If the state is telling you that you can't strike, then you definitely need the ability to strike. Like, I get the idea that there are some sectors too important for disruption, but the solution to that is to make those jobs good enough that nobody working them feels the need to strike. A ban on striking just gives the state an absurd amount of leverage, meaning those workers eat a ton of pain and then eventually quit. I would rather have veteran public servants working happily to keep the Commonwealth moving smoothly than see heavy employee churn kick out everyone with an ounce of experience while the newbies hired in have all the optimism and joy ground out of them.

Yeah, I feel like, "no heat or hot water in the middle of a New England winter," is the point at which you stop sending rent checks. What would you even be paying for? If a judge eventually evicts you, do you thank them?

Demand currently outstrips supply. As long as that continues to be the case, the housing crisis cannot be solved.

That said, you're correct that this isn't the only change that needs to be made. If you increase supply without raising taxes on homes past your primary resistance, you just encourage rental companies and investment portfolios to gobble up the new units so they can control prices and keep people renting. Building more houses and apartment buildings is a necessary step, but it's one part of a system of related changes that we need.

Don't be mad she got a 28% raise. Be mad that everyone making under $100k didn't.

First, where are you getting those numbers? I'm not calling them into question, I'm interested to see the full dataset.

Second, the waiting list by itself isn't the best metric to use here. We might expect there to be more BIPOC people on the waiting list if White people are finding ways to skip the line (such as by securing private donations).

But to answer your question, I don't have a source. I was working off the assumption that every racial group needs organ transplants at equal rates, but you're right to point out that that isn't necessarily the case. Perhaps certain groups are predisposed to illnesses that require more transplants, or perhaps other groups receive better preventative healthcare and avoid getting to that point. These sorts of influences are deeply rooted in all levels of society and they can be hard to tease out.

Thank you for pointing that out. I'm upvoting your comment so people can choose whether to leave that point in or not. FWIW, I'm not strictly suggesting people use this, and I certainly don't expect anyone to use it verbatim. I just figured if I went to the trouble of typing this up, other people ought to have a chance to use it as their first draft.

>But what you are insinuating that everyone from DAs, to judges to juries are all in on the corruption.

They certainly could be, and the public would always wonder if a given case had gone in favor of the prosecution because someone powerful wanted that defendant's organs.

But this doesn't even have to be a corruption thing. Once you put the idea in people's heads that more prisoners = more organ donations, you bias them in favor of more arrests, more convictions, and harsher prison sentences. You've told them, "even if this person is wrongfully convicted, at least some good might still come out of it." That's probably not enough to drastically shift a juror's decision, but it will shift some percentage of them where the juror was on the fence and that shift will add up to a lot of convictions across a whole state.

>I believe that only violent people, and people that are dangerous to others should be locked up.

Then why are we allowing those violent, dangerous people out early under any circumstances other than a pattern of behavior proving that they are no longer violent? Giving up a kidney or some bone marrow doesn't do that, especially not when there's a contractual payment rendered for your trouble.

I just sent this text in an email to my state rep. You are welcome to copy it or use a version of it yourself:

>On January 20th, Bill HD.3822 was introduced for consideration by the Massachusetts State legislature. I wish to voice my strident objection to this bill, entitled, "An Act to establish the Massachusetts incarcerated individual bone marrow and organ donation program."
>
>Facially, this bill seems to make sense as a way to empower prisoners to do good deeds that benefit their fellow citizens even while the prisoners remain stuck behind bars, as well as a way to spur badly-needed organ and bone marrow donations. However, it results in a number of perverse incentives at every level of the justice system while weakening the foundations of punishment and should by no means be made the law of the land.
>
>First and most crucially, this bill puts an enormous amount of pressure on prisoners to become the organ bank of society. If given a choice between giving up a kidney and spending a year in prison, most people in desperate circumstances could hardly say no to the option to get out early, particularly if they have dependents. Even without any explicit promises of time off, prisoners would still feel pressured to give organs in the hopes of preferential treatment from the prison, the guards, and parole boards. This concern is explored in greater depth in this NY Times opinion piece from 2013. Essentially, prisoners do not have a meaningful freedom to refuse, not under such heavy levels of implicit and explicit coercion.
>
>Second, the philosophical premise of this bill is an affront to the concept of justice and cannot realistically be limited to organ donation. If prison sentences are meant to be a just punishment befitting the individual's crime, then no amount of extracurricular good deeds could be traded to buy off that punishment. However, if we instead decide that giving up an organ provides sufficient counterbalance to the societal harm that the individual's crime caused, then there would be no reason not to take a sufficiently large check instead. This bill requires us to agree that societal harm and societal benefit are fungible qualities and gives organ donation a specific valuation, but that means we could also assign a particular level of societal benefit to the US dollar and allow prisoners to buy their way out of prison. Imagine a very rich person were to kill someone through reckless driving and received 5 years in prison. Surely $100 million would benefit society vastly more than one individual receiving one kidney, so by the logic of this bill, that rich person could just pay some amount less than $500 million and walk out of jail that same day.
>
>Third, this bill creates a perverse incentive for our entire judicial system to imprison more people and for longer sentences. Imprisoning people is a necessary evil, but it ought not be desirable from a societal level. With this bill, however, we encourage the police to arrest more people, DAs to seek harsher sentences, judges to lean in favor of the prosecution, and juries to default to conviction, simply because a larger and more desperate prison population results in a larger store of donated organs. In extreme cases, this could even result in individuals with rare blood types being targeted by crooked police and hospitals. Even if none of these dystopian circumstances were to occur, the public would be eternally suspicious of them happening in hidden backrooms. We do not need even more reasons to distrust our Justice system right now.
>
>Fourth, none of this even touches on the extremely problematic macro result: if this bill were to go through and none of the other issues arose, we would still effectively have turned a racial minority population into an organ battery for the White majority of the Commonwealth. For reasons that are complex and multivarried, prison populations tend to be disproportionately BIPOC while White people outside of prison tend to have better access to healthcare than their fellow BIPOC citizens. An organ donor would be more likely than average to be a person of color while an organ recipient would be more likely than average to be White. In a time of increasing racial disharmony, the last thing we need is to turn to such ghoulish measures to feed the longevity of those affluent enough to be able to afford the various costs of organ transplant.
>
>Thank you for your time.

