The details are the important part in the “housing crisis.”

By its nature, advocacy journalism glosses over the details that many would consider crucial.  Headlines from a pair of such articles by Katie Mulvaney in the Providence Journal illustrate the point: Six months pregnant with nowhere to go – an unhoused woman’s plight on RI’s streets After months of sleeping on the street, pregnant woman finally…

A homeless mother pushes a baby carriage in Providence, RI
Journalists should be conspicuously fair, even with groups nobody likes.

In the last couple decades, Americans (at least those who occupy seats in academia and mainstream media) appear to have lost their ability to distinguish between upholding a principle and supporting any given people who might benefit from that principle from time to time.  Nobody likes to defend groups that are broadly deplored, like Nazis…

Street artist draws passing white people as MAGA
What is it about social media lately? (A hope for controlling the crisis.)

Almost in passing during a recent podcast featuring Greg McKeown, Tim Ferriss stepped into an idea I’ve been contemplating lately: [A]s my job, I interview some of the top performers in the world, hundreds of them, and the change that I have seen for those people in that subset who are already, I think most…

People stare at their cell phones while disasters happen around them
We react to increases in housing prices in exactly the wrong way.

Lance Lambert, who appears to be a reporter on the housing beat, shared a table of increases in housing prices in the 50 largest metro areas.  As the following snip from the table shows, Providence experienced the third-largest increase over the past year: Various contextual points are important to remember.  Metros can vary in size,…

Suburban house with a slot machine on the side
We’re crossing the line from inadequate education to malevolent indoctrination.

For those willing to step outside the boundaries of “just the way we do things,” the justification for mandatory schooling backstopped by taxpayer-funded government schools is an interesting question.  I’d pick up the rope and pull for the “yes, justified” side.  A country founded on freedom and individual achievement and held together by abstract agreement…

A teacher Xes out George Washington on the blackboard
Even By Her Own Metric, Rhode Island’s Education Commissioner Has to Step Down

The Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity has called for the removal of Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green. They make their case here. I echo their call. During her tenure, Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green has failed to implement successful education reforms. She has instead prioritized questionable, experimental, non-education initiatives in Rhode Island’s K-12…

Elaborate government investment fraud creates incentive for election fraud.

The latest shiny news object in Rhode Island media is the revelation that the Tidewater soccer stadium will cost Rhode Island taxpayers $132 million in order to finance $27 million of the construction costs, or $4.4 million per year for 30 years.  Grumbling is being heard from people with familiar names — “obviously these are…

A man in a suit holds a soccer ball decorated with dollar signs
People who want to think for themselves are not the target of national Democrats’ talking points.

Among my frustrations with social media in recent years has been the way my streams become filled with content in which I have minimal interest — like Democrat propaganda — because people share it in disbelief.  The frustration is primarily with the realization that people apparently believe in completely incompatible realities, which is what motivates…

Men discuss box of garbage in a dark shop
In Rhode Island, government is a natural disaster.

Yes, yes, words get thrown around in state-level politics, but there’s an important lesson in East Providence City Council President Bob Rodericks’s letter asking Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee to declare a state of emergency over the closure of the Washington Bridge between East Providence and Providence: … East Providence is impacted more than any…

A road inspector sleeps on his car
In the current environment, expedited voter registration is an invitation to fraud.

When one of our cars became unusable last year, my family had to buy another, which we did at a dealer in Massachusetts that a friend had recommended.  We’ve bought cars in Massachusetts, before, but it appears that something has changed.  Registering the car took about a month, during which time we were short a…

The word, "vote," on puppet strings
Rhode Island’s K-12 Transgender Policy: Why Are Education Commissioner and Council Silent?

Following our first inquiry of Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green and the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education about Rhode Island transgender policy in K-12 schools and their non-response, Anchor Rising reached out a second time, this time asking, … current RIDE policy permits schools to discuss transgender procedures with students.  RIDE policy also permits schools…

A word on housing.

Amidst all the other happenings in Rhode Islanders’ lives, it’s worth a moment to consider that we’ve reached the point that the General Assembly is delving into such levels of micromanagement as housing setbacks and in-law apartments in local zoning.  That’s a sign that we’re doing things wrong. In the mania of the day (or…

A dense conformist neighborhood on the water
A Central Landfill meeting gives a sense of what’s being lost from media.

