defend themselves in court.

$500 isn’t exactly much, given how long art takes to produce, how relatively infrequently that art will be bought, and how many extra expenses a “self-employed” artist has. I expect that most people selling art for $500 are hobbyists with some other means of financial support, because they’re not going to earn enough to live on by selling art. Portraying them as corporate sellouts is just silly.

(The exception might be some digital artists working on commission. But they’re probably drawing furry porn rather than something you might see in a gallery.)

I wish this wasn’t relevant as often as it is. It’s bizarre how so many Americans want to destroy America (meaning the present-day USA as opposed to some fantasy with the same name). They think they’ll be able to replace it with something more to their liking but they’re going to see that what they had was actually pretty good and that fixing things is a lot harder than breaking them was.

I think even China would prefer to see the USA not making climate change worse for everyone.

Apparently it’s supposed to be refundable when you leave, but also the government is not expecting to issue many refunds?

I’m surprised that such a tourism-crushing policy was not in the news (or at least not in the news that I saw) before the bill passed.

I still don’t understand how this is supposed to work even in principle. Clearly the sort of people who voted in the primary prefer Mamdani by a wide margin. Is Cuomo expecting to be elected by people who didn’t care enough to vote in the primary but do care enough to vote for him despite the fact that he’s not the Democratic candidate? Does he think that there are more people like that than there are people who voted for him in the primary but will vote for Mamdani in the general election?