USA USA USA

Quick note on this one

Pedestrians are not expected to look out for traffic, but are not allowed to just cross anywhere. So it balances out.

If you end up driving, pedestrians are not allowed to cross anywhere (although some places like New York have legalized crossing anywhere) but pedestrians always have the right of way. You can’t run people over because they crossed outside a crosswalk.

So if on foot, use crosswalks or you could get a ticket for jaywalking. If in a vehicle, don’t hit pedestrians.

The title in the image

American checking in, this was also how I was taught to pluralize throughout my education.

The usage in the post title seemed correct to me fwiw

The heat generated by a dumpster fire would not be good for forging steel.

Forging steel requires a minimum temperature of 900F

This scam ad is also something that if you showed it to anyone that knows anything about metallurgy would get you laughed at.

If I can’t take things I see on the internet at face value then I’ll also have to discount your completely unsupported assertion that “someone just slapped a caption on this picture”

So did this guy just blast his own legs with shit to own the libs?

Very on brand for the conservative brain trust

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

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.

I’m sure after decades of capitalism they are doing fine now… right?! Oh no

Not really perfectionism just grammar

I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.

I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”

There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.

While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.

America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.

That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.

Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.

There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment

So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.

We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.

TIL updated my post to reflect that

“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.

Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority

Thanks, TheReturnOfPEB for correcting me

Based on your interpretation every group could simply be redefined into illegitimate.

• We are for democracy
• Oh so you think that monarchy is bad and you want to define yourself as excluding loyal subjects of the king! That will never be legitimate.

Leftist think that democracy should extend into the economic realm as well and what we should do with the means of production should be governed by the people and not just whoever happens to own the capital. One way to word that would be anti-capitalist, but another way would be to word it as economic democracy.

So if you require an inclusive definition for something to be legitimate, there you go. Liberals in America do not seek to do away with capitalism, you would be hard pressed to find any that do. If you support capitalism, then by the fact that capitalism’s private ownership is mutually exclusive with democratic control of the economy, you don’t support a democratic control of the economy.

You can’t have a vegan meat eater, not because of any moral assessment on veganism or meat eating, but because those two terms are mutually exclusive.