Considering how frequently I criticize professional journalists, I may too infrequently convey how powerful I think their role can (and should) be.  A recent Johnson Sunrise article by Rory Schuler, about the resignation/retirement of Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) Executive Directo Joseph Reposa, is an excellent example of what we’re losing.  Without making a gooey…

Reporter shocked at 19th Century public meeting
The system we inherited doesn’t persist of its own accord.

News that the Rhode Island Republican Party is struggling to hit the qualification requirements to place any presidential candidates on the primary ballot points to a deep problem in our state’s political landscape.  This is true even if we put to the side (for now) rumors that some large number of signatures were inexplicably invalidated….

An unkempt and overrun baseball stadium
Ripples
Maybe mental illness isn’t the cause of progressivism.

This is an interesting bit of data, and Frank Fleming’s response is humorous, but a question of causation and another bit of information are relevant:

IMAO_: Don't you feel terrible that we've been spending our time making fun of liberals online when we should have been locking them up in asylums for treatment? The answer to the political divide is compassion.

The bit of information that’s missing is the percentage of each group who’s asked a healthcare provider to diagnose a mental health condition. No doubt, psychologists and psychiatrists could find something wrong with many a conservative and many a man.

The question of causation is more political.  Progressivism is the ideology for mental illness.  They reinforce each other, and the presence of the latter makes a person vulnerable to manipulation by the proponents of the former.

No, RIPEC, funding isn’t the problem in RI infrastructure.

It’s hard to believe this is the conclusion of the CEO of the “business-backed” Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC):

The state should consider alternatives pursued by other states like road usage charges, electric vehicle charging fees, increased registration fees for hybrid/electric vehicles, or tolls (especially if the state is unsuccessful in its appeal of the ruling in the truck toll court case).

Mo’ money, mo’ money.

Rhode Island does not have a funding problem.  It has a management and priority problem.  Adding to the cost of living and funneling more millions through our corrupt government will not solve the problem.

It’d be interesting for somebody to do a study of the percentage of new money that actually goes toward increased time-on-task for infrastructure in the Ocean State, versus new hiring, increased pay, and graft.  Unfortunately, RIPEC does not appear likely to be that somebody, despite being one of the vanishingly few groups with some resources and mission to do such things.

What corruption might we find if we looked?

These stories come much too quickly to keep up, digest, and consider, but Mel’s review of Letitia James’s campaign finance reports a few weeks ago is worth a look:

Mel: When I got asked to look into Letitia James’ financials last week, I really wasn’t expecting to find much.

What might we find in RI, if we looked?

Be great if we talked more about young’ns voting.

Letting 17-year-olds vote in primaries if they’ll be eligible to vote in the associated general elections is certainly reasonable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note a pair of conspicuous questions along the way.

Firstly, why do Democrats seem always to want to expand voting toward the most manipulable constituencies?

Secondly (and perhaps relatedly), why do our beliefs about maturity seem to be moving in contrary directions?  Young adults can remain on their parents’ health insurance through the better part of their 20s, and they now typically stay in school nearly as late, where it’s apparently unfair to hold them accountable for the debt they incur.  We expect them to take less and less responsibility later and later in life.  Yet, the push is on to let them decide they want to mutilate their bodies to “become” the opposite sex at early ages and to let them vote on politicians who affect us all.

It’s almost like the intention is to keep them from growing up, confuse them, and then urge them to give government more power over our lives.

Sometimes it’s the minor legislation (like weekly pay mandates) that is the most telling.

This legislation is hardly the most-pressing matter facing Rhode Island at the moment:

Sen. Frank A. Ciccone III and Rep. Enrique George Sanchez are sponsoring legislation to require most businesses in Rhode Island to pay their employees weekly.

Has either of these legislators ever had to make payroll for a business?  One suspects they simply don’t understand the challenges of operating a business, so this seems like a no-brain crumb they can throw to the constituents to claim to be helping them.

They would exempt small government offices and nonprofits, which shows they have some dim understanding that the legislation could be harmful, but that’s just a special-interest nod.  You otherwise have to conclude that they consider themselves competent to micromanage the entire Ocean State economy and don’t really care what the effects might be.

