quicklime

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

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.

something something Melon Husk and Rare-Earth Mining

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

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.

Gladly, but more like r/collapse 😐

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.

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.

Our species has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, give or take a bit. Looking back from the year 2100 and possibly a few decades earlier, it will be noted that for just a few generations – for an almost vanishingly brief fraction of our species’ lifespan – it was temporarily normal and unremarkable for one person to be able to haul thousands of pounds of stuff around whenever they pleased. And then we will be right back where we started, able to carry what we can carry on our backs and sometimes make use of a draft animal, and if we’re lucky a cart or a boat.

I was about to comment nearby that the phrase “billionaire robber barons” is redundant because there are no billionaires who are not living and profiting by means that should be illegitimate.

But you just reminded me that even “robber barons” is a conflicted term because it implies that there is or was some other type of more acceptable, more legitimate baron.

I suppose I’m probably playing “too socialist for school” here, but there never should have been any barons, and right now there ought not to be any billionaires. Their very existence is proof of a failed form of government.

Could have just let the Sasquatch look for them. There’s a pretty good record of people being returned unharmed but with very vague memories.

what’s the symbol for “sarcasm status uncertain”… /u?

The time has come, the song is over,
thought I’d something more to say 🎶

An increasing number of people don’t mind risking getting shot, since there’s no longer any future.

The missing link here is they want you to enter voluntary slavery when you realize it’s the only remaining way to afford healthcare.