I witnessed 5 police officers all hit a man on the ground with their tasers. Broad daylight.
Died on the scene of a heart attack. Apparently natural causes. The polices internal investigations found the police did no wrong, imagine that.
Unless you make enough money that you can regularly “donate” to the force, I suggest that you assume they are not there to help you and you protect yourself accordingly
They are thinking the got the customer by the balls because they’re a state sanctioned monopoly. They’re so big the CEO of Samsung has essentially the same power as the SK president.
Every major corp out of SK is a state sanctioned monopoly. The government tells Samsung “make washing machines now” and Samsung does.
I know it’s been widely overlooked to allow South Korea to economically develop after the armistice, cold war and all, but at some point the rest of the free trading world is going to have to hit them with tariffs to protect native, or critical industries.
Frankly I’m really tired of looking the other way for any reason. Every other day it’s a headline about how some government or multinational led the public on a 20 year gaslighting campaign. If I were to say, “hey did you hear that story about XXXY(any well known mega corp)?” Do you think I’d have a positive wholesome story to share? No. Because there never is. The structure of a corporation is set up to protect financiers from liability from the crimes theyre guaranteed to commit thru abusive, shortsighted, toxic business. It’s literally the fucking point. But we don’t have to accept that, and we don’t have to choke back and somehow keep down our sense of justice, or be passively complicit, which is to nueter your morality, your sense of self
Our individual actions do matter in this case. Like don’t buy shit off Temu, theyre using slave labor. Don’t endorse that. Don’t buy anything out of Dubai or Saudi Arabia, they, also, keep slaves. Don’t support slavery. Including wage slavery. Don’t do business with Israel until an non Zionist coalition is back in charge. Don’t buy anything Russian. Genocide is not an acceptable modern practice. It CAN’T be. Boycott Mississippi and Louisiana as well, since they like to let their prisoners die of treatable conditions and bury them in unmarked graves. That is ALSO a genocide. Don’t fucking fund crimes against humanity. This is kindergarten levels of sophistication.
And hopefully enough people will actually live their morals and gain seats of power, because we have to. Otherwise waves hands THIS.
Senators go for as little as $2000. I wish I were kidding.
I’m flattered. Thank you.
I told my wife if we ever decided on kids (which we won’t) I want to name the kid after my hero. She asked “who’s that?”.
“Mega man”
“What if it’s a girl?”
“We can call her Meg”
"Middle name?”
“No middle name. MegaBlake, that’s it.”
I’m wearing a mega man belt she bought me right now actually.🤓
Every single comment here is describing symptoms but not the cause.
Enshitification is the evolution to the final form, only possible after the company, thru merger/acquisition or stock manipulation (leveraged buy outs, acquiring controlling stake, shorting a company into insolvency, etc), has achieved a commanding monopoly.
Then it flexes it’s monopoly powers, the buttons fly off its shirt and the monster shows it’s true colors.
We have laws to prevent this. Lina Khan is the first FTC chair to start holding these companies to meaningful account in my lifetime (yea, Microsoft/netscape is exponentially smaller than todays issues). Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all need to be broken up into a thousand different companies, same as we did with AT&T. Uber, Angieslist, homeaglow, all the contractors pretending they’re just networking hubs (like some union hall) need to busted up and gigwork made to contend with employment law, which it can’t, because it’s all bad faith exploitation.
And for fucks sake we need to make the fine for white collar crime that extends state lines to necessitate the forfeiture of the entire C-suite’s and board of directors assets, both domestically and internationally, upon threat of seal team 6. Empty their bank accounts and leave them with nothing, like they regularly do to employees. They’re so fucking smart they can earn it all again, right? Right!? Corporations are the largest thief in the land, just in WAGE THEFT. Everything else they do that’s slimy is all BONUS. The 2nd largest thief in all the land? the fucking Police force. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, democracy doesn’t work in mental institutions. We don’t need to defund the police, we need to fire all of them and start over with transparency. If casino employees can be video taped all day, so can cops. Fuck em.
What America truly needs is another Teddy Roosevelt. We need to revive the Progressive party with the Bull Moose as the symbol. Protect the environment, protect the family by protecting the workers, end legal loopholes and trustbust the 1% back down into the 10%.
And if we don’t? The path ahead is obvious, I for one, don’t want to live in Blade Runner, but that’s where we’re going until we stop fucking around and right ship.