Vitalogy is a reminder of our need for adventure (at least for me).

Yesterday, I listened to Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy album all the way though for maybe the first time because it’s the 574th best-selling album, and I’m tracing that list from the top. The band’s prior recording, Vs., had been such a disappointment that I didn’t bother with its follow-up.

Vs. came out while I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University, so buying it took some doing. I had to decide if the cost was worth the tradeoff on my slim budget, find a music store in an unfamiliar city without the Internet, figure out the bus schedule, and ride back-and-forth across town, observing people along the way.

It feels like we’ve lost something by making everything so easy.  Tom Petty once complained that CDs and tapes took something out of the musical experience.  Vinyl records came in this large, beautiful envelope, like a poster packaged with the music.  CDs and tapes would fit in your pocket.

At least you still had to go to the store and find them.  There was an adventure to it, and if you didn’t know what, exactly, you wanted, you had to make an actual decision, because you could only buy so many.  And sometimes the experience was all you had, because the album proved a disappointment, like Vs.

Of course, I never could have listened to all the best-selling albums back then.  Even knowing what they were would have taken extensive research, and listening to them all would have been a heroic quest.

As in so many areas, what we need is a way to revive the sense of adventure, tangible experience, and risk without imposing a phony scarcity.

Plotting degree prices versus earnings 10-years later yields unexpected results in Rhode Island.

This is certainly not where I’d have placed the dots if somebody asked me to guess:

Costa24601: Which colleges in Rhode Island are worth it, financially?

Four-year colleges, net price for a family earning >$110k

That Rhode Island College is the least expensive, and doesn’t seem to produce a great effect isn’t a surprise.  Johnson & Whales, however, is surprising, and New England Institute of Technology is even more so, both in how expensive it is and in the fact that it doesn’t produce even an average income in Rhode Island.  I’d have thought skilled trades would achieve that threshold.

What explains Rhode Island’s emissions increase?

The focus of the related article is explaining why the American Northwest was unique in the country in its increase in emissions from 2022 to 2023, but Rhode Island is a conspicuous red dot on Michael Thomas’s map:

curious_founder: In 2023 power emissions fell across the U.S. as they have for the last decade.

But they rose significantly in the Pacific Northwest, erasing some of the region's climate progress. 

So what happened?

If accurate, this result shows “net zero” proclamations to be so much hot air, but what happened? I’m only speculating, here, but I wonder if the result comes from our deteriorating infrastructure and punishing economic policy.  If infrastructure is inadequate, people will do things like run gas generators when the power goes out, and when businesses and households are struggling to make ends meet, they’re not going to invest in newer technologies, which will tend to be more efficient.

Bjorn Lomborg’s illustration of number cooking can’t be ignored.

Honestly, it looks like Lomborg has identified a typical example of the method of operations for alarmists with this tweet:

BjornLomborg: Climate alarmists are annoyed that global climate-related disaster deaths have declined dramatically

As with economic numbers, environmental alarmism creates too much incentive of money and power for the numbers to be trusted.

The scale of NYC’s banana-republicism is difficult for most people to fathom.

But Mark Steyn clarifies it with his usual panache:

… one hears so much breezy chit-chat in America about appealing this and appealing that one takes one’s appellate rights for granted.

Not so. In order to appeal, a losing party has to post a bond for the amount at issue. …

This is no small thing, even for those of us at the nickel-and-dime end of the Great American Judicial Shakedown – and especially not when, at the lower-court phase, justice has been comprehensively weaponised against one side of the country’s political divide. But to be clear: to appeal Judge Wankeron’s decision Trump needs to come up with a bond for at least $350 million.

So, just to complicate the issue, Wankeron forbids him from doing business with any financial institution registered in the State of New York. Which is rather a lot of them, it being the home of Wall Street – and of almost all the big players: J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley.

One can be nostalgic, of course, but it seems to me the America in which I grew up would have expressed broad consensus that justice — and trust in the justice system — was so important even the appearance of attempting to curtail due process rights would do harm to the republic.  These days, however, even people I once thought were reasonable clearly don’t care.  If they can be whipped up to believe somebody they don’t like is a “threat to democracy,” they’re content to undermine democracy’s foundation.

