To borrow a phrase from Steve Hofstetter, I’ve never flown a helicopter, but if I saw one in a tree, I could still be like “dude fucked up.”

But do the extremely rich really get to rest and enjoy their spoils the way you think? Just look at someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, they just keep working even though they already have far more than they can spend. Gates is especially funny because he’s working full time on figuring out how to spend his fortune. Almost like having all that money just became another problem that now requires solving.

Bro, I LITERALLY just said I don’t give a shit about rich people problems. You can fuck all the way off trying to get me to sympathize with them. “Oh but it’s hard to spend all that money!” Then don’t fuck over the working class to accumulate so much money you have to work to spend it all! Or do the ethical thing and let the working class eat you. I might keep arguing with you but this is the last this particular stupidity is going to be dignified with a response.

Okay, see what you just did there? You went from “being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it” to having an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit, and I’m willing to bet you’re not thinking of living next to skid row either. And then you want to be able to save money on top of that, too.

Ah, I should have clarified. American cities are built wrong and need a redo. Please refer to this educational content. I do sometimes forget that not everyone is on board with the reality that cars and car-centric infrastructure is destroying our mental health, our finances, our cities, and our world, so that’s on me. The point is, what I described is a reality in several of the dozens of places that aren’t the USA, and the fact that it’s not a reality here is the direct result of the actions of people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and just to throw another one in there, Charles Edwin Wilson. Look him up if you don’t know him, but he ranks just under Henry Kissinger in terms of worst people in American history. Just to reiterate, if your goal is to get me to feel sympathy for the owner class, give up now.

This poses an interesting question: what if this is in fact the most self-stable and therefore sustainable solution in the long term?

Then humanity is fucked.

Is it really preferable to sleep in a palace surrounded by armed guards because you are worried about assassins, just so you can own 50 nice cars you’ll barely ever get to drive?

Oh, boo hoo, won’t someone think of the poor rich people, having to pay extra to keep their disgusting riches safe from the people they fucked over to get them. I’m sorry, I’ve been trying not to contribute to the toxicity I see in these threads, but come the fuck on.

Besides, I don’t think people envy the rich and powerful the way you’re describing, I think people envy the idea of being able to maintain a good standard of living without having to work themselves to the bone to do it, and they begrudge rich people’s wealth and power on the grounds that they use it to influence politics and deny a decent standard of living to the working class. I don’t want a mansion and fifty nice cars, I want an apartment in the city in walking distance to transit and stuff to do, and then to also save more money at the end of the month than I did at the start. Most people are similar: their specifics might be different, but the broad strokes are the same, especially the last bit.

True. A distressing amount of the time, you can make far more money from a problem existing than from solving it.

I don’t think most people are selfish to the point of it being harmful. I think the problem is that a small number of people are, and those are the people who are in charge of things, where their selfishness can do way more harm.

As others have mentioned, though, a lot of behavior is heavily influenced by the incentive structures people live within. This can apply in very obvious ways: for example, when trying to get from point A to point B, people will use the mode of transportation that makes the most sense for that trip, which is heavily dependent on the infrastructure that exists between those two places, and that’s why the Dutch will bike five miles, the Spanish will catch a train across the whole country, and people in Houston will drive across the street. It can also apply in more subtle ways, though, and that’s where capitalism comes in. To pick one example, companies that are owned by their workers are more stable and better places to work than traditional privately owned or shareholder-owned companies, but it goes far deeper and gets far more complex than that, too.

People are responsive to economic incentives. If the incentives favor doing good things, then good things happen. Otherwise, you get what we have now.

$20? That’s amateur stuff. Buy my $999 course and you’ll learn from a master how to apply capitalism to problems!*

*For legal reasons, note that I did not say “how to apply capitalism to solve problems”

Which was the fashion at the time.

