assuming you don’t think the American rescue plan, bipartisan infrastructure act, CHIPS, IRA, and the first massive tranche of funding for Ukraine are useful

No more than the CARES Act or the PROSWIFT Act or the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 or the Hong Kong Autonomy and Uyghur Human Rights Policy Acts, under the prior administration. We’ve never had a problem issuing large bipartisan bailouts in the thick of a recession, rolling out buckets of cash for proxy wars, or pissing away trillions on expanding legacy highway infrastructure. This is not something unique that Biden brought to the table.

Hell, Trump was even sending military aid to Ukraine as early as 2019. One could argue it was this military escalation and subsequent bombing of the Donbas that kicked off the war with Russia to begin with. Thanks for that!

Unfortunately they didn’t codify Roe, overhaul SCOTUS, or harden our institutions against fascism

Because they’re a party heavily populated with Pro-Life Democrats, they genuinely like the business-friendly / anti-regulatory bent to the SCOTUS, and they are more than happy to break bread with fascists just so long as the fascists can be used as proxies against enemies of US business interests at home and abroad.

This isn’t a fucking accident. It is deliberate bipartisan consensus.

Who knows what they could do with a larger majority and control of the House/Senate for 2 more years though

Exactly what they did in 2009. Send trillions of new dollars to the privatized tech sector. Roll out new privatization schemes for the USPS and US Education System. Bailout failed banks. Increase the size and the authority of police agencies. And impose a host of new unfunded mandates on consumers - via tariffs, anti-union tax increases on health insurance, and private lending schemes - that only serve to degrade quality of life in pursuit of higher corporate profits.

FFS, the lowest hanging fruit imaginable for the Democratic Party is DC Statehood. Easiest win imaginable to just hand yourself two free Senators and 3-4 new House Reps. And they won’t do it.

Old enough to remember when Dems did control the House, but it didn’t do anything useful.

I don’t understand why we aren’t in the streets.

We were in the streets for Palestine and then some seriously bad shit happened.

Were you get your info from Facebook?

Huh?

Wages need to be increased and the best way to do that is to stop businesses undercutting wages by hiring cheap foreign labour.

Urban density increases the efficiency of public services. Wage rates do not.

Trying to keep populations small and fragmented does nothing to improve domestic quality of life. And rising domestic populations don’t hurt overall household incomes. Cartelized labor markets are what do that.

Inflation is largely a global issue.

Prices vary enormously by local regions. And price gouging is increasingly difficult over large distances.

Inflation is most commonly a consequence of local commodity monopolization, not global price trends.

tax cuts on the poorest people in society

Are functionally no different than higher wages. But without public infrastructure - housing, education, health care, etc - what does an extra couple grand actually buy?

We’ve seen this in the US for decades. A pittance of tax cuts pitched as a percentage of income is presented as this enormous boon. But then wages stagnate, prices skyrocket, and debts soar in the face of new privatization.

And then we’re worse of than when we started.

The tax cut doesn’t buy anything in an inflationary economy

I think helping everyday working class people is a good thing

Just cut taxes bro. Just one more time dawg. I promise it’ll work this time, dude. Just one more tax cut. One more time bro I promise. It’s going to stimulate the economy homey. This time we swear.

It’s called a Maginot Line and you build it on the German border

It’s foxes all the way down. Just a question whether Russians or Americans get their slice.

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“Accused” by whom?

The British, by the look of it

Wheat is the most successful lifeform on the planet.

Animated webps have been a thing this whole time.

Reading this in Sam Reich’s voice.

Even if it wasn’t, you could just convert it to .jpg if you felt strongly about it. Not as though there’s a compatibility issue.

The complaint people are having is with resizing/manipulation after download. They want these enormous uncompressed files floating around on every website, in the off chance they plan to download it and manipulate it. 99.9% of the web needs to be full of megabyte sized image files for the 0.1% y’all want to play with.

Don’t forget Blinky, the three eyed fish.

https://hero.fandom.com/wiki/Blinky_(The_Simpsons)

I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.

Renewables and batteries have their own problems.

Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery’s end of lifecycle.

Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.

Which isn’t even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.

Nuclear power isn’t any different. If we don’t operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.

Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).

We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.

But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.

I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.

Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.

Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.

One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.

Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.

Ah yes, the comparable states of Hawaii, Quebec and Crimea which famously issue their own passports, have their own heads of state, pass their own laws and are not subject to the laws of parent states.

Each of these regions has its own governor and its own municipal laws.

Taiwanese residents who regularly travel to China carry a distinct Chinese passport precisely because the Taiwanese passport isn’t recognized. In fact the Taiwanese passport is notorious for how many problems it causes with international travel.

And thanks to the US defense pact, Taiwan is heavily beholden to US sanctions, trade restrictions, and travel embargoes. Taiwan isn’t independent, it is occupied territory. Much the same way as Crimea is occupied by Russia.

you’ve wandered much to far from your safe space

Its always fun to see people encounter some facts they haven’t seen before and conclude “These facts have simply been misplaced! I’m not supposed to be hearing them. They belong in somewhere else.”

someone could come up with a meaningful definition of a country that would exclude Taiwan, but include all other countries

The classical definition of sovereignty doesn’t apply to Taiwan, no matter how you slice it. They’re not a country in the same way that Palestine and Hawaii and Quebec and Crimea aren’t countries.