Who was that…I remember he had a weird nickname or something. Something like …Moose…? Moose Ali Nee?
Oh I’m with you, believe me. Theres some great building tech now, things like aircrete and the hundred variations and uses of lime. And if course just caluz it’s old doesn’t mean better, there was definitely a gradient to build quality back then, same as today.
We can look at churches in Uppsala that were built with pine and have stood for 1000 years…in Sweden…and it’s clear we’re missing something in our knowledge today that they had (it was their harvesting practices, btw, fucking germ theory levels of brilliance). Or how the Japanese have relied on coppacing for lumber for 500 years and that’s why Japan still HAS trees and didn’t go all Rapanui/Easter Island. The Amish and green wood timber framing is another example - practices that take the future into account. It’s the planting of trees who’s shade you’ll never sit in.
It’s easy, and incorrect, to point at history and say it was ALL better then, because only the cream of the crip has survived. Survivorship bias, clear as day. Of course we can build with the same mindset today - we just DON’T.
For a substantial group of people building their own home, to their own standards, towards sustainability or fingerprint reduction is their main driving goal. Earthships are an attempt. Buckminster Fuller made his entire career building off such ideas. Fuck I want to live in a geodesic dome SOOO BAD. Only have to deal with rain when I have to brave society. (I figure where the segments meet I can channel the rain to irrigation channels for the foliage and trees in the inner biodome…and then I’m raising free range sugar gliders.)
I’m in the middle of building my redoubt now. Everything by hand, it’s tedious, requires a ton of knowledge and physically taxing, but it also screams of character, uniqueness and craftiness. I take a lot of fun making things intuitively crafty if you know, but invisable if you dont know. Microprocessors can be a part of that (Im a huge electromagnetism fanboy, I’ve spun up my own generators from magnet wire for custom windmills, and I’m debating doing it again for some microhydro but currently leaning stepper moters), hidden magnetic locks are fun. shit my firearm safe is a Rube-Goldman-machines worth of steps to open, and that’s if you even noticed it was there.
I love the new tech. Don’t get me wrong. Maybe it’s that I’m a xennial, and that I had an analog youth, idk. I own all the power tools - I also own the hand tool analog version and know how to use them. I’ve always maintained the position that I had to level up into power tools. Electric planers save a SHITTON of time but if I can’t plane by hand…then it’s just a crutch. I don’t even want to get into metal working by hand, I’ve done it, i prefer metal to wood so that entire attitude applied to metal before wood.
Anyway. I think we have more in common here than not, lol.
Timber framing, and all Amish framing, is actually done with green wood. Attention is paid to grain of the beams and they are put up so as the wood dries and ages it’ll twist into itself making a more cohesive unit.
Sure it makes remodeling a bitch, but plum straight and true were never part of a remodelers lexicon to begin with.
Oh man, the quest for plum straight and true. Rick was well within his right to wipe Morty’s brain of it. It was probably the single greatest act of compassion we’ve seen him do. I wish he’d wipe mine.
New houses are fucking garbage, what are you talking about? You aren’t from the trades, clearly.
The only thing new houses have on old - speaking in generalizations - is a warranty - which is really what’s at issue here. And as it plays out, it’s super fucked up
The main number one metric for housing is livability. New houses are all glue and wood shavings. Literally what’s swept up after tree delamination for plywood. I’ve seen it. I’ve swept it up. I don’t even want to know the VOC release from OSB over time. If there’s ANY traceable amount (and of course there is) then the fact that I have to spend thousands putting in a RADON bypass cuz the ground wants to kill me for standing on it now yet swimming pools of profits from industry remain untouched and not held responsible. Yea…no. Old walls are best walls. Gypsum is nice but plaster isn’t out of reach. Old framing is best framing. Old wood floors can be found inches thick, no nailing. Carpet? Vinyl? Linoleum is only the best…NOFX song…arguably…Gen Z is suuuuper good. And Eat the Meek, New Boobs, Kill all the White Men, Creeping Out Sara, Idiots are Taking Over. Fuck. NOFX is just best, everything, really. Fat Mike seems like a cool ass dude to hang out with.
Um. Back on it…
PEX cannot be good for you, and even if not bad - yet - it’s not going to kill microbes like copper piping will - “upgrade” your pipes back to copper people, as a matter.of health). +1 old home
Hmm…Hardy board, that’s a modern win. Except it dulls your carbide immediately. That shits awesome for siding and water containment. +1 new homes
Modern windows are better. Without question.
