Then we got the leaks saying the Chinese Military is Fubared by corruption down to the warehouse workers.
Russia could at least limp into Donbas when their Kiev assault disintegrated. If China tries to invade Taiwan and their missiles don’t launch, it will be a stupidly expensive, deadly, embarrassment. Just ships and planes littering the ocean floor.
Xhi needs to be confident that his navy won’t get pulled into Taipei ports by tugboat like Russian Tanks in the cornfields.
They can’t do everything everywhere all at once.
Sandy Hook survivors are in high school now and some are getting into activism.
You give us too much credit.
Anhedonia is horrifying if you think about it.
That’s, a remarkably rosy set of predictions.
I hope you are right, and big picture, I think things might shake out that way eventually.
But I am not as optimistic as you on several points.
I don’t think LLM AI will do as much as you claim as fast as you imagine.
I don’t think the owner class will put enough pressure on the politicians to generate that level of systemic change. They will muddle through with a thousand band aids stuck together.
Which will lead to an increasingly dystopic hellscape in which young people increasingly persue careers as scam artists, wanna be celebrities, and outright criminals because those are the only paths to a comfortable life.
But so hope to be wrong. Good luck to us all.
The one thing you can count on conservatives paying attention to is messing with their money.
What happens might not be pretty, but if they try to day “fuck it, guess we are ending the program” there will be hell to pay.
Who said they have a wife?
Social security is funded by government bonds.
Bonds are just a promise the government makes to pay a certain amount of money at a certain amount of interest after a certain time has passed.
They aren’t stacking gold bars in fort Knox.
(They might or might not be stacking gold, they just aren’t paying for social security that way.)
SS has always been a funded by the promise to pay it. I don’t understand what you mean by “stealing”
No one has been paid less than they are owed just because SS ran a surplus for 60 years.
Non wealthy people had their taxes cut for a time, but raised permanently. The trump tax cuts were a wealth transfer from the working class to the owner class.
Sorry to come with “um, ackshuslly” but they didn’t ask if they were convicted of a crime. The question was "were they jailed? And according to your post, they were not.
France has a powerful executive. More powerful than even the US president, inside their own system.
I have heard the French presidency described as an “elected dictator.”
Macron wants people to see what the far right has to offer and hopefully realize they don’t like it before the presidency goes up for grabs.
France made childcare and education free and relatively high quality and look at that! They have just under replacement level fertility!
Some people do want children. Not everyone, but lots of people do. It’s true that wealth depresses fertility, but you can have a sustainable society if you give people financial security.
I’m willing to believe there are some cultural issues at play, not just the economics, but that is for demographers to tease out.
The American congressional representatives have an average of 2 children. Replacement rate. Get our standard of living up to that and you will see fertility go up.
Yeah, America is undermining it’s own hegemony since 2016 and what do you know? The threat of violence is rising.
Russia invaded Ukraine, China is threatening Taiwan, Ethiopia is threatening Eritrea, Venezuela is threatening Guyana. A world where large nations can bully, invade, and occupy small nations unopposed is not really better than the Pax Americana.
In what country?
I’m talking about raising wages by 40-70% in the US.
Pipe dream, but if it happened the fertility rate would increase.
I’m a fan of sortition over ballot, but what is the purpose of this? To have fun?
Raise the price of labor to the point that a working family can afford to have children at the standard they consider socially acceptable.
That would devalue investment accounts though, so it won’t happen until there is suffering on a scale not seen outside of major wars.
I have been trying to cut down my social media use. Leaving reddit was a big part of that. What actually happened was I spend time here and on YouTube, and occasionally I load up old reddit!
I’m trying guys, but it’s hard.
I’m happy they did the right thing. I lived under Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. (Don’t really remember Bush Sr or Regan personally) And one team helps us, and the other fucks us over. I will remember this in the voting booth.