Okay, context, paramedic of 13 years experience. I actually picked up a dude who did almost exactly this. Except he was diabetic with severe neuropathy and had no feeling of hot or cold. And no thermometer in the hot tub that was being directly warmed by a wood fire. You see where this is going. Well it gets worse than that. Dude, still no idea he’s burnt all to fuck, gets out of the hot tub, goes in, and beds down for the night. His caretaker finds him two hours later with his burn juice having soaked all through the sheets and brings him to the local, rural, 4-bed ER hospital, where the ER doc promptly shits a duck. That’s where we come in. We have to haul his ass to a burn center, and I’m telling you, this dude’s legs were fucking wrecked with second degree burns. Never seen anything like it before, and the guy is just chilling, no pain medicine, still a little skeptical that this is really all that bad (it is). Wild. Rural healthcare is something else.

Millennial here. When I was a kid, before everything lost its goddamn mind in 2004-6, landlord was generally something old, retired folks did for a little extra money, not a career choice or get rich quick scam.

Before Quora went to absolute dog shit and you could actually get real, good answers to real, good questions, I remember a question was asked about tax cuts and a business exec gave a really insightful answer. They basically said “no, tax cuts on businesses don’t create jobs or boost pay. If we hire somebody, it’s because we need someone to do this work; we’re not going to hire people just because we have money laying around. We people based on the salary we negotiate with them, not based on how much extra cash we have laying around. Tax cuts are really just a giveaway for the investors and c-suite.” Mind you, they weren’t taking a moral position about tax cuts, just telling it like it is: business tax cuts don’t create jobs and don’t raise pay, about the only thing they do is increase investor returns. All you have to do is look at the massive wave of stock buybacks that happened in the wake of the Trump tax cuts.

Everyone with any insight into the business world knows this. The business leaders know it, Congress knows it, it’s probably one of the bigger scams in US politics, and that’s saying something.

No, no, the leopards promised they wouldn’t eat his face.

Oh my aching banana. We need to be dealing with climate change, car dependency, our fucked up healthcare system, our fucked up education system, microplastics pollution and a whole laundry list of issues. Instead we’re going to be spending the next forty years cleaning up after these fucksticks and resisting the tipping into fucking feudalism.

Private gun ownership is legal in the US, and the reason the people who wrote the constitution put it in there wasn’t for blowing up Tannerite and posting it to Facebook.

Real talk, as a parent, it distresses me to think about my kids’ future. Shit’s going to start going sideways fast by the time they’re adults. They’re going to have to deal with so much awful bullshit because of a bunch of rich/old fucks making decisions that they are beyond the consequences of. I wonder if they’ll have kids, but I doubt it; I sometimes feel guilty having brought them into this, and I wouldn’t blame them for not wanting to have their own when things start really falling apart. I’m just trying to appreciate the good times while we have them, and being cognizant that they’re not going to last.

I’m trying to be politically active, trying to make a difference where I can to make sure they inherit a better world, but it’s damn hard to find the time.

Article drama aside, we’ve seen this strat before with mixed results. In '16, the democrats bet big that MAGA would be more unpalatable to voters than HRC and corporatist Democrats, and got everybody (including themselves) punched in the fucking mouth for it. Slow clap, you guys, never going to let you live that down. However, since '20, MAGA has been underperforming, particularly anyone not Trump. Boebart managed to make one of the safest seats in Colorado into a narrow race, and there were multiple elections where mainstream GOP candidates won the governorship while downticket maga reactionaries fared twenty points worse and lost.

So, seeing the DNC do it again is kinda like… Wasn’t getting burned once enough for you guys? But I also see why they’re banking on MAGA underporforming-- because it has been. Idk, just seems insane to me to risk the future of the country boosting these fucking assholes; let us not forget that the HRC campaign boosting DJT in '16 is part of the reason we’re in this mess in the first place.

Yikes, in an industry where the journalism generally skews positive, this is pretty bad.

Good point, thanks for holding me accountable to the truth. We can’t set things right if we’re selling people a bill of goods; that’s what got us here in the first place.

Ah yes, state primaries are the real general election.

Yes

You mean trains, bikes, and good public transit? Because those all mean less wear and tear on the roads overall. Trust an American because we’ve been at this for seventy years. If you guys go all in on car dependency, it’s not only going to break the banks of government from local to national, but it’s going to break your bank and destroy what small businesses you have left.

Ameribro here. This is our life, we’re so insanely car dependent that it’s actually hostile to try and use any other means of getting around. It makes everything worse, including your budget and and the government’s budget, and we’re just starting the multi-decade process of unwinding this bullshit. Don’t do it.

Also, please stop appropriating our culture of making the most braindead governance decisions possible, it’s really insulting.

It cost over $100 to get the whole family in, buy popcorn, etc before greedflation for, what, an hour and a half of entertainment? I can think of a lot of things that are a much better value for family entertainment.

It feels like we get a new leaded gasoline every year. CO2, microplastics, plastic additives, PFAS, ag chemical runoff, mine runoff, road runoff, and on and on and on.

Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I think tragedy is a really strong word here.

The tl;Dr answer is build more housing. The long answer is that we need better urbanism. Our cities are awful, and have been for a long time, and the best and worst part is that it’s a consequence of seventy years of deliberate and terrible policy choices. It’s terrible because we’ve been choosing for almost a century to have the shittiest cities in the developed world while thinking that it’s completely normal. It’s great because the problem really is as simple as working to reverse these policy choices and their consequences.

This subject really deserves its own book (or even series), but the series that NotJustBikes did with StrongTowns is a good place to start.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa&si=R2TD6rICxWvUAIvs

We can have more affordable, more livable cities, it’s just a matter of making those choices. The great news is that for most Americans, these aren’t policy choices that are as out of reach as, say, universal healthcare. A lot of these policies are controlled at a municipal or county level, and can be affected by your city council. Try showing up to a meeting once in a while and making a public comment; they don’t know what people want without us telling them, and the people who want awful cities are vastly overrepresented. It’s easier than you think and the cops can’t stop you.

Oh, crap. I voted for this, and I didn’t realize this happened. I’m in favor of more housing across the board, but shifting the money to locked psych facilities just to add more three day hold capacity is not what I meant to vote for.

I don’t think there’s a single problem we’re facing today that hasn’t been made meaningfully worse if not outright caused by private equity.