A few words on the viral video of girls dancing at a concert (or something).

I haven’t seen anybody outraged by this video. I have seen a lot of people displaying their moral superiority to the people who are supposedly outraged by it, though. For that reason, it seems like a good example of the way in which social media can social engineer movements by creating opportunities for communal opposition (aka, scapegoating):

Playboysparadox: "Why don't men want western women?"

Personally, I was just relieved Hamas didn’t fly in and slaughter them all at the end.

One undeniable fact about the huge influx of illegal immigrants…

… is that we, the People, are being manipulated.

JonDBrien1: This is a disaster.  Indefensible.

Of course, we should be clear.  The contribution of illegal immigration is not the entire 3.8M, which also includes whatever increase there would have been, if any.  (Presumably, immigration could prove to had made up for what otherwise would have been a decrease.)  We also should turn a good portion of our attention to a realistic “So, now what?” analysis.

That said, a country-changing trend like this really should be subject of extensive public debate and consent, which is pretty much the opposite of what our political elites are encouraging.

Progressives’ Valentines give a hint of life when everything’s political.

It seemed to be a mini-fad, this year, for progressives to post fake Valentines on social media that weren’t about love, but about their political positions.  This one, from RI Kids Count captures the distasteful feel with particular gusto:

RIKidsCount: Roses are red
Violets are blue 
Kicking kids off Medicaid is myopic
Can't you see that too?

The tone is hard to miss, with its insinuation of superiority and assumption of bad-intent and/or blindness.  The post even uses a word from the classic vocabulary of pretention, “myopic.”

This is a small thing, to be sure, but something about it really captures the flavor of life under a progressive regime.

There’s a subtler lesson about the lie of Biden’s loan forgiveness.

Brian’s got this right, but it’s not the entire story:

BrianCNewberry: Let me fix this headline: "A new report shows Rhode Island taxpayers will pick up the tab for 450 lucky people whose votes Biden is trying to buy".

$3.4 million to 450 people is $7,556 each.  That’s not life-changing money; it’s purely a political handout at others’ expense.  Wait until the kids discover how limited this handout is, by the way.  Most of them are actually struggling with their private loans, which tend to be much larger and that are carrying interest increases under Biden that more than wipe away the benefit of the subsidized-loan buy off.

Education will not improve in RI as long as these folks are setting the agenda.

This is all about ideology and politics, not about truly educating Rhode Island students:

PaigeCParks: .
@RIKidsCount
 is an allied partner w/ NEARI.

Most Rhode Islanders don’t have any idea who these people are, and many of those who do want to avoid the danger and cognitive dissonance of believing they have ulterior motives.  Nonetheless, as long as they have prominent roles in public education in our state, students will suffer.

The ACLU of Colorado has reached the point of psychosis.

That’s the only explanation for this sort of thing:

ACLUofColorado: BREAKING: We’re suing Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHCO) after they refused to provide top surgery for our 18-year-old transgender plaintiff — all while doing the same surgeries for cisgender patients.

This is discrimination — full stop.

 

The activist-lawyers at the ACLU would have us believe that they are so blinkered by ideology that they can’t see a distinction between a children’s hospital removing unhealthy breast tissue to stop cancer and removing healthy breasts for cosmetic reasons under the assertion that it will help relieve a mental illness.

Pay attention, by the way, to the “full stop” language, which I’ve seen with increasing frequency from trans activists.  We should be concerned that this petulant insistence that disagreeing is simply not acceptable has contributed to the increase in violent attacks from transgenders.

Yes, pet euthanasia often comes down to convenience.

I mean, I know from experience it can still be sad and traumatic, but at the end of the day, few people exhaust the medical possibilities before concluding the cost is too high.  That’s why this tweet is an example of the way in which political arguments can brush aside the most significant distinctions:

kelsey_coletta: We allow our pets to die with dignity, shouldn’t we afford our fellow humans the same option? Rather than forcing people to suffer?

Kelsey calls such statements “stupid,” but it’s simply undeniable that euthanasia for human beings with the same standards as for pets would be a downgrade for humanity.

The cause of the young-adult suicide drop is less important than the cause of its resumption.

