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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • There’s a shocking number of people who walk this Earth without a functional world model or empathy, and don’t feel things until they occur to them personally.

    It’s almost akin to a sort of brain damage or disorder, I’m not qualified enough to be able to explain what occurs in the brain structurally for this to happen; only that when they’re grimacing for getting convicted after they’ve murdered 40 people (or millions, if it’s an oil exec, for example) and wondering why that’s happening, you carefully and patiently explain to them that’s only part of what they’ve inflicted upon others and society writ large.

    It doesn’t create a “just” or even sane society philosophically speaking, and the legislative process has been almost completely subverted by that segment of the population as you’d pointed out, specifically to be dysfunctional.

    Maybe we ought to install more mirrors in the legislative branches













  • Yeah, it’s definitely a vibe. I took a wormhole (time travel) to 1991, walked into a blockbuster and keeled over from nostalgia.

    Nostalgia is such a complex/convoluted feeling – you can’t have it if you didn’t have a past to draw the experience from, but when you do have it, it’s almost like a religious or philosophical experience both acknowledging and becrying (or grieving) the passage of time.

    Unfortunately, even with a “time machine”, we the people who walk through the portals are ever changed. We won’t ever live in the past again. We can see those places and experience them in our present states, but…

    Just like a glass shattering on the ground and the pieces scattering: Entropy cannot be undone.




  • Yeah. I hate the negativity of the Internet, but this is what “life” (at least in the first world) has become: the negative stories are amplified and the positive ones are short.

    In a time of great planetary wealth creation, there is still disparity. One of the richest nations on the Earth has packed all of its citizenry onto the “liveable coasts”, into cities.

    The couple mentioned in the article tried to move away to a more affordable area with more land (Portland is Urban, and Spokane is rural), and were met with boredom and dissatisfaction.

    They both earn collectively $250,000/year, which seems like a lot, and to many people in the U.S who earn the median salary of $52-65,000/year, it is.

    They mention not wanting to pay more than 30% of their budget to mortgage costs, which they stated with “$5,000 being 50%”, which means their real adjusted income is closer to $120,000, not $250,000.

    That’s still a lot, but more reasonable to the point of Median Salary × 2.

    What this average couple demonstrates however, is that the erosion of the “middle class” in the United States is complete: The middle class is dead. They are both educated professionals who are working honestly, and don’t make enough money to own a home.

    That makes them poor. That makes all of us poor – and it is a gross failure of the economic system with misplaced incentives and lack of regulations that has led us to this point.

    The important thing to remember that this socioeconomic and political atmosphere is wholly contrived.

    A better world is possible – it however requires sacrifices that many people are unable or unwilling to endure. Whatever you are imagining going through your head right now, that’s exactly what is necessary to change the first world for the better.

    It’s not any one individual’s fault this happened. The honest working man and woman haven’t done anything wrong here, and aren’t to blame – it’s precisely because the honest (the just) have enabled the dishonest (the unjust) to continue to run amok, completely unchecked and unchained.

    Here is to a better future, and for all the hardship we must all endure, to get there. 🍺

    Fuck Private Equity.