I always point out that the capitalist robber barons profit directly from having a pre-born, pre-literate workforce pool, they just want it for free.

Part of their whole socialism for costs capitalism for profits thing.

I say this as a now old person at 40, that’s hypocritical bullshit as far as policy goes, but that’s humans for you.

Spent 10 years driving around in a city with a lot of retirement communities setting up home medical equipment. Was a daily blight for me.

Should be every 2 years past age 60 if you want to keep your license.

Sorry, for every 20 year old doing 90, there’s ten seniors wobbling between 2 lanes in a giant SUV intentionally purchased to protect them from the accidents their diminished capacity will cause, about to do a double lane change in the opposite direction of their blinker that’s been on since they left their driveway.

Ive always found it bonkers that young drivers with the sharpest reflexes are punished to the maximum from insurance to rental car rates, as they should, while no one dares punitive action against people who literally lack the faculties to drive safely if they wanted to and incur the wrath of AARP and the like. But those necrotic seniors make the rules, sadly. They can cause accidents with abandon, but some thing’s gotta be done about those young maniacs on the road driving 10 over the speed Limit as you drive 30 under it with white, arthritic knuckles on the steering wheel for dear life, calling your impromptu roadblock “safe.”

Of course we would we’d just have more!

And buy really expensive ketchups for it… Like Dijon ketchup!

Another neoliberal.

I agree, but I don’t think there’ll be another real election here for a long time if ever, and I’d rather vote for her than another hypercapitalist enslaver with pride ribbons(D) to stop hypercapitalist enslaver with scapegoats® yet again as I’ve done my entire life in our descent to oblivion. There’s not really rational hope either way. The capitalists won and have us by the balls in every way, including tens of millions of deluded minds that have learned to love and defend the Massas and their “free market” directly against their own interests.

Climate change is going to end planetary scale civilization in 50 years max, probably 20-30. It’s blowing past all projections because we were conservative and both couldn’t and didn’t want to consider the runaway effects. I honestly think Kamala was my last pragmatic funeral dirge vote. Give me something to vote for and I’ll show up. I haven’t had a federal level candidate to vote for in a general in my entire life though. I doubt AOC will become the first after the DNC uses every lever to end any primary run.

Also because both of our major party machines would cooperate in attacking her.

Neoliberals would rather lose power than signal to their bribers that their party isn’t bought and paid for. President Ocasio-Cortez would be such a signal.

The DNC promotes on the basis of potential federal level reps getting bribe money. AOC was a spoiler and is not welcome in the party because of her views. That’s why the Neoliberals in congress don’t care Trump is in office and even help him with appointments.

Neoliberals like Pelosi would lock arms with the Fascists and treat a President AOC like the threat we wished they’d treat their fascist opposition like, but they have too much in common on the same Economic policy they’re both well bribed to enact and protect from us.

Which is why, all the more, AOC is a good choice. The hatred of our true oppressors on Wall Street is welcome. At worst, it will further demonstrate that the American people aren’t permitted by big corpo to have a real choice in governance, only hypercapitalist robber baron enablers paid to divide us on social wedges as they legislate new ways for the owners to monetize sucking us dry.

Neoliberals are still openly hostile towards her.

Queen Neoliberal Pelosi spent more time in the lameduck period undermining AOC’s committee appointment than Trump’s Presidency.

That’s good enough for me as a leftist knowing the context that she really is about as left wing as our pathetic, deluded, propagandized, under or miseducated populace could ever elect as we are.

I don’t have any hope anymore, this nation died under Reagan and it’s just a slow falling corpse as far as I’m concerned, but for anyone looking to cling to at least borderline rational hope, someone in her position is your best bet, because she’s a known name, that matters in our shitty celebrity obsessed culture, she proves every day that a leftist can be professional and govern, that matters because leftists are painted as anarchist boogiemen without a plan in most American news media, and she’s photogenic and naturally charasmatic, which shouldn’t matter but sadly does.

