It's because Russia invaded Ukraine and the Republican party wouldn't allow Biden to properly arm Ukraine in order to defend themselves even though it was very very much in US national interest to do so.

The Republican party is basically a franchise of the Russian government at this point. Some of it is because of direct bribes and some of it is because Trump actively protects Russian interests and some of it is because the Republicans know they get a shitload of indirect help through propaganda on social media from the Russian government.

It doesn't matter the specific reason why a specific Republican politician defends the interests of Russia over the interests of the United States.

The question you need to be asking yourself is do my interests align with Russia's so much that I'm willing to vote Republican when they are actively doing the bidding of the Russian government.

And I think if you answer that question honestly you're going to come up with a no.

With very few exceptions every single person who votes Republican knows they should have stopped years ago but they keep doing it. I think we called that the definition of insanity.

And Ubi is worthless by itself. If all you do is do Ubi then monopolies coordinate and jack up all their prices and suck out all the money that you're getting from the Ubi system.

I've actually seen this in the real world. Companies will give out stipends for the company cafeteria that you use through an app. When they do this they also typically outsource the running of the cafeteria. The company that has the contract for the cafeteria then Jack's up prices until the stipend no longer even covers your lunch.

Typically the way this gets solved is somebody eventually complains that the prices in the cafeteria are ridiculous and the company yells at the vendor running the cafeteria and they cut their prices a bit.

In this analogy the company is functioning as the government and it's regulating the market, in this case the market is basically the vendor running the cafeteria who's afraid of losing a contract.

My point being we have seen Ubi fail in the real world. Unless the government basically steps in and regulates markets then Ubi is basically worthless, but the problem with that is Ubi is only ever put forward by tech bro libertarian types that want to use it as an excuse to eliminate all government regulation and put in dog eat dog techno feudalism that they pretend it's capitalism...

Shortly before renouncing your us citizenship?

Because if it wasn't you would know that America is a winner-take-all first past the post voting system which by its very nature and design inevitably results in only two viable political parties with all other political parties just being spoiler candidates propped up by the two major parties.

As such when you take part in American politics as anything more than a low information voter you directly engage with one of the two major parties specifically with their primary election systems.

If you're really fancy and sophisticated while you're doing that you are also pushing for reform to the voting system like ranked choice voting as well as reforms to the primary system, which incidentally following Hillary Clinton the Democrats did.

If you knew all that you would understand why vote blue no matter who exists. It's because it's currently in America we have a center right party and a openly fascistic party and under the circumstances you throw in with the center right because at least there is a chance for reform instead of just being sent off to a gulag.

They even let you vote for real over there in russia? We can vote here we just have to wait in line three or four hours if we want to vote for a Democrat. Oh and you can expect to have to go down to the courthouse and prove you're who you say you are if you're a Democrat because your signature and your voter registration will get randomly challenged illegally by Republican operatives.

I mean we don't have Fair elections but we do have elections and they are at least real.

You got about 748 from Trump's tax cuts. You're gonna pay around 740 more in gas this year. Factor in inflation from tariffs and you're out about $1200.

Son, are you winning?

Shows how little they think of you.

Of those stupid delivery robots running into traffic or knocking people over or just running into things and doing damage.

They are remote controlled like the cars but I think like the cars they try to run autonomously as much as they can but they're not as well monitored because the assumption is they can't do as much damage.

They're not going to kill you but they're going to fuck up the front end of your car if one of them hits you.

I am really sick and tired of billionaire tech Bros being allowed to experiment in cities a personal risk to myself.

You don't just order elections to stop. You use voter suppression tactics to prevent them from going on. If you already know the outcome because you picked who can vote and who can't is it really an election anymore?

The Republican party uses a handful of county level voter suppression tactics. They have a network of volunteers hoping to get ahead in the party that spend hours illegally challenging signatures and voter registrations. Meanwhile they get some of their people in charge of the county positions because nobody pays much attention to those and do stuff like send broken voting machines to Blue districts or accidentally close polling locations early. During the 2024 election we had 7 hour wait times to vote in swing States.

So they don't do anything flashy or showy that you would notice on a national level. What they do is very pedestrian and boring and doesn't make good news so nobody pays attention to it.

I mean to be fair predicting the human race is going to end within 50 years isn't exactly amazing Kreskin territory.

We put a has been game show host with a long history of crimes and rapes and pedophilia in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and he tried to invade another country, made a fool of himself and his country, and he is still polling at over 40%.