Armand Domalewski asks an important question, when he observes a quick decrease in teen and young adult suicide after 1994, which held until about 2008 and in 2017 exceeded its previous high:

ArmandDoma: What happened in 1991?

The more important question, though, is what has been happening since 2007/2008.

Having graduated high school in 1993, I’d speculate that the drop in the ’90s had to do, most profoundly, with the lightening of the existential dread of nuclear war after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 combined with young adults’ trimming their Baby Boomer parents’ greater social excesses and gaining a general optimism for the future based on economic growth with the rise of information technology.

Corresponding with the elevation of Obama, efforts to revive existential dread based on the environment and to erase progress toward racial harmony, not to mention attacks on the economic freedom, reversed those trends.

The union push is a bad sign for ABC6.

Entirely apart from ideological battles, the push at the ABC6 news operation in Rhode Island is a bad sign for the station:

bamaral44: A group of staffers at ABC6 are seeking to unionize. They say they're facing stagnant pay and a lack of resources at the station. A union, they say, will bring them to the table and elevate their work.Over a quarter century of living in Rhode Island, I’ve seen no movement from ABC6 toward a greater competitive position against WJAR (10) and WPRI (12).  The perennial third-place laggard from a struggling industry in a deteriorating small-market state needs flexibility and an entrepreneurial spirit across the organization, not the what’s-in-it-for-me sclerosis of a workplace model more suitable to a factory, where workers are interchangeable.

Of course, in this state, nobody will question the move, and it will likely be the final, fatal albatross for ABC6.

McKee is a great representative… of RI insiders.

I’m a little slow with this, but I still want to chime in on how telling this is:

KimKalunian: VIDEO: @GovDanMcKee said yesterday that the Washington Bridge issues are only adding 10-15 minutes of extra commute time for drivers. @NewsProvidence pressed him on that today. What are you experiencing behind the wheel? @wpri12It’s never a good sign when politicians find themselves explaining to constituents why they (the People) are exaggerating the difficulties they (the politicians) are causing them with unarguably incompetence, but it’s so, so emblematic of RI government.

 

This should be the repeated proposition for a better future in RI.

The following sentiment, expressed here by a small-business owner being crushed by the Washington Bridge closure, has been expressed by people seeking to reform Rhode Island for decades, so it is encouraging to find it somewhere outside of our meetings and events:

“think of how successful we could be if we weren’t having to pick up the slack of other people”

Rhode Island could be the gem of the Northeast.  Rhode Island could be the archetype of America’s promise.  Rhode Island could be the hub of such dynamism as historians will talk about for centuries.

The problem is that its obvious potential has made the Ocean State vulnerable to rent-seeking toll collectors who stand in the way but promise we only have to pay them off a little.  They’ve collected, though, and there are so many that the purpose of the state has shifted from a vision of thriving to the burden of supporting their slack.

A question that must concern us all is at what point they’ve utterly ruined even the possibility of that vision.

Fictional movie poster for Day of Reckoning

Politics This Week: Day of Reckoning!

John DePetro and Justin Katz explore who can expect days of reckoning in Rhode Island.


A giant mime shushes an empty legislative chamber

Politics This Week: RI’s Code of Silence

John DePetro and Justin Katz explore various subjects about which journalists aren’t free to be clear.

Ticket booth outside a circus sideshow tent

Politics This Week: State of Distraction

John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the ways in which Rhode Island’s political elites distract and mislead the public.

Shortsighted inspectors of disaster

Politics This Week: An Establishment Without Clarity

On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss: Political establishment deteriorating with the Washington Bridge Safety falling through the gaps of immigration euphemism Media punts on journalism when it comes to people they hate Tidewater beneficiaries “Quiet campaigns”   Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.

Rising tide floods a city

Politics This Week: High Tide for Special Interests

John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss unions, immigration, infrastructure, borrowing, and other ways special interests profit from government.

A giant mime shushes an empty legislative chamber

Politics This Week: RI’s Code of Silence

John DePetro and Justin Katz explore various subjects about which journalists aren’t free to be clear.

Ticket booth outside a circus sideshow tent

Politics This Week: State of Distraction

John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the ways in which Rhode Island’s political elites distract and mislead the public.

