There are several, actually.

But first let me note that we do give people "money for nothing" - how else do you explain all the billionaires? You're not seriously suggesting that any one single person is 1,000,000 more efficient or productive than the avenge? If not, wjy do they earn that much?

Also, we've given away money for nothing e.g. during Covid, and also other forms of gigantic subsidies on other occasions - just not to poor peole, but to corporations, i.e. those that already have enough.

Which brings me to the most important change we would have to implement: a mechanism for moving wealth down from the super rich back down. It's the unequal distribution of wealth that generates stagnant wages and recors profits, and also high prices on housing and real.estate. There are a myriad of mechanisms to give away government money to rich people. All the while government money comes from taxes, and taxes are paid predominantly by the average. Bht there's close.to zero mechanism to bring money back.

Even thinga like.UBI and social welfare, if implemented "on top" of the current system, would actually shift wealth uphill (we're going to finance it by yaxes, paid ny the middle class; and you're going to spend it all in rent and groceries, moving it to shareholders and owners of bing corporations).

We could tax ownership above a certain threshold (say, above $50m?) by 5-10% yearly. Or we could tax income above, say, $5-10m yearly by 90% or even higher. The mechanism doesn't matter, the important part.is that wealth flow mechanism must be in balance towards more flat distributions, hot tilted towards one side.

Alternatively we could revive various negative-interest monetary systems, e.g. the one of Sylvio Gesell at the beginning.of the 20th century, which inherently don't have the wealth distribution problem.

One way or another, the central pivoting point is uniformity of wealth distribution.

The method we use to calculate unemployment stats was explicitly designed to hide the real unemployment.

Unemployment is going to be closer to about 8 and 1/2 to 10%. That's the underemployed and people who gave up on looking.

It also doesn't include people who don't are elderly and would be working if they could get jobs but who are basically unemployable and a doctor wrote a disability script for them so they could get enough benefits to not die in the streets. That's a dirty little secret of our economy we don't like to think about let alone talk about.

But a better statistic is 2 and 5. That's the number of quality jobs. There are two quality jobs, defined is a job that can support a adult and isn't paycheck the paycheck, for every five Americans. Basically the majority of jobs cannot support an adult.

We are rapidly becoming a failed state. A third world country if you will. It's why we keep doing stupid crap like electing a game show host with a history of sexual abuse. People under a lot of pressure don't make good decisions. That's a TV trope but the real world that's not how it works

No you didn't.

Yeah I don't give a shit if they claim this isn't a problem because it unlocks when the fire alarm goes off screw that noise. This is a little bit of improper maintenance away from being a death trap.

I want to say I wouldn't shop there but I know damn well that with all the monopolies around nasty shit like this will spread everywhere and most places only have two or three grocery chains.

I want to take away the power corporations have to do this and I want to take away their power to starve people so that people aren't feeling the need to shoplift groceries.

As for shoplifting booze since a fuck wad like you is bound to bring it up, people over the age of 21 don't steal booze for the hell of it they're using alcohol to cope with the misery of modern Life. And kids do it here and there and that's nothing more than a youthful indiscretion. Alcohol is cheap and ultra high profit and don't be an idiot if you think corporations will cut prices because shoplifting goes down you don't know the first thing about supply and demand.

What happened to you to make you so mean spirited and angry that you would revel at the thought of people getting punished for stealing food or a little bit of booze to cope with life? Did your dad beat you or something? I get it that sucks but don't take it out on the rest of the world. Be better than your dad or whoever the fuck did this to you. End generational trauma.

No he meant unhoused. And what the fuck is wrong with you? Do you really think you're going anywhere but hell with an attitude like that?

On the other hand Trump said he's not going to heaven so maybe you just want to go to the same place Trump's going...

If you have people, you will eventually have crime...so yeah, if there are literally billions of accounts on Roblox, crime will happen, but they're doing a better job at protecting kids than your local school, playground, or grocery store. They have more mechanisms than online games have had in the past. It is pretty kid friendly and it's very clearly a gaming platform, as they say it is. It's not a dating platform and adult content is not allowed...even racy stuff probably exists, but I have never seen it. Billions of kids go on there just to play incredibly weird and stupid games made by other kids.

I don't know the specific details of those 32 families, but I am skeptical they're doing more than a cash grab. However, if the fucking state of Texas is suing them, you'd think you'd need a lot more than 32 stories when common estimates are that there are 5 billion Roblox accounts created.

I don't even personally like Roblox. I find their games dull and basic, but my kids love them. However, I hate Ken Paxton trying to get his name in the news with fake bullshit culture war stuff. Yeah, we know David Baszucki didn't donate to you or Trump so he needs to be punished. Anything bad on Roblox is 100x worse on Facebook and 100000x worse on Twitter...but hey...they're donors!

Paxton is just doing this to send a warning to any corporation out there...donate to us in our next election or we will weaponize our state or federal justice dept against you!!!! It's a routine cash-grab/shakedown. The Republican Party is sick of Silicon Valley staying out of elections as much has they have....they're making so much money, yet not bribing politicians the way oil companies have in the past. This cannot stand!!!!

To take food out of the mouths of hungry kids. They couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about children. I mean except for like they did in the Epstein files but I don't think that's what anyone means here...

The only question is which ulterior motive is the most prevalent. On the one hand this is red meat for voters so that they can offer them something other than a functioning economy. On the other hand they are trying to eliminate anonymity on the internet so they can relentlessly punish anyone who says anything they don't like while also pretending they are persecuted.

Whatever the result it won't help children but it will hurt you and me.

