On the bright side, while they are marching their flags around I bet domestic violence and police brutality goes down to nearly 0.

I disagree with your post fundamentally. You say nothing happens and no one does anything, but I argue people are actively and willfully supporting and enabling and maintaining the status quo that leads to all these abominations and horrible disasters.

It isn’t apathy. It’s willful weaponized evil and ignorance and corruption and greed and selfishness and on and on. It’s an entire political party/movement that celebrates ignorance and hate and racism and lies and fear and pure evil.

Wait. Is chronic Lyme not actually a thing? There are quite a few long/chronic types of things I’m aware of that are quite real, but also still not super well understood. I assumed Lyme was in there with those. Real, but more of a side-side-effect of a disease that breaks something in weird ways for different people.

I hate fascism, but I hate GOO Fascism even more!

Legend speaks of an ancient manual that held the knowledge of such incredible feats as this. None I know of have ever ventured there and returned. Best to leave the ancient forbidden arcane knowledge at rest and not disturb the techno spirits.

Somehow, Darth Turtle has returned.

I yearn to live in the mines.

He was flying the towers!

Whoa! That is a big deal if true! Source? Why isn’t anyone investigating this suspicious detail!?!?!?

Everyone complains about my rooster, but no one complains about our neighbor that goes out into his back yard and just screams “Hayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy” at 3 am every night.

I memorized the whole thing in school. I’ve forgotten parts, but it really has stuck with me since. But it took a decade or so before the real true impact of it hit home.

Like, as a teen I understand it, King built a statue, was a powerful proud king, had everything, blah blah, now it’s all but gone and only pieces of a statue even remain.

But, the impact of it hit as an adult.

Not even the greatest of kings or warriors or sages can escape the slow erosion of time and sand and all things crumble to dust.

It’s both depressing and empty feeling, but also freeing in a way. Optimistic Nihilism I guess? It’s all going to be dust one day, so be nice and have fun and be whimsical and silly and do what you want.

It does at least give me comfort that even the big evil rulers of our age will one day be long forgotten and but a crumbled relic and some lines in a rotting history book that no one bothers to read anymore.

A wall is but a bridge built wrongly.

Love Weird Al Hate weird AI

My parents are life-long Republicans. Triple Trumpers. They aren’t the flag waving MAGAs or anything insane, they just fully believe all the decades of propaganda like “vote R if you believe in freedom and law and order and the working man. And Democrats are all insane evil people that think schools should have litter boxes in class.” or whatever the shit all is.

I’m very Leftist or Progressive or whatever you wanna call me.

It is SO DAMN FRUSTRATING talking to them about anything at all that is even tangentially related to a hot political take. You can visibly observe the “Thought Stopping Cliche” kicking in and any further discussion is over.

It really is the hypocrisy. You question things like “pro life” and how statistically more women and babies die due to medical neglect and very preventable issues with abortion being demonized and a legal issue. If you keep pushing you eventually hit the wall of the hypocrisy where they really don’t care about all the deaths because “it’s just wrong and if people die it’s their fault” as if people are lining up to get medical abortions for funzies.

And on and on. You point out the facts and statistics of how detrimental a conservative policy is and it’s always met with victim blaming, whataboutism, straw men and all the other cliches.

That, among all the other things, and just paying attention and giving a damn about other people pushed me further and further left.

I know what it meant, but for a few seconds I imagined McDonald’s employees working from home to cook burgers and then what? How does the customer get their burger? I’m all for WFH, but maybe that one isn’t quite there yet.

That part. Exactly. We pay for estimated value, they should.

1 trillion net worth (even if all made up) should pay the taxes on that full amount just like we do.

If I earn 100k dollars, half that goes to taxes. How come Peelon can earn 100billion and gets all the benefits thereof and doesn’t pay half in taxes?

In theory 50k from my taxes should be in the tax bank and 50 billion from his. Instead I payed 50k and he paid maybe 5k.

Hehe. A rawr. Hehehe. Rawwwr.

Would that be the $ cap of what you can contribute each year? I think it is like $5k per year now maybe? Something like that. I think it went up recently. 7k?

I’m curious as to how or why that would actually help though, because I think you can open multiple 401ks, right? So you could just open 10 of them.

But yes, any MATH that makes it so you can’t just exploit the hell out of the system by virtue of just having lots of money already.

The big issue is that there are tons of loopholes and exploitable things in all our systems (many are intentionally put in for the rich to use). Whatever laws or regulations or systems you don’t has to be fair and all that.

One glaring issue is that the billionaire class is so wealthy they aren’t even playing the same game as us anymore. They don’t pay taxes because they can stop “earning income” in the traditional sense and it’s all sorts of leveraged forecast market value stock and asset bullshit. I mean, “money” is made up too, but they are outside “money” and deal with “theoretical money” and thus escape all forms of taxes and fair share stuff.

I’ve always wondered if the answer is doing away with “income tax” entirely (it’s a racket anyway) and having a much higher “sales tax” on everything.

Let them have billions, but they pay the tax when they buy something like the rest of us do.

I dunno. I’m tired of overthinking it. Maybe the better option is to eat them.

It could maybe be written so it counts employees, part time and full, salary and hourly, contractors and even the contract itself, so you can’t just fire the employees, make them contractors. And even clauses where you can’t just give your buddy a no-bid contract for 14.7million (random number completely out of the air) for a shitty half-assed job nowhere near that price. (I don’t know for sure, I don’t do contract work for theoretical contracts like in my completely made up example.)

Same with shareholders and dividends and bonuses and stock and bonds and crypto and any other such bs. Any and every way a company could pay someone for any product or service. Whatever that max and min are. Or the average or something. Use that to cap the max or the max to force the min, whatever.

That and I feel like it should also have some tie to each business. Like the top salary+benefits in your company can only be 10x the lowest or some ratio. 1,000,000,000 : 1 is WILD that we all just keep going along with that and it’s like, well yeah, the CEO works harder than you so he earns more.

He works a MILLION times harder than me? He works a BILLION times harder than me? Are you sure about that!? By what metrics?