Shortsighted inspectors of disaster

Politics This Week: An Establishment Without Clarity

On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss: Political establishment deteriorating with the Washington Bridge Safety falling through the gaps of immigration euphemism Media punts on journalism…

Rising tide floods a city

Politics This Week: High Tide for Special Interests

John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss unions, immigration, infrastructure, borrowing, and other ways special interests profit from government.

Government insiders play in a snowfall of cash

Politics This Week: Snowfall of Favors

John DePetro and Justin Katz trace the disconnect between what Rhode Island needs and what its politicians keep supplying.

An old man contemplates a pit expanding to consume a city

Politics This Week: Distracted by Disaster

John DePetro and Justin Katz lament the lack of focus on the basics in RI government and media.

Ripples
Maybe mental illness isn’t the cause of progressivism.

This is an interesting bit of data, and Frank Fleming’s response is humorous, but a question of causation and another bit of information are relevant:

IMAO_: Don't you feel terrible that we've been spending our time making fun of liberals online when we should have been locking them up in asylums for treatment? The answer to the political divide is compassion.

The bit of information that’s missing is the percentage of each group who’s asked a healthcare provider to diagnose a mental health condition. No doubt, psychologists and psychiatrists could find something wrong with many a conservative and many a man.

The question of causation is more political.  Progressivism is the ideology for mental illness.  They reinforce each other, and the presence of the latter makes a person vulnerable to manipulation by the proponents of the former.

No, RIPEC, funding isn’t the problem in RI infrastructure.

It’s hard to believe this is the conclusion of the CEO of the “business-backed” Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC):

The state should consider alternatives pursued by other states like road usage charges, electric vehicle charging fees, increased registration fees for hybrid/electric vehicles, or tolls (especially if the state is unsuccessful in its appeal of the ruling in the truck toll court case).

Mo’ money, mo’ money.

Rhode Island does not have a funding problem.  It has a management and priority problem.  Adding to the cost of living and funneling more millions through our corrupt government will not solve the problem.

It’d be interesting for somebody to do a study of the percentage of new money that actually goes toward increased time-on-task for infrastructure in the Ocean State, versus new hiring, increased pay, and graft.  Unfortunately, RIPEC does not appear likely to be that somebody, despite being one of the vanishingly few groups with some resources and mission to do such things.

What corruption might we find if we looked?

These stories come much too quickly to keep up, digest, and consider, but Mel’s review of Letitia James’s campaign finance reports a few weeks ago is worth a look:

Mel: When I got asked to look into Letitia James’ financials last week, I really wasn’t expecting to find much.

What might we find in RI, if we looked?

Be great if we talked more about young’ns voting.

Letting 17-year-olds vote in primaries if they’ll be eligible to vote in the associated general elections is certainly reasonable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note a pair of conspicuous questions along the way.

Firstly, why do Democrats seem always to want to expand voting toward the most manipulable constituencies?

Secondly (and perhaps relatedly), why do our beliefs about maturity seem to be moving in contrary directions?  Young adults can remain on their parents’ health insurance through the better part of their 20s, and they now typically stay in school nearly as late, where it’s apparently unfair to hold them accountable for the debt they incur.  We expect them to take less and less responsibility later and later in life.  Yet, the push is on to let them decide they want to mutilate their bodies to “become” the opposite sex at early ages and to let them vote on politicians who affect us all.

It’s almost like the intention is to keep them from growing up, confuse them, and then urge them to give government more power over our lives.

Sometimes it’s the minor legislation (like weekly pay mandates) that is the most telling.

This legislation is hardly the most-pressing matter facing Rhode Island at the moment:

Sen. Frank A. Ciccone III and Rep. Enrique George Sanchez are sponsoring legislation to require most businesses in Rhode Island to pay their employees weekly.

Has either of these legislators ever had to make payroll for a business?  One suspects they simply don’t understand the challenges of operating a business, so this seems like a no-brain crumb they can throw to the constituents to claim to be helping them.

They would exempt small government offices and nonprofits, which shows they have some dim understanding that the legislation could be harmful, but that’s just a special-interest nod.  You otherwise have to conclude that they consider themselves competent to micromanage the entire Ocean State economy and don’t really care what the effects might be.