TheHiddenCatboy

That’ll hurt us, but it needs to happen. And targeted boycotts of Red State stuff for extra ‘FAFO’ energy.

Dealing with Trump is a daily example of ‘like playing Chess with a pigeon – the bird shits on the board and struts around like it won the game.’ Canadians need to tell the USA to fuck off.

Like others have said, nothing we say or don’t say will change what ideas they get. But calling it out makes them at least reconsider being so transparent.

You have a lot riding on a single election in one of the most democratic parts of the country. While I agree that Democratic Socialists did make a push here that could well set the tone of politics for the next 20 years on the left side of America, I’d hesitate to say it with certainty, given how crass American voters can be. Let’s let ZM actually get elected mayor, and let him prove he can get a DS platform passed in NYC before we crown him America’s saviour.

I know this is in jest, but it’s definitely something the shitheads would push. And my answer goes thusly:

No. The Economy hasn’t done a damn thing for me, and it’s done less for my wife. I’m treading water, unable to afford a house or a car on what was once an unfathomable sum of money when I was younger. It has done less for my wife, who relies on my job to keep a roof over her head. You want us to have kids? Reassure us that our kids will have a better life, and stop vampire-squidding us and sucking down every loose dollar.

There’s this possible ending in Cyberpunk 2077 that I think speaks to how Billionaires view the world. The leader of the Japanese megacorp Arasaka is arguably the most powerful man in Japan, more-so than even the Japanese emperor. His company’s security forces includes an aircraft carrier, not to mention endless drones and faceless goons equipped with … if not the best technology on the planet, then the second best. And they’ve unlocked the technology of digitising a person’s consciousness and storing it.

The CEO’s son is a bit of a rebel, trying to undermine his father. He eventually gets very hands-on (integral part of the plot that your character witnesses first-hand early in the game) and bumps his father off and takes over Arasaka. And if you play the game a certain way, you reach an ending where the daughter of the CEO assists her dead father in … coopting the son’s body, displacing his consciousness, and ‘reincarnating’ in the son’s body, to continue his centuries of ownership of Arasaka.

This is fiction, but Cyberpunk is all about assuming the worst of our corporate overlords. I don’t think it’s an overreach.

My wife and I made the same decision. We joke that Octomom had our kids.

8 billion people call Earth home. As another commentor has said, we probably should have half that. Your choice and our choice not to have kids enables that, even if only stupid people reproduce. With how the world is turning out right now, I think we both made the right choice.

Exactly. Any half-way competent Russian commander would steamroll Ukraine because Russia has roughly 10x the GDP as Ukraine (or it did before the invasion, at least), and roughly 4x the population. That Russia has only managed to take a sliver of land on the west side of Ukraine and not the whole country suggests that Russia has dropped the ball in an epic way AND Ukraine has gotten crazy lucky. This war should have been over a long time ago if Russia was 1/10th what we thought it was back in early 2021 before the invasion. That it’s not and not only has Ukraine managed to hold Russia off but actually take over Russian territory puts the lie to Russian propaganda that they deserve a seat at the same table as the US and China. As the Infographics Show likes to put it, we thought Russia was the second strongest military in the world. Now we know it’s the second strongest military in Ukraine…

No. He’s saying that 100% of the personnel they had at the start of the war are wounded or dead. Bit of a difference! We know Putin has plenty of bodies to throw in this meatgrinder.

I’ve got some thoughts on this.

When I was learning about the world, some time in the early to mid 1980s, I learned something that was interesting to me. There was roughly 1 person for every year Earth existed. I also learned that that number was likely too high, and our life was about to get more complicated because too many of us were too hungry for the resources Earth had to offer.

But now, 40 years later, there is now almost TWO people for every year the Earth has existed. Now, every rare resource has two pops chasing after it. What’s worse is everyone wants what they had in the 80s (a house, a car, a large yard, etc) without being willing to give up on any aspect of the dream. People who have houses fight against higher density housing. Cars get bigger, not smaller. And thus every individual consumes more than they did in the 80s.

