Who among us hasn’t taken a day off work to come back and find that your coworkers ate the fruit you left in the communal fridge, and then subsequently condemned your coworkers and all of their descendants to eternal suffering, then felt bad later and changed your mind, pretending your son died for a couple days to drum up sympathy and distract from your overreaction?

Not really, he wasn’t. The myth of Nazi/fascist competence comes from a combination of propaganda and “right time, right place” in terms of when they took the reins of the German economy. A kind of funny example that isn’t Nazis, but their contemporary fascists, Mussolini’s Italian regime damaged the on-time performance of trains in Italy, but the regime kept saying the trains were running on time to the point where it’s become a whole saying about excusing fascism because of its competence/results (“at least the trains run on time”).

It was a long ass year though

To be clear for any dummies like me who just woke up and are reading this, this comment is comparing DOGE to the early days of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, not completely par NG Greg’s bravery to the early days of Social Security

Description says the poster caught 9h of video, but based on the clock watermark in the top left, what is shown is about 7.5h of video (maybe cut for the interesting bits/highest quality) from 0830ish to 1600ish) at a rate of roughly 20 minutes of real time per 1 second video time, as the original commenter pointed out

The Harris campaign literally did this, I want to say in a sideswipe during the debate. And Trump said nuh-uh, it’s not a tax, and the campaign more or less shut up about it, wasn’t a core feature of their advertising, stump speech, or debate strategy going forward, they opted for “save our institutions” and “he’s going to raise the ever nebulous cost of living” (which got lost in the Biden is responsible for bird flu egg prices noise from the other side). Can you imagine betting it all on courting Republican voters, and being so easily talked off of the “he’s going to tax you more” hill? I know hindsight is 20/20, but that’s some frustrating shit to think about

You have it all right except that Covid 19 happened in 2020 (at least outside of China and maybe a few early cruise ship cases?), not 2019

Kamala still sends me emails asking for money, I think for the DNC. That is the problem with corporate Democrats, they think resistance looks like fundraising

There was a lawsuit from the AFGE (federal employees union) I think that they had to drop because it relied on the assumption that DOGE was a federal agency. When it was revealed that DOGE was just a renaming of the US Digital Service, that invalidated the premise of the lawsuit. Idk how the USDS had money lying around in its budget for a bunch of new and unqualified GS-15s to just be added to the payroll like government billets aren’t painstakingly difficult to establish, but that is another question, I suppose

Making them president, apparently

Starting at 0 would actually be silly for a normalized market index value graph like this one because the market going to true 0 is not a realistic situation. Or thought of another way, this graph is essentially zero-indexed, but 0 is marked as 100 on the Y axis. 90 in this case could be thought of as -10% value and that would be perfectly accurate. These kinds of graphs are usually misleading in other ways, usually by picking specific time ranges to represent or cut off on the X axis. For instance, you could argue that the value that Trump is erasing here is largely offset by the market gains from November to January that could be arguably attributed to speculative optimism about Trump winning the election and so the crash that is shown is actually just a market correction. One might point out that triggering a market bubble and subsequent correction is no matter of pride in response to that argument, but it is there

Bathtub curve

Low income taxes. And our sales tax is typically lower than European VAT when the comparison is valid. But those generally go to the feds and the state, that do not fund municipal services, so municipalities have to collect the remainder they need through property taxes, typically on real estate and cars. And none of them fund healthcare, so we have to pay a company premiums for that. Basically the same for higher education. When you look at our total financial burden to receive the kind of services that are funded by taxes in other developed countries, we can be deceptively expensive, especially if you start thinking about the comparative quality of those services. But our income and capital gains tax rates are low, especially if you are very rich! I made myself sad

Degoogled and upamazon’d. Don’t expect a Foss-friendly environment, just a different flavor of enshittification. Also no source

I’m not disputing your claim, but can you help me understand how paper straws are less usable/more hostile to people with disabilities? I’m struggling to see how the material choice would impact accessibility, but it seems like you have a pretty clear impact in mind

Respect to those folks. A miserable ride is often rewarding because it’s one of those lows that is eminently temporary and gives you an appreciation for the highs, especially if you are dressed appropriately so as not to catch a cold or some such. Kind of like shoveling snow for that sweet sweet mug of hot chocolate on the sofa afterwards. But yeah, also a good city will provide alternative options for its citizens, trains, buses, rideshare even. If a 30 mile bike ride is the only alternative to driving from place A to place B, your government doesn’t want you to have any kind of freedom to choose how you get from place A to place B, if there are no affordable housing options or good job opportunities that change that equation, your government is working on behalf of the big car manufacturers and dealers to keep you enslaved in debt to them, which is pretty fucked up

FYI, I’m pretty sure “at the behest of” means “as requested by”, but it looks like you meant something more like “to the detriment of” or “at the cost of”

This makes one of the “solutions” from the article: “A law was introduced at the end of 2023 that will eliminate the need for permits and environmental impact assessments for bridges that are being widened to add lanes as part of renovations.” look particularly shortsighted. Infrastructure is a maintenance debt that we are reckoning with, so we will make it easier to build specifically bigger infrastructure so that in 25 years we will have an even bigger problem to solve? Not to mention the concept of induced demand meaning that those lanes are going to increase the amount of vehicles using the bridge, which would be exactly the kind of thing that should get an environmental assessment, versus repurposing some lanes for sustainable transit or building a separate bridge for those modes