…what change did Occupy effect?

the difference being private property and public property. only one of those is considered sacred

Gen-X is based? Really?

rebellion is when you listen to music your mom doesn’t like and also caring about things is gay

tying it to income means in a few decades inflation just shrinks the number of people who can actually benefit

If you own one residential property and also live in it, no taxes on that. Multiple properties? That’s taxes. Unfortunately, most primary education is funded by property tax, so you’d have to change how that works (and maybe actually pay teachers while your at it). Fortunately, none of this has any chance of ever getting implemented.

also you can walk into basically any bank and ask for a roll of quaters

Woo! Let’s make this artificial biome that much more inhospitable for the very creatures that build and live in it!

We must imagine Sisyphus fucking miserable! Ants in an anthill made of broken glass and depleted lion batteries!

When google searches for “is Biden still running” spike on election day, it’s kinda hard to swallow “racist and misogynist” as the reason.

Maybe the electorate really is, but I think we should wait for an election where they don’t run a shambling corpse for the first half, belatedly realize that mistake only when it’s completely undeniable to anyone vaguely paying attention, and forcefully swap him out for the VP that tells union reps to fuck off and goes on television to say “I won’t do anything different from the shambling corpse”

this comment makes me wish for a Carrington Event in the 21st century

The people who are getting real mad over Republican voters don’t really care that Rs and Ds have the same foreign policy. The frontier of empire is coming home, but acknowledging that would mean acknowledging we export suffering.

eh, there’s a real trend here, but it’s not an apocalypse

and it’s not all of so-called “western society”. It’s mostly just decline in the US. Think of it like Britain.

Not long ago, they were at the top of the pile. Richest nation in the world, so much land the sun literally never set. But empire is an organism. It grows, it thrives for a bit, it declines. And it’s not like Britain just disappeared from the globe. They still exist. They’re just also significantly less important.

that’s a good point

I wonder what would happen if the Democrats tried to activate those chronic non-voters, rather than trying to flip those moderate republicans i keep being told are real

Remember, the most constructive thing you can do is get mad at other, equally powerless people like yourself! This is how political change happens.

Yeah, duh. Of course he’s worse on this.

But it’s silly to act like “His version of the genocide is worse than our version of the genocide” is anything but a fucking exhausting and demoralizing conversation

Biden’s polling low, the voters want things do be different… huh, better campaign on doing nothing different! What? They’re saying we’re doing a genocide? Well, better point out that Trump is gonna do a worse genocide!

That’ll be a great message, exactly the sort of thing that makes people excited to vote…

One of Biden’s last acts this month was to approve another few billion for Israel, and Harris said repeatedly she wasn’t gonna do anything different from Biden’s admin. It wasn’t gonna be better for those kids if she won.

you can get 100x gains by optimizing your code rather than throwing endless compute at your model

woah, that sounds dangerously close to saying this is all just developing computer software. Don’t you know we’re trying to build God???

It’s easier to sell people on the idea of a new technology or system that doesn’t have any historical precedent. All you have to do is list the potential upsides.

Something like a school or a workplace training programme, those are known quantities. There’s a whole bunch of historical and currently-existing projects anyone can look at to gauge the cost. Your pitch has to be somewhat realistic compared to those, or it’s gonna sound really suspect.

There’s not really one clean cut definition of fascism, mostly a lot of “I know it when I see it”

That being said, one definition I find kinda useful is; “Fascism is what we call it when an imperial power begins applying colonial policies to itself; the frontier comes home.” Germany had already been organizing concentration camps in northern Africa years before they started rounding up Jewish people. As a colonial power, Germany always had fascist policies, they were just directed outward.

By this metric, it’s hard not to see the US as a fascist power for… most of the latter half of the twentieth century? Obviously, outright colonization isn’t the standard anymore. It’s mostly mediated through international businesses, propped up by the occasional secretly-funded coup or even an outright military invasion. Those of us living within the official boarders of the US have just been privileged enough to not have to live with the negative consequences.

I’m not saying we need to sing them sweet nothings.

The democrats, as they stand, don’t offer much beyond maintaining the status quo. You can sing people’s praises or chastise them, but if you’re not offering any actual material improvements, then it doesn’t really matter what you say.

People said the same thing about not having kings