Unfortunately chaos breeds usury. The more fronts the little guys are forced to fight on, the more dilluted their efforts, and the more unified the ruling class can become. The goal is always chaos, obfuscation, distraction, entropy. There are two camps: the social, and the antisocial. While we have to worry about maintaining a functional society, the antisocial are completely unfettered, and free to exploit any and all ambiguities. They are the disease, we are the immune system, and the world is the body. They are unconcerned with killing the body, while we must both fight them, and preserve the body. For this reason we are at a disadvantage. And for this reason they should never be underestimated. Eventually a cough becomes pneumonia, and at a certain age pneumonia is a death sentence.

That’s certainly part of it. But it’s also a nation trend in communication. Trump has done a brilliant job at weaponizing and popularizing clipped, terse, sparse, blunt, chunky, speaking. He’s basically made headlines into a kind of vernacular, where everything is at once overly explicit and yet open to interpretation. Like, tone over content, and difficulty to ignore over clarity. It’s less that he has invented it, and more like he identified it, but has used it as a form of lexical gamesmanship. Set the narrative by being the one that’s remembered, fidelity to truth be damned. And giving his black-hole-like ability to bend discourse to be on his terms, everyone is falling in line and speaking in big dumb wooden blocks in order to remain competitive.

At least stabbing has the whole Brutus thing and depicts additional information; “Knifes”: betrays as well as attacks. But why not just say “betrays”? If there’s one thing Americans seem to universally hate, it’s syllables.

Pretty neat little conspiracy. Musk tells Don, I can rig it, Don takes the deal, monkey paw outcome: Musk blackmails Don with proof of cheating. I don’t know how plausible it actually is, but it’s interesting as a story.

The coastal elite thing was always real rich to me. The same people who gripe about the coastal elite somehow chose a billionaire new york real estate tycoon, whos whole personal brand for the past 40 years has been gold plated, cartoonishly decadent, opulence.

I just looked it up.: The median age of voting House lawmakers is 57.9 years, down from 58.9 in the 117th Congress (2021-22), 58.0 in the 116th (2019-20) and 58.4 in the 115th (2017-18). The new Senate’s median age, on the other hand, is 65.3 years, up from 64.8 in the 117th Congress, 63.6 in the 116th and 62.4 in the 115th.

Well, in the northern hemisphere, we’ll start getting progressively more daylight in 6 days.

Honestly the same. I woke up early, intending to wrap a gift, only to find I had forgotten where it was hidden.

Comparing “most people” to billionaires is ludicrous in terms of spreading the wealth. The average American makes between 1 and 2 million over the course of their entire life. So if you have 1 billion, you have 1000 lifetimes worth of money. Musk is worth 342 billion. The amount of wealth trapped in the 1% is absolutely preposterous.

As for your villainizing of “drug addicts”, try to tell me wealthy people don’t abuse alcohol and prescription drugs, and cocaine. The only difference is when they kill a cyclist while driving drunk they get a reduced sentence and it doesn’t ruin their lives.

I would argue there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. So yes, above a certain point, all rich people are bad. They hold an unusably vast hoard of resources. They elect to retain these resources rather than help others. Granted this is a subjective argument, but a sound one.

As for not being able to prove the danger of poverty, and my statistics you can rrad the research paper I pulled them from ar you leisure: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804032

We already have people without incentive, and who make everyone poorer as a result. They’re called billionaires. They have no incentive to improve the world, because it’s being broken is what they benefit most from. Bezos doesn’t benefit from happy healthy employees, he benefits from desperate, powerless employees. They can’t fight back if they’re terrified of losing their job.

The combined net worth of the 2020 class of the 400 richest Americans was $3.2 trillion, up from $2.7 trillion in 2017. As of March 2023, there were 735 billionaires in the United States.

Meanwhile, poverty is the 4th leading cause of death in the United States. Killing 10 times as many people as homicide in 2019.

As far as the evils of socialism, why is the life expectancy 7 years better for men and 5 years better for women in Canada vs the United States? Could it be socialized medicine and ready access to healthcare perhaps?

Quit bitching

no u.

Civil discourse got us into this. Good faith got us into this. Civilized behavior got us into this. Meanwhile we’ve been outmaneuvered by people with more resources than scruples. If we can be saved, and that’s a big if for every day that passes, then it’s going to take sudden and drastic action. Otherwise privation may be all that can pry open the eyes of our deadweight brethren, and by then it will likely be too late.

There in lies the issue. Democracy is a numbers game. And the smarts seem to be outnumbered. If Trump doesn’t kill us, climate change will. Despite an abundance of frank, clear, damning information about the dangers of both. As for increasing the smarts ranks; the American people chose the guy who wants to dismantle the department of education over the guy who wanted student loan debt forgiveness. Meanwhile, we’re using what precious remaining time we have left to act on preventing global cataclysm to argue about what bathroom people use.

The paradox is that less intelligent people are more excitable. So what we get is smart, civilized peope with no balls, and dumb energetic people willing to kamikaze. You can’t reason with unreasonable people, and unreasonable people see no reason to reflect on their actions. It’s a dangerous feedback loop that has put us on a collision course with collapse.

Edit: long story short, hot take, the smart people need to figure out a way to attract more dumb people.

First off, absolutely. None of these CEOs got where they are by acts of kindness. But there in lies the rub. Musk is in the spotlight. In a very real way, with his purchase of Twitter, he has actually become the spotlight itself. And he is vocally championing hateful rhetoric, and he is bankrolling an existential threat to America/democracy/the planet. The icon that is Tesla is inexorably linked to Musk, and lately Musk is shaping up to be America’s Goebbels.

Exactly. He’s the poster child for a virus that is killing our host. Beyond unhelpful, and well into counterproductive.

I acknowledge that it’s unfair, but I’m judging you. Everyone driving in a Tesla looks like a rube at best, tacky and vain at least, or a contributor to fascism at worst. Perhaps you might consider a bumper sticker, haha.

It may be unfair, but I’ve been increasingly judgemental of Tesla drivers, especially over the past 4 or 5 years. He used to just be a joke when he was tweeting edgelord stuff like his nightstand and trying to have images scrubbed from the internet of when he was still bald. Model S, model 3, model X (s3x, hur dur). Then I was made angry by the hyperloop and his distracting, unproductive impact of the way America thinks about mass transit. Then I got mad about Starlink, first as extremely expensive, dystopian sky litter. Then as a frightening glimpse at communication control in places with civil unrest/protest. Then he bought twitter, and did a hilariously bad job at running it. Installing a cartoonishly bad sign on his building and whatnot. Naming it something idiotic. Then helping bring Trump back from the dead. Then everything he has done in the 2024 election cycle. I don’t know how people can stand to be associated with Elon and all the he represents in any way. It would be like driving around in a Jimmy Savile-mobile.

You just made me mad by helping me realize that the Trump bros are going to break water by removing fluoride long before they fix water by removing lead.