You don’t necessarily need more money, just more flow. Imagine 20 people sitting in a circle, each with a colored stone in their left hand, and $20 in their right. Everyone gives the $20 to the person on the right, and takes the colored stone. Everyone gets the stone they wanted, and everyone paid with $20. Now imagine only one person has a $20… the same exchange happens, but it goes sequentially.

Now, and I’m not advocating the removal of all fat-cats and big-wigs and promoting a cookbook here, but where things get really fucked up is you have businesses and governments inserting themselves as the intermediary in every one of those exchanges, and siphoning a little for themselves. If, in our example, the stone costs $10, and a business siphons $0.55 from each exchange, it ends up with $11, and everyone else is now at $19.45. Repeat until the business has $209, and everyone else is at $9.55… It gets even worse if the exchange is sequential, where only $20 exists to begin with. Ideally you would have a wise government who controls the money taxing and managing the overall picture, but complicated doesn’t begin to describe it. We’ve made everyone start equal in our example, and all have the exact same exchange. You can expand with different skills and services and products as you want, like imagining a coal miner and a farmer trying to be in the same circle with an oil worker and shrimp fisher.

I’m just bullshitting here, but I’d bet the US is sitting somewhere around the $11-12 mark right now. More and more people are feeling the squeeze as the companies get closer to having all the power simply by having the resources to get what they want while the people can’t afford it.

That’s the big issue in my area. The city and it’s lovely corporate-sucking politicians keep putting out ‘information’ about the city being “X% developed!” The only thing being developed is more strip malls and high cost houses. Everything green and natural is disappearing. It’s all single-family sprawl, with only a few super-high luxury apartments scattered about and maybe 2-3 apartment buildings that anyone on a lower budget could afford. The politicians get their greedy fingers into higher tax revenues, the developing/building corporations sit back and suck up investor money, and investors get to suck up their profits because housing is relatively scarce and the cost for properties shoots through the roof.

We tried to put on a movie or another show exactly twice and it promptly got switched back.

That’s the irritating part for me. Every time I visit a certain segment of the family, it’s as if I was stepping into 1984 with the big brother screens, except that they must be on all the time. I was forced into it during the missing MH370 news. They blatantly, incessantly push fear, and it hooks the idiots into believing if they aren’t watching 24/7 that they’re going to miss the apocalypse.

Probably trying to shift the conversation topic from ‘she endorsed harris’ by giving fresh new gossip for people to give to each other. Old gossip just isn’t kosher.

The sad part is, for much of the audience it will work.

So… as someone who doesn’t know anything about the olympic performance or otherwise, what’s going on here? Was her performance strange compared to normal break dancing? Did they score the dancers using some arcane formula that she happened to hit every highlight of, without regard to whether it looked good or was entertaining?

Just from my experience with family members, fox news is on the tv as much or more than newsmax.

I’ll admit I had not heard anything about this until today. I know there has been a sign up in my city with something about a trump train (and clearly in support of whatever it was) and had been ignoring the sign just like I do everything else related to that idiot.

I have been so disappointed that the razor blade curve has turned out to not be true.

Which is hit or miss. I’ve been in those CE courses and seminars, and they range from informative and exciting to literal time-wasting. An example: What doctor needs to care about log-rolling patients and backboarding them? That’s something a firefighter or EMT does.

I think the article said it was only found out because police happened across the files during an investigation of something else (namely, the husband trying to take upskirt photos of women in public).

Or that fungus that makes the snails look like they’ve simultaneously become interested in the rave scene and inflation.

I have no doubt that the USA has fingers in the pie of public sentiments elsewhere.

Russia has learned the power of Japan.

Depending on where you are, local clubs probably abound. Anything outdoors is going to be a good start, because they have a vested interest in you coming back to the club to keep it going. All clubs will, but outdoors ones will not want to add any difficulties that might drive off the next generation in their club.

Hiking, running, rowing, biking, skydiving*, geocaching, gardening, birdwatching, fishing (rare, but they’re there!), sailing* (used windsurfers and small sailboats can be less than $1k; not great, but an option), motorcycles*, monowheels, fixer cars, mountain biking, sports (ultimate frisbee, pickleball, soccer, outdoor volleyball, basketball, baseball; all will probably have young adults in organized ways), dancing [don’t discount this one! Especially if you can find a swing club nearby, you will have tons of fun], mud runs, rock climbing*, bodybuilding…

Man, I can’t even think of all the clubs/hobbies I’ve briefly talked to people about. You can definitely find something out there that you’ll enjoy, but you may have to try a loooot. Don’t give up hope.

*these are probably a bigger investment or money sink than the others, either requiring gear, a significant training period, or ongoing costs for travel/maintenance

One, they are much better on gas use. So less energy in general to move them.

Two, they are much lighter, which as we are discovering with electric vehicles, matters a great deal in how horrible the tire wear is (and remember that 28% of microplastics in the environment come from car tire degradation alone!).

Three, for traffic purposes, they are much, much better. They are smaller, so recall that picture that floats around of how much space 100 passengers takes up. They aren’t near the train/bus level, but are closer to the bicycle portion of the picture than the cars. It becomes even better if they are scooters compared to motorcycles (scooters are generally even lighter and have smaller engines with better gas usage). I always hear the stat thrown around that if 25% of individuals switched to motorcycles, modern traffic jams in cities (in America, I guess, where I hear it uttered) would nearly disappear.

I think you nailed it. The majority of the northern portion of alaska is going to be oil/gas workers, lumberjacks, and perhaps researchers and native tribes. All of those probably have company barracks, cabins, or if there is a ‘town’ it’s going to be a few hundred yards wide. For the towns, it’s due to the winter, when you almost need to be close to other people in case something goes wrong, because significant help is a long way away in distance and time.

There’s a line in the story about her suffering through this for 10 years. It’s horrific to consider.

2011 through 2020… That is both frightening in its length and disturbing that he was able to get (invite) that many men to do this and it was never discovered.

Try vesktop. Maybe that will help.

Is that the crap that has the Ice pop flavor? The people I know at a local sports group drink it like it’s liquefied candy at halloween. These folks range from middle-aged to retirees. The effects of its advertising in my parents’ age group are apparent and it is just as insidious as in the young children.