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

"What? You are reading for fun? Don't you have a life? What's wrong with you? Why aren't you engaging in drinking, drugs, sex, and other behaviors that will lead to teen pregnancy?"

I really wanted to do this one, though.

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...

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.

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.

Billionaires don't want basic income because billionaires no longer want there to be a capitalist economy with consumers.

In a capitalist economy and a consumer economy billionaires are completely dependent on those consumers for their wealth, power and prestige.

Think of it like this, let's say you lose your job and you can't find another but your extended family all chip in and keep giving you money that would bug you right?

You would want to be dependent on them. And let's say you didn't like your extended family. Let's say you had nothing but disdained for them. You would absolutely not want to be dependent on them and their Goodwill.

That's the position billionaires are in with consumers and employees. They are completely dependent on them. But bizarrely unlike you with your dependency on your relatives they have a shitload of money and power they can use to break that dependency.

So think of it like this, let's say you were a real asshole and you decide that you were going to rob all your relatives who have been helping you out blind so that you want dependent on them anymore because you had all their money. That's what billionaires are trying to do. Take everything for themselves and leave nothing. And then create a system where they never have to be dependent on anyone else again and everyone else has to bend over backwards worshiping them or else.