The risk of dying on a train doesn’t increase based on the length, but crossing a busy intersection becomes exponentially more deadly the more lanes there are

Jesus. It is only safe to cross a single 3m lane at a time and this is 6 lanes wide!!!
The risk grows exponentially so instead of being 6x as dangerous, it is closer to 64x more dangerous

Driving is inherently stressful. Hell, merely being around cars is proven to negatively impact your health: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/newsroom/editorial/are-you-noticing-the-harmful-noise

Worse, too often these laws are selectively enforced only when cops are looking for an excuse to profile minorities and poorer drivers.

I would fully agree that confronting a lunatic face to face is dangerous, but the chances of getting shot for driving slow is next to zero.

I believe there are three reasons our broken two party system stagnates and rots:

1. Our slavery founders intended for our system to be a plutocratic republic that would resist change, not a democracy

2. The purpose of every state is to maintain order which requires preserving itself

3. Fixing our system would require our politicians to vote against their own interests, to risk their own power and status… This goes against every ideal that capitalists believe in. Capitalists believe that as long as they follow the rules, they are entitled to everything they can take. The fact that the rules were written by the rich to favor the rich is of no concern to them.

Aye, too true. Trump was the greater evil, but it is hard to see the US as being a democracy when our only two choices were genocide + an aggressive regression to oligarchy VS genocide + a slower LGBT-friendly regression to oligarchy,

The bus analogy would have been better if the only two choices were 1. to run over a bunch of poor brown kids (Israel’s genocide) and being pissed on by billionaires before driving off a cliff OR 2. run over slightly fewer brown kids while being given moldy bread to eat.

If liberal democrats truly believed in democracy than they would fight to give us a multiparty system where people don’t have to vote for genocide just to prevent a more evil tyrant from taking power.

Unfortunately, we live in a post-truth society where the vast majority of people have traded the pursuit of truth for the comfort of confirmation bias.

And the last 6 months have shown us that the stock market is mostly just vibes and manipulation rather than being grounded in facts and reality.

I am just mad that free trade is only allowed when it benefits the rich, but the moment the Chinese produce a very affordable EV that would help millions of Americans while helping us fight climate change, suddenly we aren’t allowed to buy it because our neo-feudal oligarchs can’t take a cut for themselves…

Free trade is a farce and our entire system is rotten.

The root failure of our political systems is allowing money to buy political representation. Once money can buy political influence then the system will inevitably be hijacked and corrupted to serve money over people

Corporations did this, and everyone just went with it.

Not true, a socialist movement was on the rise in the US but then the government started abducting and arresting anyone who had any ties to socialism from Truman to McCarthy.

The government has been very clear that any real threat to zombie consumerism/ capitalism will quickly be snuffed out through state sanctioned violence.

Also, the US bombed the fuck out of every country that tried to resist being taken over by western corporations. “The Jakarta Method” is a very interesting read on the untaught atrocities of the US government that forced the world down the path it went down.

As a kid, I thought of the natives as being simple and child like… But now I see western expansion into NA as being like the orcs tearing down trees from the Two Towers.

Remember when Fox News called workers “dogs” that need to be starved to make us obedient? Never forget, never forgive

A yank tank / wank tank is any SUV or pickup that is larger than the tanks we used to beat the Nazis (not joking)

Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

Markets do not equal capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.

Sadly, in the US, we can’t do that because NIMBYs tie everything up in the courts until projects go bankrupt and get abandoned.

Maybe in Europe, but in the US At-will employment means that you can be fired at any moment without cause, without warning and without severance.

It is unusual and I don’t like it, but I wouldn’t say it is bad. If I liked the person I would probably come to like the name.