Modern wiring wins over obvs.
Whatever. The WARRENTY. Don’t be the second owner of a new house. Do. Not. Do. It. Motherfucking chosen class gets zero percent interest rates and carried into new development, just to move 7 years later right before the “25yr” roof mysteriously needs to be replaced at 10years, just outside it’s warranty. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this. 1st owners have no costs going into house. 2nd owners, night shift, if you will, gets caught out, besides paying more for the house than the original owners did almost a decade ago, are going to have to absorb that extra 50k in repairs, essentially insuring 2nd owners NEVER rise above their position. Modern red-lining. Fuck bankers. Usury guarantees you’re going to hell. Fuck old money. Fuck everything -lord. Put feudalism back down, THAT SHIT IS BAD. The media only serves to persuade you of an opinion the owning class wants you to have without informing you of opposing opinions.
Did you know there are more houses in the UK and USA to the population than ever before? We’ve never had MORE housing…and yet…crisis…? That doesn’t make NeoLiberal sense…I was told…
Lies. You were told lies.
The amount of housing, that’s true. Thatcher and Reagen really changed the game tho. If you were born past 1980, your future was already sacrificed before the better part of you hit your parents sheets.
Before Thatcher less than 10% of housing in the UK was rented. It was considered one of the most successful postwar decisions, to promote security and autonomy in the citizenry…and now? The housing crisis is literally at the heart of every single crisis the western world is having, the entire world over. It’s vampiric. Cannabalizing the economy and lowering GDP for NO FUCKING REASON.
I am not against rentals - AFTER everyone has been housed. Let people have vacation homes, sure. Shit. My grandfather put 3 kids thru school, golfed thrice a week, stay at home wife, two car garage, bought his kids cars, my father raced motocross semi pro (thousands of trophies - that probably cost a house in itself) and was still able to buy a vacation home off his sole income (just so you don’t lose sight in how much economic freedom neoliberalism has stolen from the working class). I’m also not against private insurance - as Cadillac insurance. Capitalists have proven, beyond a rational doubt, that if they’re allowed monopoly to provide a neccesity (by that I mean, only private sector agents) than the rest of us are steadily more and more fucked. This is exemplified in the Simpsons. Homer went from bumbling idiot to upper middle class. Nothing about them changed, it’s just every year it gets harder. 2020 was the easiest year of the decade - bank on that - and that’s pretty fucking harrowing if you ask me.
Private farming…who has an issue against the farmer? No one. People have issues with being fleeced. See Netflix 10 years ago to the streaming shit cacophony today. Yar me matey, seems like some things are back in fashion. If farmers decide to fleece on a starving population, I won’t be sympathetic when the farmers are served up with their wheat. Treat people with respect. It’s fundamental to social cohesion. Exploitation is not.
My point, ultimately, is that people are people and people are entirely predictable. Our problems are manufactured by greedy people in power who’ve been using mass media to propagandized obedience while they return wealth to preplague levels of serfdom. And they e overplayed their hand, and they know it, everyone knows it - that’s why everyone’s just waiting for when the violence to start. Not if, when. People, again, are entirely predictable. Frankly, imo, we’ll be much better off when notions of social engineering and social darwinism go the same way route as phrenology.
The light can be tucked away into the HVAC. The light never needs to hit anyone. You got central heating/cooling? One light, whole building. It’s almost criminal this isn’t common.
deleted by creator
Currently called gen Alpha
There’s some artistic rhetoric in there but at the heart of it im saying people today, despite our technical advances, aren’t any different than people medieval. Keep in mind, I’m talking as if I’m yapping at my boys here, this ain’t for publication or speech writing. That being said, I’m feeling a little lyrical, I’m sure this’ll be long.
We done fucked up. For some of us, all our fancy tech has geniunely given a utopia. But all that fancy tech also shoved that shit in the rest our faces making sure we know we’ll never get to play with it to. Every week its some new amazing discovery but outside, for the majority of us, it’s perpetual 1999. This is where someone chimes in with “technically” stats about most peaceful time in history, etc etc. I’ll even agree with the stats, but i know, hopefully you know too, that statistics thrown up ≠ persuasive argument.