The person I’ve started seeing from Hinge in recent days told me that the biggest reason she rolled with my profile was because I seemed like I was “relatively normal” and not a techbro or finance bro. Apparently this is prevalent enough around here that for someone who’s not into it, a profile that features a dad joke about the members of punk and metal bands standing really far apart because “your band width determines your speed,” offers “Live Without at an abandoned Denny’s in Houston” as an option for a past event to time travel to, and lists “worker ownership of the means of production” as a “simple pleasure” qualifies you as “normal.”

But hey, that in turn means I’m not attracting the kinds of girls who go for techbros, which I see as an absolute win.

I can leave the house if I wanna see that

too bloody right

Yeah, like I said, I didn’t see any concrete evidence of what I would expect from the name of their organization, and the actual policies they support are mostly things that I also support (increasing density, investing in infrastructure, generally pro-transit, stuff about healthcare, education, allowing remote work, etc). I guess I just find it weird that they’re supporting all of that specifically because it gets more people to have kids, and not because they just make people’s lives better, which is my reasoning. Maybe it’s my personal bias as somebody who doesn’t want kids.

This is good news.

The framing of the organization being called “stop population decline” strikes me as weird given that the global population is far from declining, and either already has surpassed or will soon surpass eight billion. It is true that data is more granular than that: some demographics have more children than others, which leads to shifts over time. All of this is normal and, if not good, at worst neutral. The problem arises when by far the most common voices to say anything about “population decline” or “overpopulation” or anything like that are typically using those terms as dogwhistles for white supremacy/Great Replacement bullshit.

I’ll grant that their About page seems to mostly be stuff I agree with, and from a cursory look at their website, I’m not seeing evidence of white supremacy on it. But idk, the vibes are still off for me.

Damn, are you Elastigirl? 'Cause you be reachin’.

The modern state of Israel exists because a bunch of Christian doomsdayers thought that it existing would make Jesus come back and end the world, and post-WWII seemed like the perfect time to redraw some borders with no consideration for the people already living there. That’s the death cult you’re talking about.

And I know Judaism views Israel as its ancestral homeland. It’s not like the Jews have no claim to it whatsoever. Additionally, I understand that post-WWII genuinely was a great time to give the Jewish people some reparations. But you’re acting like they’ve been there the whole time and no one else also has a claim to it, and you’re further acting like after the European Christian death cult moved them in there (again, to try and make Jesus come back and end the world), they didn’t then spend the next 70 years viciously subjugating the Palestinians who’d actually been living there for ages.

MLK Jr. said that a riot is the last voice of the unheard. That’s not true about every riot, but if you have been aware of the geopolitics of this region of the world for more than like a month? and are not being a disingenuous shitbag, then this is the exact type of riot he was talking about. I know you have a lot of trouble with the not being a disingenuous shitbag part, but fortunately it seems like most people here also recognize that.

Israel invaded Palestine. History didn’t start a week ago.

I mean, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you certainly can dig into centuries of imperialism and oppression in Africa by outside colonial powers.

take me to snurch (snail church)

It could be better. I’m in the Bay Area, which has some areas that are cool and some areas that are not so cool. And my workplace is in one of the areas that is not cool, by which I mean rich, heavily suburbanized, relatively conservative, and like six miles from the nearest Bart station. And in order to make biking there remotely feasible, I have to live over the hill from Oakland, where nothing cool happens. If I had had the good sense to apply to one of my employer’s locations in a place that wasn’t a massive fucking pain in the ass to get to, I’d be having a much better time right now.

I ride my gravel bike anywhere from 5 to 25 miles before work, depending on how early I get out the door and whether or not my bike is broken. 1. I get around by bike, so the 5 is the bare minimum and 25 is for when I get out the door with two hours to spare and can really get down and dirty with some dirt, and 2. I literally broke my crankset on Thursday while trail riding before work.

Weirdly, off the bike, the latte describes me the best, right down to the unexpected tattoo, but I actually drink water most frequently.

since he was 14?

Also, the very next line in Hey There Delilah is “I’d walk to you if I had no other way.”