I don’t know you but I think the world would be a cooler place if you didn’t get shot.
At least based off this post you I feel we are better off with you than without you.
Also my wife has a super cool possum backpack which is like a plushie but with added utility, it even has cute baby possums on its head for extra adorableness.
I’m not 100% sure that it’s this one but if it’s not it’s very similar to this one https://www.etsy.com/listing/1773594130/snug-alongs-possumopossumbaby-possums
It’s true that consultants seem to love these “extremely clever” plays. I imagine if Harris wins, you’ll see a lot more “let’s switch the candidate out and get an excitement bump like that thing that worked that one time.”
I looked for data to try to quantify the demographics of Green Party voters and couldn’t find much, if you’ve got some I’d love to see it.
I suppose the thing that stands out to me is how Republican and Democratic programming works. Both parties enforce norms and spend a lot of time programming at their constituencies. I believe that trump was able to take over the Republican Party against the wishes of the party leadership because he intuitively understood this. He sorta hijacked this programming because he knew the dog whistles and catch phrases and was willing to shamelessly iterate and say whatever would work. Here’s a fun article about him thinking “drain the swamp” was a bad line and then embracing it wholeheartedly when it worked https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/2016-trump-explains-why-he-didnt-like-the-phrase-drain-the-swamp-but-now-does/2016/10/26/4a2f257a-9be0-11e6-b552-b1f85e484086_video.html
This programming is where we get political tropes from. It’s why if you see a thumbnail about “woke dei bullshit” you can be pretty sure that’s going to be a conservative complaint video.
When I look at the Green Party messaging, if they are trying to attract republicans as much as democrats, it’s weird. The comms are full of Republican third rails like social justice, the carousel says that the Green Party is the birthplace of the green new deal, the rail against corporate power. Now this isn’t to say there wouldn’t be anyone on the right that wouldn’t be cool with these ideas, but to frame it in these terms goes against decades of Republican talking points and programming.
It’s not like support for the green new deal is something of a question on the right. They have been upset about the non-green new deal since FDR passed it, and I’ve never seen a single Republican politician or talking head have anything but disdain for the green new deal. As you point out, they didn’t promote it because they like it, but as a way to knee cap AOC which backfired.
If you start with the belief that I hold that the Green Party has no chance of winning, which seems like a reasonable starting point. Every voter that would have voted for Harris and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for trump and every voter that would have voted for trump and instead votes for stein is net 1 vote for Harris.
I scroll around gp.org and it doesn’t have anything that looks like it’s aimed at attracting Republican voters. I do see a lot of stuff that seems like it could be aimed at attracting leftist and crunchy democratic voters. That’s not a criticism or anything, if that’s where their policy values are, that’s perfectly fine. But I just struggle to really think there are a ton of people about to vote for trump that are going to end up on that website and think “oh wow, finally a party that actually wants to work towards social justice.”
As someone that is left of the Democratic Party I recognize a lot of the things on this website, it’s a lot of the things the democrats have been promising and failing to deliver for a long time. Perhaps because so many of the talking points and policies are so familiar and feel so comfortable to me as someone who is disappointed in the democratic party’s failure to deliver on these things I find it hard to believe that republicans are looking at this site and thinking “I’ve found my people”
If the republicans thought that the Green Party was going to be an attractive option for their voters in 2000 they certainly adopted an odd strategy
Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president.
The ads by the Republican Leadership Council will begin airing Monday in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, all states that are part of Gore’s base and where Nader is polling well. The group plans to spend more than $100,000 at first and hopes to raise more over the weekend.
It’s not some crazy conspiracy either, the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys in this way
The Republican Leadership Council, a centrist GOP group, has been helpful to Bush before, airing ads during the Republican primaries critical of challenger Steve Forbes. Several members of the RLC board were early Bush supporters.
The RLC ads will run initially in four markets: Eugene and Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis., and Seattle.
Mark Miller, the group’s executive director, said the ads are partly a response to commercials being run by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which argue that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.
“Ralph Nader doesn’t believe that,” Miller said. “Ralph Nader and his supporters are not backing down because they believe Al Gore has had numerous broken promises.”
