Yeah, and we did we found massive fraud from 2020-2024.

Am I a traitor? Am I a spy?

If anything, the people who orchestrated the 2020 election should be shot as traitors, and the spies should be hung from the neck until dead.

They are the traitors. The people who stole our government, installed a puppet president, and again "fundamentally changed' this country.

Fixing it is putting panties in wads because each illegal deportee is one less Democrat vote, one less fraud recipient.

And fuck your incoming downvotes. Fuck them long and hard, with my favorite -- the splintered phonepole.

Fucking traitors. Fuck! Makes me want to throw up!

Two words that illustrate how badly "but but but what would the neighbors think?" that permeate government: TOXIC EMPATHY

Rule with cold hard facts, not feels.

This is an example of ruling with feels.

So's not clearing your brush and deadwood in California because it may impact some bird.

So's opening the gates at the border and saying 'no one's illegal!'

Downmod me all you want. Genie's out of the bottle. The sense that America jumped the shark is now quickly spreading, when it is readily found in comments in youtube re: current affairs.

You mean.. from "I only use you on friday night on a phone call with an old friend, and too look up how to fix my car / washer / dryer whatever" to "Not using you at all?"

Seriously. Slashdot Collective says 'eat the rich?' I say "fuck all the techbros."

Yes, I'm narrowing down the carnage to just the techbros (and tech sisters, like that nutjob that headed Theranos)

They've unleashed a new cancer on society, by amplifying voices that were best left handing out flyers at street intersections. Not everyone deserves to have the biggest bullhorn in the world.

all-or-nothing types, which .. I am one of. But I don't take full breaks from my devices. This is rather surprising, and i'm not sure if it's come about due to age and being worn down by time, or if I ran out of fucks to give about what others think.

What I dodo is take a break from the news. All news. From all sources. To me, they're all equally broken and suspect, every single one of them from A to Z an from east to west and north to south.

Once I do that, my "wellness" markedly improves, while I still use my phone as a camera, a texting machine (teletype, if you will?) a phone phone, email, etc. It is my walkman, my 110 camera, my little black book with pencil, and more. It's even a full-on movie camera, editing deck, and music maker. It's a library, with both local and remote books.

But I'll be goddamned if I let the newsman in, or the preacher, or the climate doomers, or any of the riffraff that currently is hell bent on telling me what to do. Fuck your rules. My toy, my rules.

Ultimately you are in control, the phone (at least the iphone) doesn't put tiktok in your hand and doesn't put a gun to your head while whispering "You will watch.. you will watch.. you will watch.."

Smartphone's too good of a toy to let go. You need discipline to use it in a way that doesn't rot your brain. Step #1 is stop the feeds, stop the scrolling, stop the news.

It makes me want to vomit, the way the United States and the United Kingdom have ceded production of raw materials to China and other countries.

We don't make new lead in the US.

We had trouble with copper until this one mine dared start up again.

Our steel mills have been sold off.

England can't even refine iron ore into steel anymore.

All of it for 'environmental' reasons.

Listen up, cupcakes: A country that can't work it's own raw materials will be subjugated by those who do.

Here endeth the lesson on national sovereignty.

Great, it works on depression. I can vouch for that.

So, how to get motivated to work out when the depression's got you by the yarballs?

Ahahha.... no answer for that one, right?

Now, find me one that works with PTSD.

Sometimes I feel the psychology and psychiatry fields are populated with naught but charlatans.

Hear, hear!

Why'd you anon this? It's prescient.

We're not missing anything. I think most regulars here, whether sane or insane, already know the house of cards is collapsing.

Go walk a mall. Dead dead dead. I had to go to the Galleria in Ft Lauderdale last Saturday PM and got covered parking. Plenty of spaces. 10 years ago it woudl've been jam-packed.

Housing being bought up by a very few companies so they can rent them out instead, at huge markup.

Companies, like you say, buying each other out or outright failing. We're gonna end up with Buy-'N-Large.

I may yet see the total collapse of the US at the hands of the Democrats in my lifetime. And I doubt I have 2 more decades left in me.

My prediction: The economies of the US, UK, GER, FRA collapse, leading to simultaneous Civl Wars in those four countries. The collapse will merely be the trigger. The immigration and race problems that the media is trying to suppress will be the main course of this war. And it's the same in those four countries and maybe others. Unchecked immigration is started to rub the natives wrong. And the natives in all those countries can be a very ornery lot.

mod me down, I don't care. When you have rioters in the street torching houses in the name of "no one is illegal' or whatever rot they're spouting that particular day, you'll "get it.'

