Thing is, yeah they’re fucking stupid but they’re also voters who the Dems could have persuaded and hardly tried. Repeatedly spamming “vote for us or you get Trumped again” doesn’t count as persuasion.

it’s not even remotely close to half of the city burning down. But given the damage estimates are running somewhere around $150 billion, it’s bad enough

Can I fully agree with you about them doing that, while also maintaining that in the long run insurance of all kinds will be unsustainable in light of the ongoing (and really just beginning at this point) climate catastrophe, not to mention the whole rest of the polycrisis facing humanity

I can’t help feeling that the real bad news is not that online platforms have been ruined, but that people have been and remain dependent on them.

I suspect the answer to that might be the same as to the classic question, “Can the markets stay completely insane and irrational longer than I can remain solvent?”

no, he’ll block federal aid and claim that Palisades residents didn’t rake their yards well enough.

Yes – surely the eligible pool is tiny at best. And the pull to use skills of deception for profit instead is widespread.

Right? And meanwhile the alternatives also cost more than they ought to if our whole system weren’t so fully captured by profit seeking.

It seems our species as a whole has deep problems of greed, corruption, nepotism… we’re fundamentally, maybe even genetically, not very close to systemically social and selfless behavior. We turn any system of government and economy and social structure to the benefit of an elite few eventually.

We / our society need many more like that guy, but I wouldn’t wish that level of stress on anyone. I’ll bet he gave two years off his eventual lifespan for every year undercover. On the other hand, lifespan would be worth so little in a white-supremacist christofascism.

It’s worse than murder because

• the state MUST be held to the highest standard;
• the state has the resources to do other than kill;
• execution ends up costing the state more than life imprisonment or better solutions;
• because someone who is ready to murder typically already does not fear punishment of any severity;
• because resources spent on decreasing economic inequality decrease the murder rate far more effectively than capital punishment ever can;
• etc.

Gladly, but more like r/collapse 😐

Mind if I just jump in here and praise your username?

And yeah, I wonder if that medication is from Europe, thinking the word may not have the same cultural baggage in many countries there and might only refer to the original meaning of the action of slowing or moderating.

They work for anyone who can ensure their sky-high wages and benefits and near-immunity from prosecution or firing. But yeah, that would be the billionaires who fund the predictable media drumbeat/circlejerk on “law and order” (read: prosecution for the poor, total invisibility for most “white collar” crime), who thereby are effectively the prime supporters of the police state. The billionaires hardly give a shit personally about policing or justice, beyond the basic level of “I just want clean streets and a safe home and car”, but they use the law-n-order schtick as an obvious yet unbeatable tactic to buy almost any political outcome they desire.

Let’s be really honest and clear about this, unless it’s actually in question: If Uber and Lyft had to pay a living wage, including proper healthcare and taking care of the costs of vehicle ownership and maintenance, they would not be in business. They would not exist. The difference between that world and the one we’re in is all in corporate profit. Their business model requires massive wage theft to be profitable.

Indeed there are cold stews.

In thirty years we will have neither, and the surviving humans will be living at a mostly pre-industrial level of technology, unable to repair or rebuild most of what exists today.

Pee isn’t stored in the balls. (couldn’t resist)

I wish I could just press “fast forward” and skip the years this society is wasting on AI, just the latest (cough… very profitable for the elite few) distraction from facing the rapidly looming polycrisis more directly.

Mars awaits!

I’m fully on board with your comment, take my upvote… but if you’re suffering from the nonexistence of public space and you can possibly get out West before you’re stuck for good, that is one thing that everyone who comes here from anywhere east still tells me, that they can hardly believe how much public land there is.

On the other hand, though, to actually make use of all that public land over here, attempting to do so by making plenty of money and therefore having plenty of time and transportation options is a vicious circle that only leads to more frustration for most. The average Californian spends so much time in their own city, barely able to get a few clipped weekends off to enjoy the vast open and unpopulated areas that lie very close by. If you give up on your future (or “the” future) you can still live and work a shitty job in a small town and have lots of time to enjoy the wilderness. I went for broke and did that for many years. Now I’m back in cities because I can’t tell the difference anymore and a city is just a different type of wilderness, now that all roads seem to be leading to the same dark future.