Miller added that some of Nader’s supporters have bragged that Nader has never had help from “soft money,” the unrestricted donations used by parties and interest groups.
“We’ll put an end to that,” Miller said.
You might notice how the answer doesn’t really make any sense, a pro Bush Republican PAC wanted to run ads in Gore strongholds promoting Nader with the argument that Gore broke numerous promises. Why? Because groups said that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It sounds like they are trying to counter this but then their actions fully support that idea.
Maybe some republicans could be persuaded to join the greens, but I pay attention to how people spend their money because talk is cheap. If republicans spend money to promote Nader in states they want to win, they obviously think they’ll poach more gore voters than Bush voters, it just doesn’t make sense otherwise.
I actually agree that the Green Party is staking out policy positions that both parties have abandoned, but I still think the abandoned policies they’ve picked up to champion are still more attractive to left leaning people than right leaning people.
Unless the WSJ has been taken over by liberals, owned by famous liberal Rupert Murdoch, they seem to be following a similar path now https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/jill-stein-republican-support-harris-voters-5a194ebf
So while I imagine some of these policy positions might be attractive to some disaffected republicans, republicans seem to think it will be useful to promote them. The only way that makes any kind of sense is if they think it will attract more potential Democratic Party voters than republican.
I thought we were just casting aspersions for fun 🤣
It’s a nice straw man you’ve erected and if I did any of those things you might have some kind of point.
I didn’t attack anyone, I pointed out that this alternative plan is unlikely to bring about any substantive change either.
So you keep telling people to sit at home and I’ll wait for the glorious revolution, maybe if you shout down people and tell them to read more theory that’ll help. The American people are super into reading political theory.
So if you look at the policy positions of a Green Party, it tends to align more closely with voters who would traditionally vote Democratic.
Here’s their own blurb from their website
We are grassroots activists, environmentalists, advocates for social justice, nonviolent resisters and regular citizens who’ve had enough of corporate-dominated politics. Government must be part of the solution, but when it’s controlled by the 1%, it’s part of the problem. The longer we wait for change, the harder it gets. Don’t stay home on election day. Vote Green!
Considering that the Republican Party uses the phrase “social justice warrior” as an insult and to this day field candidates that reject climate change, the idea that Republican voters might choose to vote for this party over their own seems less likely to me.
The Green Party is politically left of center, so it seems reasonable to me that the people that would vote for them would be more likely to come from the group of voters more likely to cast a ballot for Harris than trump.
That’s not how evaluating a plan works.
Here, I’ve got a cure for cancer, shove pinecones up your ass.
You can determine that this plan is bad without having to have a cure for cancer.
No you see they have a plan.
Its brilliance is in its simplicity!
I’m sure some reporters talked to him. There are some pretty amusing clips of him just sorta standing around awkwardly.
There is a non-zero chance that some reporter told him about the Taylor Swift endorsement. I truly hope he responded with the grace and elegance he had on display all night 😂
He’s currently standing awkwardly in the spin room hoping that people will talk to him.
Dogs instinctively recoil and begin snarling at MAGA supporters so the idea that a strange dog would willingly come up to them for pets is unthinkable.
Pico8 carts are just a special flavor of png. I would try running it directly or if it won’t run them with the png extension just rename the file from .png -> .p8 without converting and see if that works
Relevant section of the user manual
There are three ways to share carts made in PICO-8:
1. Share the .p8 or .p8.png file directly with other PICO-8 users
Type FOLDER to open the current folder in your host operating system.
Although if you are having trouble you might have more luck getting started with the built in SPLORE command
Relevant section of the user manual
This might be easier to get started with since it will all get wired up automatically for you
This is nowhere near the average price
I gave you 3 concrete examples of things happening right now. I put them in the context you asked for. You said I’m over pattern matching the past, which tells me you got to company towns and quit reading.
Feel free to respond but know that I’m done engaging with you. If you can’t engage in good enough faith to read what I wrote then I don’t really feel the need to humor you any longer.
Your brilliant solution is to remove zoning laws and building codes. As an engineer I can tell you those codes are written in blood, they exist because people were hurt or killed due to some home builder thinking “do I really need to ground this, I could save a 50 cents and I would really like 50 cents”
You are sitting there thinking you’ve cracked the code and if you could just get people to understand you’d win. I understand your point just fine, it’s just wrong headed.
