Could you help me understand something? Is this person also… dumb? I don’t mean to be disparaging or judgemental, but I’m trying to navigate all this and I’m having a hard time understanding how someone can lack this much self-awareness and still function in society. Unless, they can’t do that either? Thanks.

On the one hand, the shock and horror that people experience when their government goes hard on bigotry, demands some kind of retreat to psychological safety. On the other, the above is not the kind of copium one should reach for. What’s sad is that, as a group, they probably had the resources to actually do something useful to help themselves, rather than offer mutual support to ignore all the warning signs.

For a while now I’ve been paying attention to the way customers are treated, and noticed a kind of symmetry with how the employees of a given business/institution are treated. If you’re seeing one kind of abuse/neglect, the other is very likely to also be the case, because it all comes from the same place.

In the case of Walmart: employees under a rather heavy yoke of part-time-no-benefits-never-unions labor, and customers are given a dis-compassionate choice between poorly made and barely viable goods from dubious origins. It’s not that management/ownership doesn’t care about this or that, it’s that they generally don’t care about people and are grotesque about it. It’s all here.

Even he can’t believe it happened.

Possibly the grossest thing about all this, is how the RNC wasted no time trying to turn this into something it’s not.

Those who resort to violence to undermine our state and nation must be held accountable

While in principle I agree, nobody was hurt. That’s because this was arson, not assault.

Today, we see the same dangerous tendencies play out in new forms—attempts to suppress free speech, silence dissent, and use fear to control the political narrative.

Ironic, no? Nevermind the whataboutism regarding the old DNC and GOP roles back in the early 20th.

Maybe, but as I recall, it was a Civil Rights protest. I had to look it up. Back in 1963:

https://sandersinstitute.org/event/bernie-sanders-arrest-at-chicago-civil-rights-protest

Edit: maybe the most based human being alive at this point.

I did this once. Only way to get rid of it was to sell my house.

Heaven only works for them if they imagine that they will be able to look down and see hell.

See, this is the part I can’t get behind. An eternity of that disparity with even the smallest scrap of empathy would eventually be unending torment. Every day is just more “oh yeah, hell is a thing and I can’t do anything about it…”

How do I join the MGU (MacGyver Union)? I have to cobble together some kind of device that hacks me in, don’t I?

Please tell me that a lower circuit court can do this, and that we’re not depending on the SCOTUS to pull this off.

This reminds me of the dolphin jokes that Lower Decks got away with in almost every season. Dolphins + Universal Translator = Instant workplace harassment.

Once you’ve got that kind of money, I’m sure you have millions squirreled away here and there.

That’s kind of right. He likely has liquid funds stuffed away in all kinds of places, possibly in different currencies on different continents. The only way to put someone like this in the poorhouse is to bankrupt every single one of his investments, while simultaneously freezing all his funds internationally.

From a finance perspective, a billionaire is a few orders of magnitude beyond “escape velocity” from ever being poor. I think most of us would need a few tens-of-millions USD in cash to even consider achieving such a thing.

Another way to look at it is that the billions in “net worth” he has accumulated are just ablative armor for real spendable wealth. Consider the move he made with Twitter: the objective was controlling the platform and discourse on it, full stop. Losing tens of billions didn’t matter - it wasn’t real money in the first place (mostly stock) and wasn’t spendable in the conventional sense. DOGE is a similar play in that the kinds of unfair advantages being gained are worth at least what he’s losing.

Thank you. I’m wishing the same for myself and my fellow not-pants-on-head-crazy people in this madhouse.

Yours,

• Your downstairs, and trapped in a failed meth-lab of a country, neighbor

Same. I’ve got a real bad feeling about this.

Good point.

Now that you mention it, eggs fit the right conditions for this kind of scheme. They’re experiencing an abnormal spike in value, are highly perishable (somewhat inelastic demand), and probably are stored under low security since they were (recently) cheap. Just the right commodity for arbitrage before everyone involved wises up or things normalize.

I dumped that into ChatGPT to figure out what that would mean:

“Gold-progressing”: If “oro-” means gold, then “orogressive” could describe something advancing toward wealth, golden standards, or prosperity.

“Mountain-moving” or “Mountain-progressing”: If we go with the geological meaning, “orogressive” could mean progressing through or overcoming mountains—maybe symbolizing overcoming big challenges.

“Speech-advancing”: If “oro-” is tied to oral communication, “orogressive” might mean someone who is progressive in speech, rhetoric, or persuasion.

Honestly, all of those are ironically far more aspirational than “progressive”. I give it 4/5 stars for your newly-minted neologism.

Not sure where you’re from, but we have some problems that stand in the way of coordinating any kind of resistance. At least, not proactively.

In short: we have no living memory of domestic war, famine, epidemic, or wholesale financial hardship lasting longer than a few years. We’ve had tastes of those things, but they always effect people disproportionately, usually along class lines. So being proactive by taking up arms, or preparing for economic catastrophe, is literally unthinkable for most.

Meanwhile, the usual kind of political corruption that we’re accustomed to just came to an end, and is changing shape before our very eyes. Nobody knows what to do with that, yet.

you might be surprised how quickly the 90-million non-voters come around.

Good. I’d rather know what the score is with the actual, entire, electorate than left to yet another situation where a huge number of people just stood by.

A valid concern.

I strongly recommend looking at what the Polish did. We can have multiple movements all trying to influence outcomes. They don’t even need their own candidates, they just have to endorse ones that party elsewhere or have a chance of being picked up by a major coalition (e.g. Sanders, AOC). Over time, that movement gains traction and notoriety, further influencing elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Initiative

This does make me wonder: do municipalities with a large number of roundabouts have stats for how these things foil drunk drivers? I feel like there’s a serious possibility of reducing fatalities if we just replace the center of these circles with ponds and/or sand traps.