The virus can persist for days in dry crap, which is the primary way it's spread to humans, when they disturb it

Yeah it's a good idea to try to get people concerned about concerning issues

No problem, there are never rats on ships

Window 11 is painful to use. Things draw in like I'm on a Pentium 3 with 256mb of RAM.

If you can't spy on me without killing performance don't do it.

Firewood permits are only for falls here in California. They're still cheap at least.

As far as I can tell that is essentially true. The restrictions seem to be more on what they can or cannot do with rates than anything else. However they also still have to apply for permits for things like anyone else, and here in California can by stymied by the coastal commission.

You are probably Gen x. Or at least younger boomer. I say that because what you probably experienced is a unique phenomenon only Gen x saw which was a lot of crappy teachers because there was a whole bunch of people who went to college to get out of the Vietnam draft and they just hung out in college until the war was over. When they were done they had to cobble together a degree and a bunch of them went into teaching and they really suck that it. Most of them became history teachers which is why Americans suck so much at knowing history...

Those guys are long gone and anyone left in education is extraordinarily dedicated because the pay really really really sucks especially after that much education. Also you work a lot. You don't have a choice you can't function as a teacher unless you are working your ass off. You are constantly busting your ass on lesson plans and you spend Summers putting them together. The state gives you guidelines not a complete guide and plan to follow. You still have an enormous amount of work to do there on top of grading all the papers and providing tutoring.

Yeah back in the late 80s and early 90s we had a small rash of bad teachers. They are long long gone but as usual old people cannot comprehend the idea of that change happens and it's something that occurred when they were young isn't occurring anymore. Not sure why old people do that but they all do. I do it too I just try to catch myself doing it and I sometimes fail.

Our institutions have broken down and our democracy is collapsing. We have had several major Court rulings that stripped voting rights from millions and millions of Americans. Our courts have repeatedly ruled that the right wing extremists in charge right now can gerrymander but the moderates who oppose them cannot.

If you have a national Congress and one state steals votes from millions of their voters it's up to the other states to correct that. But the courts of course have been captured by those right wing extremists so here we are.

More importantly you have county level voters suppression. Basically you have a network of volunteers made up of little old ladies and little men combined with middle-aged dudes trying to climb the ladder in the Republican party. They do things like millions of illegal challenges to voter signatures or registrations and take over local voting infrastructure and send broken voting machines to Blue districts resulting in multi-hour wait times to vote on election Day.

Basically at the moment America is barely a democracy. If the right wing really fucks the economy up then the public at large can still take them out of power but it requires a super majority to do it.

It's possible that the right wing will fuck up so fast and so hard that the public won't finish letting them have everything and finish killing democracy but it's still a long shot right now. If the rest of the world wants to help you could spend a few hundred million or billion on propaganda to counteract Russian media propaganda... But you're ruling class doesn't want that. The collapse of the American democracy is also collapsing America hegemony and Europe is hoping to take over as the leader of the world and get their currency to replace the dollar. If that happens their guys get to be the first trillionaires instead of ours. And at the end of the day that's what all this is about

Iran has demonstrated they can take 1/5 of the global economic output off the table and there is fuck all anyone can do about it.

We haven't quite got to the point where we are willing to use nuclear weapons for the sake of convenience. As terrible as we can be we aren't really willing to let Trump genocide an entire country and I don't think the rest of the world is either. And nothing else would allow us to stop them from closing the straight.

Trump gave them something better than a nuclear bomb. He showed the world that Iran is in control of the street and that there isn't really a hell of a lot anyone can do about that unless we are willing to kill millions of women and children.

I know there are some people here that absolutely are. Especially if it means affordable gas. But they are very much still the minority.

Iran won't just sit on its thumbs either. The United States really fucked up when it took out Iraq and Afghanistan for no particularly good reason. It really showed the world unless you have something on the order of a nuclear weapon that you're not a country you're a vassal state. The same thing happened with Ukraine after they gave up their nukes.

What I ran has shown here is that you can have something just as if not more devastating than a nuclear weapon and we have Trump to thank for that.

Honestly by the time the great negotiator is done I wouldn't be surprised if we aren't a vassal state of the Islamic Republic. This is the guy who bankrupted casinos and couldn't sell alcohol and gambling to Americans after all.

Why did you make a pedophile president of the United States?

Anyway as for how it'll be turned against you, have you not noticed all your civil rights being eroded? Like how did gerrymandering is making it so they don't need to care about how you vote anymore. Eventually you're going to want to try to do something more radical like protest or just some generic violence and none of that's going to work because with a 24/7 surveillance state you won't be able to use any of the traditional mechanisms for dealing with the collapse of democracy and getting things back on track.

Your ruling class that you seem to think you're a member of for some reason is going to use all that tracking to make sure you stay in your lane like a good little slave. Like in China you'll be woken up at 3:00 in the morning and given some weak tea and biscuit for your 14-hour shift.

Eventually they'll be completely tired of using you at all having replaced you with machines and he will be relegated to the kind of life the American Indians had on the reservations before the casinos. If you get uppity they will send drones to blow you in the kingdom come. If you even show signs of developing past bronze age technology they will wipe you out just to be on the safe side. Basically treating you like vermin at that point.