What do you think they would do with less government? Do you think they would be benevolent titans of industry and not hurt you if it meant greater profits for them?
It’s not like we have to wonder. There is plenty of history to go read about what people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would do without any restraints on their power. Factory towns where workers are paid in scrip and kept in effective indentured servitude were a real thing that happened.
What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government? Look at what the free market did with respect to Amazon. Investors are happy to play the long game, they bank rolled Amazon for 9 years to compete against retailers, when the locally owned hardware store has to turn a profit to keep the lights on but the capital class says Amazon can sell hammers at a loss for 9 years, then at some point the local hardware store goes out of business. An enterprise that doesn’t need to turn a profit can out compete one that does.
Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years? Because they knew that once they crushed the competition, they would have a bunch of people locked in, habituated to using Amazon and they could slowly decrease quality while increasing prices and make a return on that investment. They created a machine that destroyed jobs and businesses and for a while the consumer got a great deal. Subsidized high quality goods conveniently delivered to your door.
That isn’t a gift though, it’s a Trojan horse. That subsidy stops at some point and Amazon has a nearly impenetrable moat. Every year they can increase the cost of prime, increase the cost of goods, and now half the search results are some jumble of letters company that was just formed to shovel low quality goods at you.
The end result is harm to you as a consumer, a worker, and a taxpayer.
Those retail jobs are gone, instead of dozens of local business each with a workforce in every town, there can be one mega warehouse with a couple hundred people serving a huge swath of customers. This is great for amazons bottom line but if you need to work to make money to buy food and shelter, it means fewer jobs. The law of supply and demand works for the labor market just like it does anywhere else, if the demand for jobs is the same and the supply is lower then the glut of workers means employers can pay less. If there are enough unemployed people they will be willing to accept lower pay, they will be willing to accept worse working conditions, and if they aren’t there’s a hundred more unemployed people willing to take that spot. Those are direct harms to people.
Those locally owned businesses use to make up the tax bases of communities. Now instead of buying that hammer from your neighbor, you are buying a Chinese hammer from Bezos. Towns still need fire departments, police, roads, so your taxes go up because it has to come from somewhere.
Now when you go to buy a product you get whatever you get from Amazon. Enshittification is a real thing. And people can’t compete with Amazon, with their scale and their reach and their logistics. The best you can hope for is that people will try to sell through Amazon, but amazon in control of the search and there are thousands of dropshippers working to get their slice of the pie pushing quality down down down as they import cheaply made goods from alibaba and resell it to you at a mark up.
So no, the price of necessities being high is not good for me, but the government isn’t doing that. Capitalism is about the accumulation of profits to those with the capital, and more money means more ability to buy the market. There’s a reason that monopolies form in capitalist markets. Greater profits allow for greater market capture which leads to greater profits which leads to greater market capture and so on.
Competition isn’t sufficient because nothing stops people with a lot of money from going “outcompete them for a while by selling at a loss, we can do that longer than them and then we can jack up the price once our competitors exit the market.” This is exactly what investors did with Amazon.
So yes, they have the power to hurt me and you. You keep talking about less government, ok fine, what part? Which function of government would you remove that would improve the situation? What mechanism replaces that function and how does it work?
I hear your point it’s just wrong.
It’s clear that you believe the government is the bad thing here. I see you completely skipped over all my points about how their market manipulation harms the consumer and the worker. That manipulation is purely from them having a bunch of money and using it to their advantage and does not require a government boogie man.
It’s not that I can’t see the point you want to make, they corrupt the government and then the governments power is the thing that hurts me. First it’s wrong because if we were some sort of anarchy society, bezos using investor money to undersell and falsely outcompete the rest of the market until he has a stranglehold on the economy and can exact a tax on every item sold would still happen.
The fact that you don’t think high speed rail can be built, despite it existing all over the world, is just your opinion. The fact that musk has said he promoted the hyperloop in hopes of pulling funding and support from high speed rail is a thing that happened in reality
Let’s say that we took the power away from the government. Poof just like that they can’t regulate how much rat shit is in your Amazon prime food or if Elon can dump the toxic waste from his battery production in your drinking water. The harm of regulatory capture and lobbyist power just gets replaced with capitalists directly harming you. How is that better?