What happens when supply goes down (because NIMBYism and rampant consumerism), while demand goes up (because there are now twice as many people chasing resources)? Look around you. Everything is expensive. Housing. Fuel. Food. Education. Healthcare. What could be done with a single income in the 80s now can’t be done with two incomes today. World-wide, even. Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, and even China are suffering population growth rates falling below replacement rate because it’s too fucking expensive to have a kid in this world. House ownership is a forgotten dream for young people these days, and even for me. I’m earning 6 figures these days, but even that’s not enough to afford the down-payment on a house, especially with rents as crazy expensive as they are. Car ownership? In 2005, we looked at the costs of a car (not just the cost to own it, but the cost to maintain it, the cost to keep it fueled, the cost to drive it responsibly – insurance, and the cost to store it) and decided it was too expensive to own a car or even lease a car. When we need a car these days, we rent one, and give it up gladly at the end. We don’t run the AC in the heat of the day because electricity is too fucking expensive. And I don’t know if the 15kg I’ve lost over the past 2 years was due to being disgusted with how expensive everything is, but…well, I am disgusted with how expensive food is. That’s the one thing I can’t escape.

I hear ya on the whole ‘why did I bring kids into this world?!’ A fun (?) thought exercise I like to do is consider what life would have been like had the wife and I had kids. Back in 2005, we were in a good place for having kids. She was working for CompUSA and I was working for Qwest, and our total income was 5x our rent, easily. We were finally settled down, and things were looking up for us. Then Hurricane Katrina hit.

Let me be clear. We were thousands of miles away from where Hurricane Katrina hit. New Orleans flooding did affect my wife as she has family down there, but even had Katrina made it to where we were, it’d just be a moderate rain event for us. But that didn’t stop the massive corpo I worked for cashing in and cutting its workforce. We went from “you guys are doing a great job, we’re going to hire you as regular IT guys” to “pack up your desks, you’re done here” in less than a week. We went from on top of the world to filing for bankruptcy in 3 months. Had we had a kid in that time period, we’d likely have had to move back to Louisiana so the Grandparents could help with the kids while we went and worked minimum wage jobs just to try to keep a roof over our heads. I’m so glad we didn’t, but that’s a shame to poor ‘Victoria’, our hypothetical daughter who I would have liked to me. On the other hand, she’d likely have a touch of AuDHD like her mom and dad, meaning the next 4 years would have been hell on Earth thanks to Junior and his merry band of miscreants over at Dept. of Health. :|

None of this is to excuse the shitheads in the world. It’s just…when you have twice the pops chasing half the resources, even the most well meaning of governments will be fighting rampant instability, which makes Authoritarianism look appealing.

My comment to her is that we need to enforce anti-harassment laws in all spaces. I don’t care if you’re a man harassing a man, a man harassing a woman, a woman harassing a man, or a woman harassing a woman, the cops should come take you away and … educate you why we don’t do that shit in a civilised society. And you don’t need to make a person presenting as a woman use the men’s washroom, or a person presenting as a man use a woman’s washroom, to make that happen! In short, you don’t need to be a dick to people.

Fun fact. I saw a recent news article where a trans-man (i.e., born female, presents as male) went into the woman’s washroom because the only free stalls were urinals, which he couldn’t use. So he went to the woman’s washroom to use a stall there, and got harassed by the police because…well, he was a man in the women’s room. Except he wasn’t. He was born a she, and in North Carolina, you USED to be demanded to go to the washroom of your birth gender, and they’re trying to force that back in again, after it was partially repealed and allowed to expire back in 2020.