I’ve heard the recession is over since 2008. Now, 16 years later and I still haven’t seen this improvement the talking heads prattle on about. What little recovery anyone of us workers had managed to squirrel away the pandemic took. I know one couple who is better off now than they were 16 years ago. Showing me statistics otherwise my observed existence isn’t going to convince me I’m wrong, it’s going to make me think you 1. Aren’t listening to me, and 2. Would rather steamroll me with party lines and talking points. 100% would not work. Im still convinced that the recession, for at least 75% of Americans never ended, and the unprecedented success of Black Rock, Amazon, and that grifter Musk, and the rest of the lawless, Epstein clas, threw every metric out the window. Or just blurred enough of the acronyms to hammer a couple home as evidence even tho …in .no one sees it anywhere.
But y’know, media, ministry of truth, 2+2=5. Neoliberalism lies thru its teeth.
Example: We have a dept of defense but we haven’t fought a defensive war since 1865, save for 2 moments in 1941. We are historically the warring party, the attackers.
That point aside, my main point is the heavy, unironical use of euphemism when everyone and their mail-order-mother-in-law knows their playing fast and loose…but he who controls the present controls the past. Words matter. There’s still a public record. There is still what we indoctrina…/teach our next generation. That’s why those sick GOP fucksticks fetishize children…s education. I joke but the only two things a R cares about in a school are what myth of our history are we selling and what set of private parts the kids have.
Now I don’t know any pedo’s, but for how much the right talks about children’s nethers and their concern for where 2 (or more) consensual adults park their bits, I don’t know which group, far right fascista faggotry or literal chimo’s, which of whom is more consumed by other people’s bits than the other, and that’s frankly frightening.
There’s the media line, the line of record. Then there’s testimony by those actually living it. Bro, I don’t know a single parent that’s not on food stamps. I’m 42. I know hundreds and hundreds of parents. Not. One. Our failures as a society, and the general mood towards that is a one of the most important statistics we have, because it measures the general zeitgeist of resentment: income inequality. NeoLiberal policy has created our society, these conditions aren’t the result of unforseen social theory. Neoliberalism itself is a rather interesting sparring partner with in² ($≠…idk) since NL requires almost maxing out the propaganda and police state specs. Theyve already sustained far longer than the French Monarchy did. Income was easier to acquire before and during the French revolution, and homes were easier to purchase during the great depression.
School teaches us that, generally, we are at the end of history, which is NeoLiberal doublespeak to dissuade looking elsewhere for answers. But I’ve the mind that the truth doesn’t need to hide away. If capitalism were so secure, why do poli sci grads leave uni without reading Das Kapital? You cant gloss over Marx when talking poli sci.
They’ll juviophobe every generation to distract. Millennials killed the funeral (can’t afford any fun :( ), GenZ can’t think in color. Blah blah. Gay, straight, fuzzy, chimera’s, whatever. It’s all bullshit
We have the same problems today we had a hundred years ago. An entire century of human development wasted. For what? So the same lazy fucking 100 families can continue never working?
You got another way of seeing that? Cuz that’s my take on our entire planet and I find it extremely wanting. I couldn’t plead a defense to some galactic court, I’d just go listen to Gogon poetry.
So stats can make a narrative, but if no one is actually living that narrative, it’s not an if, it’s a when. Democrats, always, ALWAYS, framed as it’s them or ANARCHY, sell us a narrative we all know is bullshit.
Some people are tired of eating it. And I can’t blame them. I am not paid by the DNC, I am not doing their work for them. And if I’m being honest, anarchy sounds more appealing then perpetual 1999.
Idk how true that is, tho it sounds like the exact kind of thing that results from Democrats not thinking about policy downstream and just rubber stamping lobbyist bullshit, and then being blaisé about it when called out. Dems are conciliatory, reactionary with policy. They’ll bend whichever way keeps them in power.
That being said if that kind of shit thought it could fly in my state I’d go pay some homie hectors from in front of home depot to throw a dozen molotovs each at town hall, the building the police union is in and the courthouses. Bonuses for the guys that actually get a structure fire roaring.
When all the avenues to redress are jammed up to the point of nonfunctioning, when, by the design of those currently winning, using the protections of our systems likely means bankruptcy; justice delayed IS justice denied
A society with no regard towards justice will fall by the hands, rightfully, of those that do.
Lessons from history show that those that enabled, protected or profiteered from that cancerous society will be seen to have aquires that cancer too.
