I’ll gladly vote for the person saying progressive things even if it’s only lip service when the alternative is someone who “reluctantly” sides with MAGA 100% of the time. Maybe eventually someone who actually believes those progressive things will get in. It’s a terrible system that should be burned down and rebuilt with 21st century ideas, but until that happens we work with what we have.

IT the next day “We spent an absurd amount of money on a new 3rd party service without telling anyone and for some reason nobody is opening the emails that company sent to our employees. Are they stupid or something?”.

“Ron, who served in the military for 25 years, said the 2008 housing market crash left him “really disillusioned with the Democratic Party.”” …what? How unaware does someone have to be to say something like that? The GOP took (literally) the WH and held congress for most of the years leading up to the '08 Crash. I mean, not knowing that the GOP are the ones that led us into the Great Depression (a feat they’re about to repeat) is one thing, but this moron was alive and presumably can read during the events he is describing.

Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself… /s

My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It’s also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “Farmers suffered for years under Joe Biden, who increased the United States’ trade deficit to over $1.2 trillion, raised input costs, and pushed woke DEI agricultural policies." I love that official US policy has become fundamentally not understanding trade deficits and running as far as possible with that lack of understanding. Follow that up with the vague claim of raising costs when the baseless Attack on Iran raised costs by more in a month than four years of Biden. Then finish with the absolutely irrelevant to family farmers woke boogeyman. Are we great yet?

Good summary. What’s wild to me is reading through this and pondering the frequency of these events. “Someone made an arrogant/stupid business decision” multiple times a day every day. “Someone tried to weasel out and was told that was stupid” also every day. “Went ahead with the plan anyway” - very frequent. “Tried to burn it all down” - all too often. Then we get to the turn where the wronged actually got a fair day in court- far, far less often. Then the villain of our story with $250M on the line somehow didn’t lawyer up enough to get the best justice money can buy - almost seems like fiction at this point and beyond.

Wait, you mean Dr. Feynman didn’t speak extensively on the healing power of crystals? /s It’s really super-duper-cool that we’ve created a system of zero platform accountability.

There is stupid, and there is trust Trump to pay you as a contractor with the backup plan to sue the federal government if it goes bad.

Nope. There are many proportional government systems in the world that work just fine. Ranked choice makes zero sense in this context. Assuming everyone will be tactical is cute. The considerable leap in logic to the Abilene effect is… where to begin? First, we already have coalitions they just form before the election, but the voters are NOT deciding the power balance at the DNC/RNC. Second, nothing is forced and Abilene Effect is not a state of being. Third, as Larry David said “A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied”.

We have local and state governments. Focusing on these minor differences at the federal level made less and less sense with the industrial revolution, rail, telegraph, highway system, internet. I’m not sure where exactly we crossed over from valid governance to outdated system to absurd, but we’re definitely there.

Also, these differences tend to be overblown which is why people, politicians speak about them in the vaguest of terms. Yes, when comparing a large city to hill people there might be some differences (though again, far less than historically). However, we’re at the federal level and big city to big city and hill people to hill people it’s all more or less Anywhere, USA.

Wow, if you don’t read what I say and just reduce it to something else, I sure do sound silly. Congrats on your smug internet points.

Now look ahead two steps and see how absurd that works out in practice. It’s not even a hypothetical, we’ve seen this time and time again throughout history. The internet doesn’t need dialect chains.

I have children and I love them very much, BUT if I was making the choice to have children today it would be resounding no. Primarily because of people like Elon Musk and the TDS that is speedrunning America’s collapse.

The FF tried that and it immediately failed, leaving us with a system ill equipped to handle political parties.

“Let’s keep all the existing problems slightly repackaged and create new ones.” -VP at a Think Tank

No wonder we’re in so much trouble. With friends like this who needs enemies. Better solution:

No more geographic attachment for the House. Proportional representation time. In 1776, local concerns were much more distinct. Now, Anywhere USA is everywhere. Plus, Senators are still bound to states for people who worry about that. Instead, parties win seats based on a percentage of the vote they receive and can assign members (which they do already, just with more steps) as they see fit. Gerrymandering solved, also we just broke the terrible de facto 2 party system.

I like AOC. I would vote for AOC. AOC will not win POTUS. We’re tried this twice already, and a woman who has had years of non-stop character assassination attempts lobbed at her is not going to win. It’s terrible that sexism and lies play such a big role, but that’s where we are as a nation. Dems had the right idea in 2020 setting up the first woman president via VP. Then they did the worst job possible of handling any potential transition, because of course they did.

Solid post. #2 stings extra, extra hard when you learn that in the USA doctors spend on average somewhere between a quarter and half their time (studies vary) with insurance nonsense. We could potentially DOUBLE (or, low end, increase by 1/3 which is still insane) the number of useful doctor hours tomorrow, but we don’t. U$A

Our rapidly depleting aquifers being used to produce those resources would suggest there are too many people.

progressively making it impossible for trans people to exist

He already did that. Now it appears as though he is aiming to be the last.