- or -

WW III thanks to Putain Putin and Xi.

And so does the LGBTQPIA+++ NO CARRIER groups.

And Communists / leftists /Marxists / Palestinian sympathizers

The thing is, many of those can't co-exist with themselves, let alone 'normal' people.

See my sig for my thoughts on the subject.

Best one i've had in miami was inside an italian supermarket. Literally in the center of it. It's in North Miami, "Laurenzo's." 50-60 year old place. They have a fantastic brick oven made in Modena, and know how to use it. My shop used to lunch there often.

If the business has a conveyor belt oven, it's shit. and even if it has a real oven, you need skill to operate it and make good pizza.. and most here dont.

you mean, the shit franchises are in trouble. Pizza Hut, Little Greasers, Papa John's, Anthony's, etc.

but not the locals. We got 2 new ones in 2 years.

I grew up with Pizza Hut as a sit-down restaurant that also delivered. Now it's all deliveries. Anyone remember 70's - 80's Pizza Hut? checker tablecloths, red soda glasses.. stained glass lamps, and good pizza? All of that ceased to exist near the end of the 90s. Enshittification isn't just a computer thing.

i also worked at a pizzeria in my teen years, a then-brand-new one in my hometown. It's still there. They endured, persevered, grew. tip o' the hat for Faccio Pizza!

No, sir. The good pizzerias are still around, but they don't have the billboards, they don't have the TV ads. They just have word-of-mouth.

Bought a nice yamaha G-60A made-in-japan 1968 classical guitar off craigslist. Cleaned up real nice.

Found a job in it once, too. My worst IT job, and I stayed only a year, but it sure beat the convenience store I was working at, at that time. 2016-2018 was really rough on me.

I'd rather CL than Marketplace or Mercado Libre or whatever.

Not everything requires flash and dash and java and popups and dancing red peppers.

No. Luxury goods always attracts a certain type of person who will put themselves in terrible financial trouble just to drive that Benz, or that huge Lexus SUV, or Range Rover, or Mcmansion, when the brutal truth is they don't even have Toyota money. They barely make the payments, neglect all maintenance, and run 'em into the ground, but they just have to look good when they pick up the kids they didn't want to have at the school they can't afford.

These people are what i call the "Fake it 'til you make it" crowd. and Apple is a favorite of theirs. I noticed it as early as 2009.

And if they can't have the real thing, they'll fake it. Look up "upbadging."

Partly disagree. That first screen was the nose under the camel's tent. It was soon co-opted for car config, then nav, then infotainment, and now has grown to a laptop.

The injuries and accidents of people backing into kids are easily solved by a walkaround of the car before you get in. Takes 10 seconds. Any flats? Any oil slicks? Any coolant puddles? Any cats / kids / dogs / trikes / whatnots behidn the car? No? In we go, belt on, engine start, putter away. Do this every time.

A 15 second walk around the vehicle to ensure the space is clear and the car's good to go is apparently too much to ask for.

The technological solution was the enabling event for the madness that assailed car interiors.

In retrospect, the airplane industry showed us the way in the 1980's when CRT MFDs first invaded the cockpit. But there, the madness stopped. The MFDs were for the eyeballs. For the hands, they retained yoke / stick, rudder pedals, throttle levers, flap levers, gear lever, speedbrake lever, etc. all of that remained manual.

The car guys went full-retard on MFDs for eyeballs and for control because it's cheaper than discrete physical controls. That's all. As always, we get the short end of the stick. We pay more, they spend less, we get less.

The one hole in my statement above is... IDK if Musk ordered Tesla to go control-less, but I know he did on Space-X. his vision of spacecraft control is like LCARS. Touch-slide everything, whearas pilots will tell you "We need to feel the thing, man." And divers would agree. Not motorists. They couldn't care less what they drive. But drivers? We care. Feel counts more than numbers.

"It's not the numbers that matter, but in the nature of the delivery" -- James May, on the linear way the 250 Ferrari V12 (the Colombo 3 liter) delivers it's 250-something HP. It's the feel. That was the episode where he finally got to drive a 250 California.

Until sanity returns, I'm retaining my glorious 2013 shitbox. It has all the right feels, and makes all the right noises, she's paid for, and fairly well-behaved. Mostly.

We had that. it was from roughly 1993-2013, before the first Federally-imposed intrusion of the screen into our cars.

Truly, the last gasp of the car, before it turned into a laptop-driven living room surrounded by Brutalist architecture.