For all our advanced tech, socially we’re still medieval; societies medicine hasn’t moved beyond the humors…and blood letting
Fuck, North of Seattle off, iirc, 238th and 99, there was an Albertsons and a Safeway kiddie corner to each other, and some brilliant person decided what was best for each store was to switch locations, with each other. These are the big brains here, people, better look out!
I hope whomever initiated that set in motion an unstoppable Rube Goldman chain of events on his way out after telling the board of executives to fuck themselves off a cliff, and if they’re not the case, then I hope they physically join the rest at the bottom of our metaphorical cliff
We have a living constitution, a living body of law. Current laws have been bought and paid for, just like judges, representatives, senators…
The deviation from where we started to where we are was a process of the living and still is for today’s legislators, or more accurately, today’s lobbyists who actually craft the laws and have them at the rest in case the Overton window moves to the point they’re feasible.
2008 financial crisis ripped the last vaneer off.
The rich won’t be allowed to lose. The whole system is bullshit. You can do everything right, get sick cuz fuknature, have to sell everything off for medicine and still die, younger than you should, in debt and penniless. It’s not even necessary, the Cruelty is the point. That’s capitalism. It’s about control, and capitalists need to be looked at like they have a mental illness. Most our jobs are bullshit and don’t matter. The national debt doesn’t matter. Money isn’t real, it’s a vehicle for resource allocation, not a store of value, but try getting someone not ready to hear that to even think about our social systems as something mutable and not organic or ordained. Nope. Society was designed, by people, and it’s working exactly as it’s intended, which is, fucking great for them and fuck everyone else.
At the end of the day, your physical body has had just one goal. Survive. Everything I have to do to achieve that end is justified by existence itself. Building a system that puts itself in the way of people simply surviving is building a system to fail. When it comes to politics, and by that I mean, do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-it-doesn’t-hurt-someone-else and then policies, and for policy I just ask “is this the best we can do?”
I don’t think I see the best we can do anywhere.
I keep seeing report after report that Gen Z keeps falling for internet scams at an alarmingly high rate
…which, I mean, idk, maaaybe?
Media literacy and scam discernment, I feel like we as millennials grew up alongside the rise of disinformation and the greater Enshitification of the internet, like this is our wheelhouse.
I remember icq, yahoo chat rooms, Napster and limewire, playing MUDS and ADOM, then digg, myspace. I remember when the Internet was fun, now, it’s just advertisers. I quit Facebook 7 years ago. I quit reddit with the API dick punch. I’ve been advertised to so much in my life that if I see a movie trailer it makes me not want to see it.
The internet can be great. Getting knowledge off it is amazing. I personal feel like the library of Congress should be made available online for free and all this knowledge thats hiding behind pay gates needs to be visited by the freedom fairy. I hope I can help facilitate this in my lifetime.
With media, I can only speak for myself, but I quit watching news in 2008. Ill read my news and not have some talking head attempt to emotionally manipulate me while they leave out key facts that don’t fit their narrative, thanks. Televised news has been more detrimental to us as a whole, imo.
My bullshit meter is simple. If whom or whatever is saying something that makes it an us vs them issue, dividing the people up, then they’re wrong. Almost universally. If your answer is only found down around the fallen, you aren’t bringing an answer, yr bringing an excuse to violence.
Real leadership, real progress, lifts up those it encounters. The rising tide is supposed to lift all ships. Cept in this dystopic reality, motherfuckers chained everyone’s ships to the dock and the rising tide just overcame and sank them. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, until the poor get even.
I’m dismayed we have to keep repeating this pattern. America had the same problems 100 years ago. We’ve had an entire century to do something about it, but fucking NOPE. An entire century wasted in my opinion. Better tech is cool, but if it doesn’t improve the lives of us all, than it fails the reasoning for tools existing in the first place, which is to relieve society if the many necessary hours of labor.
If you plan on actually living in your house, and not pulling out any equity, property value rising had a negative effect on you in that your taxes rise.
For most people adding a couple hundred to a few thousand dollar bill on them - for effectively no reason - is a big deal. Some consider it a hostile action, and I’m in no position to argue them.
I try not to drink calories at all, but if I do, it’s considered part of the meal.
I strongly recommend this, as strongly as reading the news everyday. Don’t watch or listen to it, READ it. It makes you conscious of your participation, makes it easier to remember, and over time, will sharpen your critical thinking skills
If you’ve ever thought ‘holy fuck some people are dumb’, well, if they read the news on the reg, they’d be less and less dumb, everyday.