Meanwhile half the planet thinks the world is less than 10,000 years old and that climate change is a hoax by big science.

I don't see how we make it out of that kind of a mess. If we didn't have nukes sure. But sooner or later some religious lunatic is going to get their grubby little paws on those things and it's game over.

He's not going to get a third term. Trump is cut back heavily on resources to prevent terrorist attacks in the hopes that he'll get a second to 9/11, going so far as to put a 22-year-old former grocery clerk in charge of the nation's anti-terrorist organizations, but the various Nations out there that would support a large-scale attack on us soil aren't stupid enough to take that bait.

The goal of 9/11 was to force America to overreact and attack uninvolved parties so that America would be substantially weakened. It worked and it was the single most successful terrorist operation in human history. Bush Jr use the attack as a excuse to get a second term and to invade two countries in order to steal their oil. That was great for the American oil Man but the American economy got hammered and the American working class got hammered even harder. The country is much weaker now.

That said that doesn't help Afghanistan or Iraq both of which were heavily damaged. And there isn't really a viable Target we could go after that isn't just the country that would be financing the terrorist attack and therefore getting the shit kicked out of them.

The reason Trump has to back off Iran and give them basically everything is because the American people aren't going to accept a draft. If I ran blew up a couple of large buildings and killed two or three thousand Americans then you can bet your ass Trump could rally people around him and put boots on the ground. It would be a terrible Quagmire and a complete clusterfuck but it would get Trump a third term.

It would also mean the Iranian regime would get overturned for real. Lots and lots of executions by the strong man Trump would put in charge

Anyway without Iran taking that bait it's only a matter of time before RFK is gone.

It's possible Benjamin netanyahu would arrange for a terrorist attack to bail Trump out but I think the risk there is too high. It might come out enough the people decide Israel was responsible and if that happens there is a lot of simmering anti-Semitism that demagogues could make use of. Netanyahu is a psychopathic asshole but he's not a complete lunatic. It was a reasonably safe gamble to put Trump in the White House even though Trump has strong ties to neo-nazis and white supremacists, but I think arranging a terrorist attack on us soil would be a bridge too far for him. Not that he wouldn't do it just it it's too high risk even for him.

Of course who knows because the people of Israel don't exactly like netanyahu. He stays in power because of a quirk of their political system.

This kind of chaos and stupidity is kind of the problem with putting psychopaths and idiots and lunatics in charge everywhere...

Living paycheck to paycheck. Yeah you're going to think short term when you spend decades living like that.

When you grow up poor you learn to take what you can get the moment you can get it because you know in advance something horrible is going to happen and wipe out any attempt at savings or long-term thinking you do.

This is extremely well documented behavior among poor children and it's one of the few social studies you can consistently reproduce.

I mean sure you can opt out of their data sets but they've got 50 shell companies at least. Good luck tracking down every single one of them and opting out of every single one of their data sets.

That seems to be the thing nobody is considering here. All of this crap comes from the right wing because this is about control and that's what the right wing is always about. If you go all the way back to when the right wing got its start it's literally the side the monarchists were sitting in at the French assembly.

The fundamental concept that underpins the right wing philosophy is that there is a natural order and hierarchy that we all fit into and that we should obey the people above us and commands the people below us.

With that kind of belief system you're going to get surveillance because you aren't going to be able to maintain control otherwise.

If you look at $40 is having your pocket picked they just don't care about you anymore. You are no longer a worthwhile consumer to them.

Increasingly the focus of large corporations is on more affluent consumers that would see $40 as peanuts. Like if somebody picked your pocket and walks off with a nickel you just wouldn't care. You probably wouldn't even notice the missing nickel. That's the kind of consumer Disney wants.

In the past they couldn't ignore guys like you and me because another company would come along to service us but these days they can just identify those companies and buy them out or run them out of business before they become any sort of long-term threat to their core Business of servicing highly affluent consumers.

Basically anyone who is in filthy stinking rich is being just kind of shut out of pretty much everything.

Are you going to prioritize this over other issues? Are you going to look past moral panic so I even try to understand what a moral panic is?

Are you going to keep voting for politicians that promise you low taxes and then do stuff like this?

Because if not then they can pretty much do whatever they want and when you go to vote you will prioritize some other thing over privacy and civil rights.

That seems to be more of a modern myth than actual reality. Data shows that undergraduate college enrollment went up about 1 % this year (https://nscresearchcenter.org/final-fall-enrollment-trends/ ).