I prefer the second picture, but angled back 30°

Oh yeah, we have so many trains. They go everywhere, we have a very comprehensive network of them

Oh wait… Did you mean passenger trains?

Oh, things will get worse… We haven’t actually felt hardly any of the effects. When someone loses their job, it sucks, but it’s not actually that bad until they’re getting evicted or can’t buy food. Cutting public health and research isn’t bad until we have the next pandemic. Cutting all these government subsidies isn’t that bad until the farmers go under and we can’t find healthy food

I don’t see that as defeatism, I see it as the working class is about to be very, very angry about the same things at the same time, and that means opportunity for change

It was their fucking bill… You realize literally ever republican except rand Paul voted for it right?

I could exploring why it makes complete sense but holy shit, take a second to think post the talking points or you’re not worth the time it takes to lay it out

Okay, so Musk’s children show up at the department of XXX. There’s no one there, the building managers who hold the keys could hand the keys over, but they don’t know who they are because the chain of command is at home.

Also, the Marshalls are at home, so the doge children are showing up alone to navigate this problem. So they break the door down?

But there’s no one there, so they search the building door by door for a server room. But they encounter a secure area, which they have neither keycards or associated pins for. So they break down the door?

And now the local police are alerted, but they continue on. They break down a bunch more doors, and find the server room. They proceed to hack random servers in the hopes of finding what they’re looking for

No, no… Shutting down the government would create endless hurdles for doge, each one that is difficult for a competent person to navigate

No, it’ll throw them for a loop. Fucking musk got social security records and thought every entry was getting payments, despite many being dead. The dumb fuck didn’t even check their status before crying fraud - which is a serious crime that must be investigated

The records contain everyone who ever got it, dead or alive

These people are imbeciles. These chuckle fucks are struggling to accomplish their goals with unlimited power, you think they could navigate a shut down government?

Oh, they know. They just lost the oligarch vote, and now they’re simping to get them back

It’s fucking sickening. This is the one piece of meaningful power they have until the midterms, and Republicans didn’t even bother consulting them.

Now they want to give it up, for what? A pinky promise they’ll play nice? To make sure Trump doesn’t get ammunition to blame Democrats for everything?

Fucking coward.

I told my parents that by learning to refurbish old things and learning skills like how to sew my own clothes, I was actually gaining necessary skills

They still think I was joking

They actively oppose change as the planet burns and survival becomes unaffordable

They’re supposed to be a counterbalance, instead people have been screaming for change so long that they’re being taken in by fascist lies

They’ve become the party of one step forward two steps back (before the other side gets their turn and full on sprints to gain more ground)

They are a right wing party, and they’ve decided their latest strategy is to move even further right and give up more ground to capture voters who hate them, and to actively block change that the people are demanding. They see the left as their greatest enemy, they tell their supporters stop bothering them, and even now they want to work with the fascists

Universal healthcare and doing something about housing. Worker protections and standing up to big business. Obstruct Trump and everything he and Elon are doing.

These things have a ton of support across the political “spectrum”, but are apparently totally off the table

The Democratic party is opposed to all meaningful change… They lost this election because they offer no hope, milquetoast solutions, and they don’t fight back.

Pressuring the voters stopped being a valid point after election day - fascists are in office and their answer is to say “we’ll get them next time, stop bugging us”

Yeah, that’s not really how that works… Coronaviruses are particularly quick to evolve, and that’s still with tens of millions of cases. Immunity is immunity, if your body knows how to fight it it’s barely going to chip at your defenses

I have many notebooks. They range from pocket sized to 8" x 5" when they’re for ideas. I’ll occasionally use larger ones for other things, but I want to take down my thoughts quickly, and I really only want the essence of them, so I write in references to other things, images, and a short phrase to title it for context

The nice thing is I’ve got almost 2 decades of notebooks like this - they’re scattered all through my things, basically by era.