Imagine you're identified as having a rare kind of bone marrow. Now imagine that a shady hospital communicates this to a shady detective and a shady DA on their take.

Preferably into history books on failed parties.

With only $35k in the war chest, they're already, "grassroots." Though even that's overstating them. More like, they're grass seeds that can't even seem to sprout and may be actually just dead.

Honestly I wouldn't mind the tunnel so much but the Lovecraftian-looking giant squids that like to hang out near the transparent section are just so unsettling. Not the best way to start a trip that likely involves swimming.

Kids can survive a lot, but they carry the scars with them all their lives.

Get used to shortages like this. We'll be seeing them more frequently as the climate shifts.

They expect you to tailgate the car in front of you, impelling them to go faster. It's stupid, I know.

They're trying to force the driver in front of them to go faster. The idea is to make them so uncomfortable that they either speed up just to get some tail room or move a lane to the right to get out of the way.

Mind you, slow driving in the fast lane is its own faux pas, but I don't find that to be a problem nearly as often as tailgaters do.

No, I don't. That's why I try to pay attention to what they're doing and vote accordingly. I would hope that everyone else does the same, rather than voting down all expenses and hoping that the politicians do good things with the money I've saved them in the short term.

That's a separate problem. We are capable of addressing multiple problems at the same time - and we should, to head off worse problems in the future. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a Conservative politician trying to distract you while they cut taxes for their billionaire owners.

We had a funding surplus this year. We can find the money to help people better themselves, especially since education will enable them to get better jobs in the future, generating more tax revenue as a result.

You gotta spend money to make money.

Free college is an investment in the future. A highly educated populace is more productive than a less-educated one. This sort of initiative pays for itself in the long run.

Living up to your username, I see!

You can't win the Presidency with just California, New York, Florida, and Texas. Go after just the urban vote and you're doomed to failure. The electoral college fixes problems that don't exist anymore, if they ever did.

Once you've outted yourself as a violent asshole why won't follow the rules, it's reasonable to presume that you might get violent in the future. This warrants restrictions that wouldn't be in place for other people precisely to prevent future victims.

You're moving the goalposts on us here. Laws don't require a victim to be valid. Restraining orders, for example, could be argued as not technically having a victim since their aim is to prevent future crimes that haven't happened yet rather than punish past crimes. You're trying to pretend that that very simple and obvious type of legal restriction doesn't exist, while in fact it does.

Absolutely. Right now, we throw the police at basically every problem facing society as our first line of defense, and that's simply ridiculous. Most police officers never fire their guns on duty, so why do sending armed individuals trained mostly in the use of force to places where guns clearly aren't needed? Surely some percentage of those situations would be better handed by agencies staffed with unarmed professionals trained in the particulars. If the threat of violence is enough to keep the peace, then isn't it enough to know that attacking one of those agents might then summon the police? That would at least prevent the state actors from making split-second mistakes.

> Don’t twist my words. It’s not the concept of law enforcement but rather the institution of the police which is inherently evil.

Friend, you're twisting your own words if you're trying to draw a distinction that fine. But we can call the people who show up when a civilian starts committing violence something other than, "police," if you want. We'll need state agents to act in that capacity regardless of what their department is named.

You really should have kept reading my comment because that's exactly what I said.