This is from reddit, but there's lots of substantiation in the comments:

When [my father] was in companies making everything from diapers to batteries to the laundry detergent he discovered that every single company makes the Walmart runs separately from the stuff heading to the local grocery store. In order to make the profit at what Walmart will pay all these companies reduced the "amounts" going into the product. Pallets of Huggies going to Walmart weighed 800lbs less than normal. Tide is 25% water vs 10% even lithium batteries that normally last 60 min in your emergency flashlight will only get 40min run time.(I've tested this one several times). The packaging stays the same but the customer isn't really getting the great savings they believe they are. Just another reason to avoid them.

It's absolutely not surprising - I know this is basically what happens to clothes at outlet malls. I just hadn't heard this particular accusation before.

The other part (and accusations in the comments) are more things that I have already known:

They also love effing over farmers. Walmart will wait until they know a farm is selling almost exclusively to them and then lower the purchase price offer by a huge amount knowing the farm cannot find another buyer for 25 tons of green beans before they go bad. Pure evil company.

Edit: Walmart will wait until the next season/harvest to drop the buying price knowing the farmer will struggle to find another buyer. I called my friend to ask how it went down. These farmers are already 100k in the red before Walmart pays and the farmers have to except or risk ruin.

Also an IG slideshow about how capitalism has turned grayscale over time. This is one of my hobby horses.

I really enjoyed this interview with Sarah McBride on Pod Save America. (Transcript here.) Her main message was "we've got to stop scolding people for moral impurity and broaden the tent to include more voters" but she said it much more smartly than that:

[H]ow do you fight back against Trump in a smart way, sort of in a writ large? because we are so susceptible to sort of this Trump derangement syndrome dynamic. We've been screaming about democracy and, you know, rights and the rule of law for so long. And clearly this country voted for someone who incited an insurrection. Right? And I've been thinking about how do we fight, how do we fight smart in a macro way?

And how do we, how do we recognize that there are two different standards for the parties? And those two different standards make a lot more sense when you, when you recognize that they're just the replication of sexism and a misogyny. The democratic party is the woman of politics and the Republican party is the man of politics. It's why Donald Trump can scream and yell and people see him as strong. And why when we scream and yell, we're seen hysterical and shrill. It's why Donald Trump can hate and insult more than half of this country because we tolerate deadbeat dads. But Democrats can't say anything about any voters that impugns their motives and their, their, their, their good faith because a mom has to love every single one of her children.

And so I've been thinking about how do you grapple with those, that reality that is a real double standard. We can't pretend that it doesn't exist. Marginalization doesn't stop in politics. We recognize it exists in our individual lives systemically. It exists in our politics. And so we have to grapple with the world as it is to change it. And I've been thinking about how does a woman successfully push back, you know, navigate a workplace, a world where so often her passion is held against her. And the socially acceptable path for a woman to fight back, unfortunately, is when she is defending her flock, when she is defending her family.

And I think we as a party would do well in replicating the strategies that women so have to have to employ to successfully navigate this world. And instead of fighting back in a way that makes Trump the main character, fight back in a way that makes consistently our constituents, individual people, human beings, the main character, Trump can be a supporting character, but we do fall in this trap of making him the main character. And I think if we always, always, always keep it local, keep it centered on, on our constituents, on people that we're defending, not only does it allow us to fight back and have that passion in a way that is heard the way we want it to be heard. But I also think it helps to reinforce for a voter the answer to the question that I said at the start, which is, do you care about me? Do you like me? Yeah. ...I think people think we don't like them.

(Emphasis mine.)

There are so many interesting parts! Like, should politicians lead public opinion?

[O]ne of the problems in politics is that people will often people think that there are these binary choices. Mm. Between being true to ourselves and saying everything we believe in exactly the way that feels viscerally comforting to us, or be completely poll tested and only talk about the issues in the way that the polls tell us to talk about them or not talk about them at all. Because the polls aren't good. And I think that that is a false choice in our politics. I think a lot of times you see politicians who will say, if I can identify a risk to something, that means I shouldn't do it....They've been scared of, of backlash to nuance. They've been scared to do politics because it doesn't, it's, it's not, you know, appropriate performative outrage online. So I think they've been scared into not employing an approach that meets voters where they are. But then on the flip side, after the last election in particular, there was such a backlash to that. Yeah. That people went, the lesson learned here is that we can never talk about these things that we have to completely reject.

There, there, there is a way to again, fight hard and fight smart. There's a way of, I always think about a political leader should be in front of public opinion.

We are not completely without agency in shifting and shaping public opinion! But we do have to be within proximity of public opinion, we have to be within an arm's reach because if we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on the public and we are no longer able to pull them along with us. And I think you've got some people who wanna be so far out ahead because it plays well on social media because they feel viscerally good about themselves, that they lose their grip and they can't pull 'em along. And then you've got other people who are so scared to be even an inch in front of public opinion that they hide within public opinion and hope that no one notices.

