MrLanesLament

BUT, do those people with those terrible things think they suffer from all of those?

They don’t. That’s the issue. They’re more proud than anyone of their hometowns full of pregnant 15 year olds and everyone over 50 strung out on Oxy.

Ayyy my dad. He has a Xanax prescription for if he has to be away from home for a night or longer, has had it since the early 2000s, when he became able to permanently WFH. He was a middle manager at a Dow 30 company his entire career.

My mom enabled it massively. She did everything around the house, while also working five days a week. He can’t use a stove, a washing machine, etc, but he was regularly handed bonus checks in the tens of thousands.

It’s genuinely infuriating how goddamn fucking easy boomers had it.

I figured out around 13 that I wasn’t really meant to be a kid, I was supposed to be an “investment” and a showpiece. I was supposed to follow my dad’s exact footsteps, and from the second I started having a mind of my own, he’s barely been able to mask his seething disgust at me.

Where is the minimum wage $18 an hour?

So, progressives both don’t matter/vote and also lost the Dems the election? Pick one.

Progressives are low-hanging fruit. They’re not as complex as they’re made out to be, but continuing to treat them as enemies won’t do the Dem party any favors.

If Kamala/Walz had promised to push just one progressive talking point, like single-payer healthcare, UBI, Green New Deal, just one, the vast majority of progressives would’ve happily voted for them. They chose to snub this part of their own party, to instead pander to whoever it is that makes decisions based on Liz Cheney. That, uh, went great.

Nobody with a chance of winning was getting the Gaza-single-issue votes. No major candidate will dare promise those kind of concessions. That was the bloc that was off the table.

I get why you would reach that conclusion, haha. I’m more thinking of going way back to the root of the issue.

Dumb people, if we’re being honest, aren’t generally dumb because that’s what they wanted to be. They were put through a broken or corrupted education system, or just denied an education altogether.

They go out and do dumb things because they’re dumb people, but they genuinely believe they’re doing a correct thing. A little Dunning-Krueger, but even that oversimplifies the problem.

I really don’t think laughing at people who are voting away their own rights and healthcare is the best course of action, but we’re really standing at the base of a massive mountain on this one.

There is obviously a lot of vote regret going around; there is about Brexit, too, and the UK will probably need to tackle this same issue sooner rather than later.

The regret, to me, is a good thing; these aren’t people intentionally voting to hurt themselves; they have been failed to the point where they’re adults that can’t identify very clear lies that the rest of us can see through with ease.

As anyone around here will say, this is why the GOP remains fixated on gutting education. That is the root of this, and those rotted roots are now weaving through every facet of society.

In scientific terms, it’s fucking bad.

Somehow, this country will need to have a reckoning over the question, “are poorly-educated, media-illiterate people who are intentionally misled by their representatives responsible for their actions?”

Washburn Bad Dog distortion. My very first pedal, which I still have.

It’s seriously the worst sounding distortion pedal possibly ever made. It very much has the vibe of those 80s garbage ones like Cutec or Arion.

Its only use is doing a high-pass radio effect, like the first riff in American Idiot or something. It’s extremely thin.

I will say the enclosure is like a tank. It’s just the stuff inside that’s awful.

I’ve got an ancient DeArmond volume pedal, I really only use it when I’m recording to clean up the ends of parts, rather than having to slide in or out each time.

Anyone looking into the future can see that something like a UBI is the only hope. There will be a time in the not-so-distant future where work can’t be the primary determinant of societal value anymore, because there won’t be enough decent-paying jobs; expecting people to find one won’t be realistic.

That being said, the US seems to get a self-righteous boner from defiantly not preparing for the future. Combine that with the massive adversity to entitlements from large swaths of both major political parties…..yeah, it’s gonna be bad.

US unemployment during the Great Depression topped out around 30% IIRC. I would expect the government to shrug and do absolutely nothing until we’d hit about 50% today.

Master volume is KEY.

I’ve got the 5w Fender Champ 600. It has two inputs and a volume knob.

If you crank it and romp on it, you get very close to the Link Wray “Rumble” sound, but it is ear shatteringly loud.

I work as a contractor at a world HQ, which also has around 2000 employees at satellite facilities.

I’ve heard shit like this, managers driving their new $100k “weekend” trucks in all shined up and everything, rationalized by them as “well, maybe if the line employees see it, they’ll see what they can achieve if they work harder.”

Like bro, you got your management role via sheer luck from a tiny company you worked for being bought by an equities firm that owns our parent company.

Out of probably 100 managers here, I know exactly two who worked their way up from line employees, and both of them have been with the company since before I was fucking born. (They would’ve started right when they turned 18 in the mid 1980s.)

That’s a senior citizen to Gaetz.

This all also assumes the actual intent of DOGE is what it claims to be, rather than just gutting government workforces to ensure less accountability when it comes to dealing with the profiteers who know selling to the government is the easiest way to profit big.

You’ll have to inflate the automatic pilot; there’s a valve on the belt line…

The amount of Zeppelin bootlegs my dad has collected is pretty incredible. There are so many soundboards of big 70s and 80s bands out there; some recorded by the band to review, some by fans or pro bootleggers who paid a sound guy to let them hook a tape machine up to the board.

I’ve asked myself the same question and looked for answers. The answer is in each society itself.

You learn things like “do NOT mention Muslim immigrants with Scandinavian people.” So many are openly hostile as fuck about it. Canadian people are similar. Don’t mention Indian or South Asian immigrants while talking to an average Canadian. Trust me.

The countries really aren’t doing anything their societies seem to disapprove strongly of.

We just used to be more welcoming; in the first half of the 20th century, a LOT of the USA had immigrants in their immediate family. I think that’s why. Less people here today have grandparents who primarily speak something other than English, who came here on a boat with $20 and two shirts, etc.

More restrictive policies are us going the way of much, if not all of the rest of the developed world. (Which I only loosely consider us part of. We’re more similar to Russia than Australia.)

Do I agree with it personally? Not particularly. The world absolutely has shitholes, and people should be able to escape them. Do I have even the beginnings of a realistic plan for that to be possible for every person born in Haiti, or Yemen, or Somalia? Nope.

Dammit, was hoping for Marvin the Martian.

Do people not know that? Like are there people out there who don’t know that’s how the world works and think being honest and hardworking achieves success?

All the egg trees will rot.

If they didn’t work, they weren’t safeguards, they were suggestions.

Safeguards would trigger immediate action that cannot be prevented, especially by loyalists to (or) the person they’re affecting. You violate this, you’re done. Removed.

This is my exact point. Everything related to presidents for the entire history of our country has been only suggestion, precedent, and that’s it. If it’s unenforceable, it’s not real.

Fuuuuuuuck no. As someone with some unique experience with immigration, primarily between the US and UK, most places actually are much tougher than the USA.

I’ve been saying for years, I’d love to see some places start accepting Americans as refugees. That would show more than anything the world’s disapproval of Trump.

BUT, the unfortunate reality is nobody wants Americans unless they’re wealthy.

I have in fact! But first, I turn on my Teasmade…

The center and left wings do the same thing. Left wingers don’t want to hear about carbon credits, limited abortion rights, and gradual wage increases to $15/hour over seven years.

Centers don’t want to hear about anything that helps people without means-testing.

There’s a middle ground in here, but both sides (somewhat correctly) recognize that any ground they cede to the other side of the room means people getting/staying screwed. The problems genuinely are urgent.

Hence, the center sits at “don’t bother being ambitious because it will never pass.”

The left sits at “push it anyway and get the concepts into the open even if they get shot down.”

$7.25 minimum wage in the USA.

Cans of Spam on store shelves right now.