And because of that, I don’t need to fill or organize notebooks - every few years I’ll see one I like and make it the idea book

I’ve gone through like 10x as many for work, but I just throw those away when they’re full

She’d probably just call them heroes and pose with them for pictures

And the parents are vaccinated

She’s surely vaccinated though… Because until recently it was required, and the vaccine is like 97% effective

Oh no, these are separate events, it keeps happening

Honestly they’re probably taking a loss to punish people who miss payments on their eggs. One person on the debt treadmill is worth a lot more than a few cents… Loans are so shady as an industry, the smaller they are the more they’re just looking to further exploit the poorest people

Either that or they think the dollar is about to deflate lol

Honestly, it’s scale. It dillutes the humanity to nothing, and all that remains is our worst selfish impulses

Communities become so large that bonds and reputation mean nothing. We create organizations to try to artificially recreate that, and they grow so large their primary purpose is to self purpetuate

It’s hard to muster up the will to hurt people right in front of you, it’s much easier if you can abstract it all to rules and numbers, and separate the actor from the decision maker

I think the only way something like communism works is like the fediverse - we need to find a way to weave ourselves into small communities that can act together. You can’t let power sit anywhere for long, or you’ll draw in power hungry sociopaths like flies - but inside a community they have to keep on good terms with others

We still have to collaborate, but if we shared methods and designs openly we could produce a lot of stuff locally. We don’t have to always be scaling up - if you have a thousand people, you don’t have to produce a 100k phones a year to make a phone. Working at that small scale even let’s you get creative and make better things - there’s all sorts of technologies that we don’t have access to only because they can’t be produced at scale

Plus it means people would be smarter and more skilled… Capitalism wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and that makes for craftsman that require a whole supply chain to be useful. Giving up scale means you have to make things last and be easily reparable. It means picking and choosing between your priorities

Know what? I endorse it. Aside from the cyber truck, if you want to pretend, ok take that as “I was bamboozled”. But the cyber truck… There’s no hiding that. There’s no hiding the timeframe on that. You can’t just call that POS a Toyota

Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Deal with the consequences… It’s just spray paint, if anything it’s protective compared to the lack of any kind of paint. Take it on the chin

Yup. I’m glad I had this cool as Caribbean co-worker who now and again would “teach me the facts of the world” when I first entered the workforce

The world ain’t fair, you gotta play the game. It saved me so much learning through failure - sometimes you gotta slow down so you have room to pull a miracle out of your ass. Sometimes you gotta play it close to the vest. Manage their expectations and they’ll be grateful, give them your all and they’ll only ask for more

It’s so very true. I add at least an hour, if not a day, before I commit something - unless it’s an emergency. Then I pull out the stops and drink a pot of coffee, and they worry about losing me, because my normal pace is enough that they get new features and when the chips are down and they’re losing money I’ll find fix it today, if not tomorrow morning

You have to know when to drag your feet, when to pull out the stops, and what you need to keep to yourself. They don’t care that I keep my mornings for myself, don’t come to meetings, and occasionally can’t be reached for a day… To then I’m a miracle worker, not a workhorse. They’re happy with my output, because I balk at anything that takes more than 5 minutes and under promise, then over deliver. But when they’re panicking, I tell them I’ll make it work no matter what it takes. And I still wait an hour if it didn’t take me all night

People beat workhorses to make them go faster, they fear losing a magician. Magicians are eccentric. They’re allowed to demand accommodations - but you have to keep up the mistique. Otherwise you’re just a flawed workhorse, because people are kinda stupid, managers and owners especially so

A workhorse seems replaceable, even if they’re better than the magician

It’s a learned skill… I’ve fucked it up in the past and broke the illusion by coming through too quickly once it became an emergency. But if you have knowledge they don’t, they don’t know what takes how long anything takes, even technical people. You have to play it up, because once the magic is broken for any reason, you’re now a lazy workhorse

Humans are fucking dumb. Manage expectations properly and reality is secondary, optics are everything.