Unless they have evidence they're not presenting, this is some bullshit culture war fodder. Tariffs are tanking the economy?...oh nooz...please don't pay attention to the failing economy, your lower standard of living or inflation...your local Republican Party may not be delivering jack shit on the economy or your pocket book, but hey...they're fighting those Groomers in San Mateo!!!!

I'm on Roblox nearly daily with my kids...never seen shenanigans. Some obviously happen at some time, but they do have pretty good AI filters and it's very easy to report people. I'm honestly not sure what else they can do. They're way ahead of Twitter or Facebook....but hey, that's the fault of Roblox founder David Baszucki for not donating to Trump's Inauguration, right?

The complaint I hear about is usually over-moderation. Kids are dicks and many have reported my kids for non-issues. My son got banned from his favorite game when he was 10yo for standing in the same spot for too long...annoyed another kid of a similar age, the dumb kid reported him, and my son was crying for weeks while we appealed the ban. My kids have friends who had their accounts suspended for routine cursing. My kids have been kicked out by AI moderators for saying bad words while their mic was on. With AI watching you, it's not easy to be a predator on such platforms, I would imagine.

In order to produce enough food to feed a nation let alone the amount of excess food that the United States needs to produce in order to keep the rest of the world even moderately stable you need to do large scale industrial farming.

Small family farms are a pipe dream. They are also kind of pointless because as it stands we only need a few percentages of our population to grow all the food when it's done industrially. If you start trying to turn everybody in the farmers what you're going to have is a bunch of people who do not want to farm and who don't know how to do it and you're going to get food shortages.

Giving everybody a farm like Ubi is a overly simplistic solution favored by libertarian types who want to dream of Independence. We are not going to get away from having a large complex social structures even if teenagers hate them.

To understand that it could never fly in the current system and environment.

I get it libertarians get obsessed with Ubi because they think they can have the capitalist Paradise but they want and that they were promised as kids while having the socialist Utopia that deep down they really know they need.

It doesn't work. There's no simple answers to complex problems and just handing out cash, the simple answer to the complex problem of human beings tending to accumulate too much wealth and power coupled with our tendency to indulge in various forms of disdain and bigotry for people beneath us on the social ladder and the ability for the wealthy and powerful to exploit that tendency.

The billionaires are not going to sit quietly while you improve the quality of life of everybody at the expense of even a microscopic amount of their privilege and power. Remember if you create a system where everyone has a good quality of life then I can go online and tell Elon Musk to go fuck himself and there's not really anything he can do to hurt me. He's not going to like that because a huge part of his power comes from his ability to destroy anyone that significantly crosses him.

Not just Elon but all the billionaires.

That's a lever they are not going to just give up even accounting for the fact that they want that money for themselves.

Never mind the fact that you don't even have the political power to even try to do Ubi.

We watched as the private insurance company methodically sabotaged the affordable Care act until it was barely functional resulting in a law that while popular is still open to attack from a variety of vectors. If you think the billionaires wouldn't do that with Ubi then you're just not paying attention and you're not a serious person.

To be fair a lot of what makes palworld so popular is that it's Pokemon on a console besides the Nintendo switch. All you have is a Xbox or a PC there's a Pokemon game for you besides emulating old games

Nintendo has been very risk adverse lately sticking with things that they know are going to be successful. Their last big gamble was the Wii u which was a bit of a disaster. The cardboard stuff was super cheap so there was no risk there. Even with the amiibo things they waited until there was an already established market to enter it.

Fun fact the Republicans pushed through laws that require a certain number of audits for middle-income and lower income earners. They literally passed laws to encourage the IRS to audit you personally.

The idea was to make you angry at the IRS and then to use that anger to get tax cuts for their billionaire buddies. It worked

You know that old Looney tunes cartoon where Elmer fudd turns into a sucker? If you voted Republican in the last 50 years that's you.

I'm not the one you should be angry at by the way

That's all. One of the things they figured out years ago is that instead of just outright blocking left-wing policy they sabotage it so that they can make sure that it doesn't work.

They figured that out in the '80s. With the projects. Basically we took a shitload of people mostly extremely poor and very black and brought them from blasted out rural hellscapes where they barely had roofs and brought them into what were for the time fairly modern apartments.

Then Ronald Reagan got in charge and he pulled all of the government support those people need it in order to have jobs and lives and let them basically collapse while also structuring welfare programs to make it virtually impossible for their families to succeed. Meanwhile trillions of dollars was diverted to the suburbs from the inner cities.

The right wing does one of two things against the left wing. If the right wing is in power and the power is absolute they murder the left wing. They will also murder anyone who they suspect might benefit the left wing so if you're a centrist the right wing will murder you in a heartbeat.

If they're not in a position of absolute power they fall back on sabotage. So Ubi just becomes an excuse to cut all the other government programs that people need and then monopolies absorb all the money and then the right wing points and says see see see it doesn't work!

There is no point to trying Ubi without backing it up with a whole shitload of other reforms and programs. It becomes nothing more than a guaranteed failure that will be used to convince the public against any further efforts to make anyone's lives better

Because in 2025 the only person I could see making that comment is somebody between the ages of six and eight.

Nothing about any of those people is communist and I know you know that. And I know this is just bait.

But why? I mean for fuck sakes China has a private Health Care system. Pol pot just murdered people and seized their property and Stalin put a stop to the Communist revolution so that again he could just take all the money and power..

If you're not going to provide anything useful to the conversation why bother with these 1950s lies? Even the most ardent moron knows that they are bullshit. This isn't even like when the evangelicals come up with excuses to hate gay people. It's just sad really.