It’s not about protecting women. If it was, they’d just enforce the laws on the books about harassment, sexual or otherwise, and be blind to the genders of the perpetrator and victim. But we can obviously see that this is about legally harassing transgender people, and it just uses women’s rights as cover for the hatred. Your only answer as a transgender person to peeing is hold it…or pee yourself. Or move to a state, city, or country that doesn’t treat you like shit because you would prefer to be the other gender…or not be restricted to the binary structure in general!

I’d answer this with ‘we rebase the dollar when a coin can’t buy a thing.’ It should have happened decades ago. Here’s my worked example.

A penny used to be a lot of money. You could buy actual things with a penny. I’m sure our oldest contributors can point to the day that a penny would get you a piece of candy. In my earliest days, I could get that same piece of candy with a nickel, but by my teens, that piece of candy would be a dime or even quarter. I remember when a bag of M&Ms cost $0.50, That became $1.00 around the 2000s, and is now $2.00.

A penny sitting on the ground was ‘good luck’ back in the day. I think that’s because you could bend down, pick up that penny, head to the store, and plink that penny down and get something in exchange for it. Today, you can’t plink down a single penny for anything. You can’t even plink down 10 of these pennies or a dime and expect to get something today, with the cheapest things requiring 25 of these coins (or a single quarter). Not much luck if you need 25 of them to get a burst of sweetness.

If we did away with the penny, would anyone lose anything? That’s 5 seconds at Federal Minimum Wage, and about 2 seconds at my city’s minimum wage. It takes more time to reach down and pick up the penny than you’d earn working a minimum wage job, so arguments about ‘Oh, prices will go higher if we eliminate the penny’ ring hollow to me. There is functionally no difference between $7.99 and $8.00 pricewise. Even a hike of a $7.9 priced item to $8 isn’t a bunch of money. We’re almost to the point where you can’t buy something with a single dollar bill. The time for the hundredth of that dollar bill passed a LONG time ago.

Kooky answer to a real question.

I suspect reactionality would prefer that servers be paid like they’re paid in Europe and New Zealand and other places – a living wage without having to rely on the generosity of the customer. And that pay, of course, will be taxed, because taxes are the payment for your government services, and Europeans in particular tend to prefer to have good government services, unlike Americans.

Don’t forget conservatives started the Civil War to protect their access to unpaid labour in the form of people treated no better than animals. They may have swapped political parties between 1865 and 2025, but they REALLY want that free labour again!

Response for the two options this may be.

Poe Principle: Don’t do this. Don’t give them ideas, because they’ll take your idea and run with it. The shitheads on the other side don’t just believe in this crap, but they WANT to believe in this crap, because they are shitheads.

True Believer: Your god is a hateful god and not the God of Christianity. Buzz off now.

I see your whataboutism and respond with what your mother should have told you: Two wrongs don’t make a right. Does anything you said have anything to do with promising us the sun, moon, and stars and delivering more cashola for the moneyed class?

I prefer Dems to Reps, but man, you got your head so far up the Democratic Party’s ass with this bullshit you’re spewing here that you can taste what they had for lunch!

You completely missed the point, like the other commentor who dropped a similar load of excrement on my comment did. Let me spell it out for you. Don’t promise the sun, moon, and stars, when your plan is to put my face in the dirt for the corpos who actually pay your bills. Dem voters get tired of that shit.

Of course not. Don’t promise things you never intend on delivering on.

I agree with your take, but I’d like to add some context to it.

Dems constantly go on about the things they want to fix. Public Healthcare. Free College. Money out of politics. Clean air. Clean Water. Etc. But for all the promises they make, we got a Republican healthcare plan that didn’t even include a Public Option, college is more expensive than ever, money is rampant in politics, and all of this with a dose of increased cost of living from housing through food.

I can see grousing that “Yeah, I don’t like what the Shitgibbon is doing, but at least he’s doing what he promised to do!” I think Dems need to take notice here, but the question is: What will they do when the moneyed class starts yanking their chains? Because I am sure the moneyed class is perfectly happy with a fascist takeover of the USA.