But it's fine I'm sure any day now you're going to get rich and be hobnobbing in the Jeffrey Epstein memorial ballroom at the White House... And you'll be able to join Trump and company on the new Epstein Island. You're certainly not just some schlub posting to a dying or frankly dead website

Catching the occasional murderer isn't worth a 24/7 super surveillance Network right?

The thing is people who think that it is worth it aren't going to speak up here or even look at the comments.

One of the things I'm seeing among the right wing is that they know that their beliefs are wrong and that they will be hurt by implementing them but they want them so badly that they are withdrawing into safe spaces where their never challenged.

And I mean never challenged. Not even for a brief second. Because the right wing has become so cartoonishly evil that the slightest challenge breaks the spell like The emperor's New clothes.

You can't reach them anymore. Maybe their families could but they've cut themselves off from their families too. It's why people keep calling the right wing a cult.

So when you are an adult you don't go pointing fingers at a problem you just fix the goddamn problem.

Accountability sounds cool until everybody starts fighting amongst themselves uselessly like crabs in a bucket.

You don't go blaming people you recognize the problem and fix it.

Only as I described on another post we can't do that because the problem is structural.

Specifically we used to just kick low academic achievers to the curb and that was okay because we had factories for them to work in where they could make a living. Those factories are stuffed with robots or overseas. So we can't do that anymore.

So we aren't abandoning them because we frankly can't, you can't have millions of young kids with absolutely nothing to do sitting around waiting for nothing. If all else fails they'll get violent. And you don't have the testicle fortitude to just kill them out right.

So here we are with the problem and absolutely no solution. Any solution that actually would solve the problem isn't acceptable to you

So you point fingers. Doesn't solve the problem but it does let you temporarily avoid facing real solutions for a bit longer. Keep it up for another few decades and you'll get to die without actually having to recognize the problem or its potential solutions. And that's basically the American dream now.

A lot of times you're going to find kids are using social media because they don't have opportunities to interact in the real world.

Suburbs are isolating as are cars and car based cities. At least for anyone who doesn't themselves own a car.

Cars have become ludicrously expensive so that fewer and fewer kids actually have access to them. Remember it's not enough to have your license you need to actually have reliable and ready access to an automobile so you can get around. It doesn't help that your parents probably can't lend you the car on Saturday because they're at work picking up an extra shift to make rent this month.

You can't even tell the little shits to just go get a part-time job because they're competing with people in their 50s to work at McDonald's and McDonald's is going to pick the 50-year-old because they know that person has to show up to work whether they want to or not.

So what you are most likely seeing is just poor kids versus the rich kids. The poor kids make heavy use of social media because that's the only mechanism for socialization they have outside of lunch time or a 3-hour bus ride.

Honestly it's always been a bit of a problem we've complained about teenagers hogging the phone for years. It's another one of those problems we don't like to acknowledge because fixing it will require huge structural changes that would bite into the profits of car companies and fuck if we're going to do that.

We know what the problem is. 8 years ago when my kid was in high School their math class had 45 students in it and there weren't even enough chairs for everybody to sit. This was not one of the poor school districts either. Not a rich School district but not poor by any measure. Meanwhile covid hit education like a brick.

On top of that parents are working two or three jobs just to keep a roof over their kids head.

We also don't allow public schools to abandon kids anymore and they're aren't any jobs for a high school dropout or frankly even a College dropout at this point. Certainly not something that you can make a living off of.

This means that you've got students who traditionally would have disappeared from the system but are now being educated and they bring the numbers down. Incidentally this is also why private schools look so good, if your grades start to drop in a private school they kick you out almost immediately. They aren't any better generally than public schools unless they have a lot more money and even then they can abandon anyone who isn't making the grade.

So basically a whole bunch of people we used to just toss into factory work can't do that work anymore because we either automated it away or we shipped it to china, and now those kids are still in the system and they are struggling and on top of that you have all the other social problems like covid and the leftovers from that and their parents not having any time because of over work etc etc.

There isn't actually a solution to any of this that doesn't involve massive transformations of society that a bunch of old farts like us are going to veto.

We could make the numbers go up and the class sizes go down by kicking all those kids to the curb but the problem with that obviously is we don't have anything to do with them and now they're just milling about getting into trouble. And we aren't going to do the kind of massive government programs Ala the New deal that would be required to employ that many people who struggle with high school algebra...

On the plus side the declining numbers and the increased cost of managing those kids means that we can point to how bad the numbers are and use that as an excuse to dismantle public education so I guess there is that. Think of all the tax savings for billionaires and all the profit when we privatize what's left of education.

It's the same thing. Whether it's talking about being a rugged individualist by solving the problem of our collapsing of energy grid due to AI data centers by throwing up solar panels or threatening violent revolution the key here is you have given up on electoral politics because you don't think you can win.

That's the thesis of the entire discussion going on here both with your comments and everyone else's.

My point is that's just cope. Electoral politics is the only path forward and if we completely lose that then it's over. We become a Russian style oligarchical feudal system. And there's no getting out of that anymore because modern technology and weapons means that the level of control over the peasantry that can be exercised is unlike anything the kings of old could imagine and they still had a lot of control back then and maintained the feudal system for centuries..

What pisses me off is we haven't lost yet. There is a small chance that the fascists will be beaten back due to their own incompetence.

But having people dreaming about nonsense like everybody having their own personal solar systems or beating a standing army with a handful of civilian firearms isn't helping. It's a thought terminating cliche that lets us say fuck it and not have to stand in line to vote on a school night...