She is extremely practical about tactics, and does not get hung up on how unfair the current moment is. Like how AOC's response to the North Carolina Bathroom Bill was "It hurts all women":

When the bathroom thing came up, she led on a message around the impact it would have on all women. Yeah. And now I got to tell you, if it wasn't AOC making that argument, they might have gotten a lot of critique from the trans community, that the argument that they were putting forward was not an argument off the trans community. It was an argument about cisgender women. But she was absolutely right. And then in the weeks and months afterward, when there was an anti-trans bill before the House, what messaging did the caucus use?

and why trans acceptance seems to have disintegrated so disastrously over the past decade:

When it felt like we were on this unending, cresting wave of progress for the entirety of the LGBTQ community, as we saw, you know, the bathroom bill blow up in Pat McCrory's face in North Carolina, the governor who had signed it into law.

As general public support and cultural acceptance of trans people seemed to be growing and growing and growing pretty rapidly, people would say, why do you think this is happening so quickly? And I think I rightfully observed, I was like, well, I think. One, there was, to your comment, there was a transfer of support from the LGB to the T because it's all one acronym.

But I think two, there was another lesson that people had in that moment, which was they were like, "I remember not understanding gay people. And because of that, I remember being wrong on marriage. And I don't want to be wrong again just because I don't understand trans people. So I'll get on board with trans rights, even though I don't understand trans people." And what that meant was that that support was sort of a mile wide, but an inch deep. It was a house built on sand. And I think because of that, we were lulled into a false sense of security, which I've said multiple times here. And I think didn't sort of do the necessary work, as unfair as it might be, because change making is not always fair.

We didn't do the necessary work that the gay rights movement had done over a period of 20 years of deepening understanding of gay people so that the support for marriage was built on genuine understanding. We didn't do that work because we thought we were past it. And I think one of the lessons for me now is that if we want to have any fighting chance of getting this thing back on track for trans people.

We've got to return to the basics. We've got to fill a knowledge gap that exists and still exists. And that is unfair. It feels like we've been fighting for a while. But again, you can't overcome marginalization if you aren't going to grapple with the fact that marginalization is inherently unfair and ending it is unfair.

I've been so goddamned angry about November, that I haven't really been interested in changing or softening our message in order to be more effective. But she makes a compelling case that it's the way forward.

Lurid Keyaki asks: does anyone have any good sources on Florida's hard right turn? I read this short article about the Florida state senator leaving the Ds, and then a longer piece from before the 2024 elections about the rapid shift of Florida's electorate since 2018. I remember being concerned about Spanish-language misinformation and the lack of a Democratic ground game in 2020, both trends that seem to have continued.

Do you have any insight into Florida's fate? Does it seem like a bellwether for the rest of the country, maybe in the way that Wisconsin did under Scott Walker circa 2010? Does it matter?

The destruction of the New College of Florida (?) might be another sort of harbinger, actually. I feel like we had a post about that at *some* point, but I wasn't the source.

Heebie's take: On Florida, I tend to think the story start earlier than 2000. Like, when I was growing up, it was reliably lefty! It was blue, and not just in the Southern Democrat sense like Texas was, but generally more-or-less progressive. So when Florida became a swing state, I was already thinking "What the hell? This is going in the wrong direction" and the trend seems pretty stable from a 40 year distance.

My uninformed belief is that critiques of the Democrats over the past 5-10 years are dwarfed by the demographics of midwesterners moving to Florida and New Yorkers maybe not having quite the pipeline that they used to have. (I'm very attached - probably overly much - to blaming The Villages for everything.)

We definitely talked about New College - I had some close friends who went there, and I took it a little personally when it was cannibalized.

Let's go with the Canada election and the crazy Spain blackout. Didn't we have an article here in the past year or so about how fragile our electrical grid is to solar flares?

Also there really doesn't seem to be enough conversation about Trump's literal diminishing mental status:

Good luck to the Great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America. No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER. ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE! America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!

I mean, it's no "I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS" but still. Extremely dumb stuff.

NPR story and another story from a source that I have no idea how to evaluate, both on how maybe DOGE just first thing gave Russians access to NLRB data and presumably every other agency they've gotten to.

The NPR story is written in Professional Mild, and the other link reads like Professional Gobbledygook, but I can definitely understand the alarmed tone in this IG Post, with lots of screenshots of the transcript of the testimony, to add verisimilitude.

So wait, like, Musk has never seemed to quite be the Russian Asset guy. He's just a run-of-the-mill comic book Nazi bad guy who likes power and ketamines and has managed to get infinity money.

...

Also what's the timeline for when the tariffs start to tank the economy?