There isn’t an individual to the left of her that I can think of that could conceivably get elected President in this cesspool of willful ignorance and systemically stoked division of the poors, can you? Even her becoming President would be a moonshot. That isn’t a knock on her, she’s one of about 4 members of congress (or executives in the fortune 1000) I’d give a glass of water to if they were dying of thirst, that’s a knock on our gold plated shithole and people, not her. She’s a diamond in the rough.

If they outline their methodology and outcomes, if science indicates an economic system will maximize wellbeing for the most individuals in a society, it should be our system based on the information available. And it should change if new data supercedes the old.

Capitalism has proven to be incompatible with democracy over time and detrimental to any social contract. It’s a “die alone” economic system on a planet we need to care for and live together on. We ain’t getting to mars, we’re killing the planet the human habitability of the world we came from and this was super easy baby just don’t shit where you sleep mode and we keep proving we can’t even do that.

I’ll never understand people that denegrate the scientific community. They and their predecessors are the reason you aren’t going to be dead by 30, why we’re even able to bitch on the internet right now. The scientific method and community have done more for humanity in 500 years than every theologen and diety mankind has ever been inspired to pull out of their ass.

Capitalism will end in the next 50 years, either by murder of it or the mass ecological suicide it causes. It’s pathetic how many people that are willing to end the species so they can pretend they’ll be rich the rich assholes living on the poors backs one day.

Who will evaluate need and merit?

Doctors and academic performance records aka grades weighed by academics, not bloodsucking capitalist leeches.

Old man yells at developed nation from his shithole.

Trumpers only see Trumpers as “good people.” if they could press a button and watch everyone around them who isn’t one die in agony for the schaudenfreude of it, they would.

That’s why they’re trying to turn empathy into a character deficit and slur.

This is what separates them from everyone else. I’m an extreme leftist, something some low information Americans incorrectly paint as just as extreme as the MAGA cult, when I want that MAGA cult to have access to Healthcare based on need, higher Ed based solely on merit, conditionless housing and social supports, while they want me dead, and preferably painfully.

I pity them because they were made by for profit media propaganda meant to divide and profit.

They’re acting like Luigi broke out and started making the world a better place one capitalist at a time again.

allegedly

I wish the office came with a mandate that they’d personally have to field constituent calls 4 hours a week.

But like so much else, they aren’t going to legislate accountability for themselves.

If it was an order of male monks found with 800 dead babies, “men are absolute monsters” would absolutely among the top comments.

Just the age we live in.

Completely fair.

For the record I am a socialist who thinks all billionaires and most to all centimillionaires are as mentally diseased as serial killers and far more effectively destructive to society than any serial killer that has ever walked the earth, and they all belong in mental health facilities for everyone else’s safety to protect us from their sociopathic avarice disease.

ChatGPT and the others have absolutely broken people, not because it has agency, but because in our dystopia of social media and (Mis)information overload, many just need the slightest push, and LLMs are perfect for taking those close to the edge off of it.

I see LLM use as potentially as a toxic to the mind is as something like nicotine is to the body. It’s not Skynet meaning to harm or help us, it’s an invention that takes our written thoughts and blasts back a disturbing meta reflection/echo/output of a humanity’s average response to it. We don’t seem to care how that will effect us psychologically when there’s profit to be made.

But there are already plenty of cases of murders and suicides with these as factors.

Just like joining a military, some people are born sheep and need to cling to a rigid structure to thrive. Without it, you have all sorts of nasty consequences from people who can’t self-actualize and need to believe in being part of something magical that has a plan for them.

Not something I’d ever want for myself, but as I get older I’ve come to realize that there are many people, people that con artists like Reagan, Trump, McConnell, and every Mega Church leader ever, capitalize and prey on because they need to be told what to think to feel safe.

I don’t think the answer is to abolish the crutches of the weak minded, so much as for society through representative government to regulate what they teach to minimize the potential for turning the structure weak minds crave into a potential army of useful idiots for those that would coopt such movements.

Trump is a witch confirmed.