I’ve been so sad to see the privatization of NASA. It feels very similar to me. SpaceX celebrating about launching a rocket into low earth orbit after spending billions in taxpayer money. How is this progress? We could do it back in the 60s with the equivalent computing power you can find in a $7 wristwatch today. Why didn’t we just keep building on our success, no we had to privatize, so that we could reach a beautiful end goal where space would not be for science and exploration funded by the people with its fruits improving humanity.
No we all had to pull together so spacex can build a massive taxpayer funded toll booth and every time America would like to visit the stars some billionaires can collect their cut. And people cheer
Are you serious?
Jeff Bezos has spent millions of dollars on union busting to prevent his workers from collectively bargaining for better wages. This massive chunk of the workforce then continues to work for less than they are worth because of his illegal tactics. This creates a systemic downwards pressure on wages across the entire workforce. Investors in the capital class gave Amazon a blank check to crush retailers for decades while losing money, because they knew at some point he would have a grip on the market and could stop providing high quality goods and start pumping out cheap garbage from companies like KYZGURK and BULJCOW and reap in massive profits. The capital class destroyed the retail sector and now you get the “convenience” of every purchase making him profits while the items you buy consistently decrease in quality.
Musk admitted to pushing the hyper loop, knowing it was unworkable, to try to prevent California’s high speed rail project. There’s no bullet train I can hop on to get to LA right now because of the power he flexed.
Musk just said he would put $45m a month into a trump super pac, his wealth makes him think that he should get to decide the outcome of our election. He purchased twitter and now has control over the algorithmic feed consumed by millions of my countrymen, directly influencing their thoughts and feelings an any range of topics.
They both contribute to the government to write laws favorable to them, reducing their tax burden and increasing mine. They promote candidates that are aligned with their corporate interests and if those interests include eroding workers rights and moving negative externalities into the environment that has the water I drink, the air I breathe, and the food I eat, fuck me.
Bezos owns the Washington post and can move public opinion in whichever way he wants. If he wants people to think that net neutrality sucks, he can spend all day having the columnists churn that shit out, changing both politicians and the public’s sentiment on the topic by cherry picking data and presenting the most one sided arguments imaginable.
Yea the people with the capital have the power. Capitalism.
You sound a lot like me. I figured it out for myself, maybe this insight will help you, maybe it won’t apply, but I’ll share.
I’m an introvert to start and on the spectrum. The world seems built for extroverts, and for a long time I thought the thing I was “supposed” to do was a bunch of extrovert activities that required me to mask my autism and drained me of all my energy. I felt a very similar feeling of being with people but feeling alone, I was in my head carefully running the scripts and behaviors I have learned. Not consciously (well, sometimes consciously) but it was just this extra burden I was carrying around that no one else was. It wasn’t a fun day at the beach without a care in the world, it was an assault on my senses, everything is too bright and too loud and sand is everywhere and “oh, what did that person just say, ugh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in this situation. I don’t want to play volleyball but are you supposed to anyways because that’s what people do at the beach?”
Over time I found people whose interests more closely aligned with mine. People I could trust to share my true self with, and not the mask of social scripts that I had learned was what I was “supposed” to do. And I realized I was not alone, but that a lot of the activities that people commonly associated with social togetherness were just not for me.
University can be a difficult time, most of the fun to be had is in those activities that I wasn’t very compatible with. I used to think that maybe I was broken too, but now I think that I am just different, and there’s nothing wrong with different. I have friends and a wife and people that I care about and who care about me, the real me, and I don’t feel so alone anymore.
I wish the same for you, if you like exploring the city with headphones, find someone that wants to do that too. If you like watching a dog play with a ball, there are people that will want to do that with you too. I found the more I opened up to people about who I really am and stopped caring about who I was “supposed” to be, the happier I became, the less lonely I felt.
I am sorry things are difficult for you now, in my experience it does get better. Early 20s are the time when people want to party and go to concerts and be quite loud. In a decade those same people will enjoy a quiet evening at home just as much as you do now.
You my Internet friend are not broken, you are just different, and different is beautiful.