The tenacity of institutional democrats in their refusal to learn anything ever is astonishing. There’s zero self awareness, zero interest in learning from this, zero interest in growing forward, just pouting about how they deserved this win because they were the less shitty shit sandwich and the iron will to try that same approach until the heat death of the universe.
it’ll stay that way if we continue to see low or stagnant oil prices.
The 90s kid in me who watched my parents absolutely losing their shit over $1.20/gallon gas in ~2003 is fucking bamboozled by this statement.
They’re a huge source of microplastics in the environment. Tl;Dr they readily break down into microplastics and small plastic filaments.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34139503/
FTA:
Cigarette butts are dangerous pieces of plastic, but are usually not handled properly and consist of more than 15,000 detachable strands of plastic fiber. Discarded cigarette butts may be carried into rivers and lakes, and finally into the ocean. The plastic fibers will continuously release microplastic fibers into the environment. About 300,000 tons of potential microplastic fibers may enter the aquatic environment from this source per annum. Additionally, toxic substances, such as nicotine, carcinogenic tar, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, have strong toxic effect, which will cause serious damage to aquatic organisms.
Cigarette butts are a huge source of microplastics in the environment. All my homies are judging that guy.
I’ve seen some leftist arguments that were denser than lead, this ain’t that. Let me rephrase for them, though:
Stop allowing social media fart sniffing contests control how you do activism. There’s mastodon, and then there’s real life.
I noticed that as well. Her campaign went from electric excitement to, well, I don’t know quite what I’d call it. Resignation maybe? It reminded me a lot of the Hillary campaign by the end, and I continually got the impression that Kamala wasn’t really in the driver’s seat for her campaign. Here’s the moment that I started getting nervous, and someone in the campaign should have started smashing the panic button: Obama lecturing down to black men for not supporting Kamala enough.
HUGE yikes moment when you start finger-wagging a group that’s supposed to be your base for not supporting you enough. Obama’s a smart dude, so I really have no idea wtf he thought he was doing here, and no idea why anyone ever thought staging and publishing this was a good thing to do. This should have been a red flag visible from space in so many ways.
It’s as simple as this, whether you’re talking about people with addiction, the homeless, LGBT, immigrants, union workers, the poor, native Americans and on and on:
What the government can do to them, it can do to you.
Seems like a good time for us all to start talking a little more seriously about redacted
Disambiguation: I mean the US, not hell.
I figured it out, this is the bad place!
Okay, real talk, human being to human being. Things are bad enough as it is. You’re clearly not happy. I saw elsewhere that you said you’ve been trolled since 1 am, and that’s a super shitty sounding feeling. I release you from any charge to respond, you win the argument. Why don’t you take a break, go get some sunshine, drink your favorite hot drink, and call or text a friend, maybe one you haven’t spoken to in a while? Take care of yourself, take a break from social, come back if you want to when you’re feeling better.
Yes, actually. Edward Snowden risked hanging for treason by leaking the NSA mass surveillance program for just this reason. He’s the last true patriot, imo, and I wish he’d stayed and made the government take him to trial over their blatantly illegal program instead of ending up as a trophy on Putin’s shelf.
I didn’t know Biden got it down to just 15. That was a big improvement
Dude, fascism didn’t spring into being fully formed out of nothing on the dawn of January 20th, just as the Roman Republic didn’t crumble in a day. It’s been decades and decades of baby steps towards this point, until we finally got to where things could get much worse all at once. Yeah, Kamala wouldn’t have made gitmo into a concentration camp, but she wouldn’t have dismantled the machinery built by the war on terror and the war on drugs that the fascists are using right now. Let’s not oversell it; at best, she would’ve kicked the can down the road another four years. Our past leaders all had chances and made commitments to close gitmo, and they had the perfect authority to do so, and then decided that they could wield the tools of fascism wisely rather than destroying them so that a future fascist wouldn’t have them just laying around.
Yes, I am against concentration camps, I just wish that our previous decades of leadership had been too. If we’re going to do accountability, let’s do accountability.
please God let this happen because it would be so fucking funny and also because of trains and healthcare and education
Mine is one of them, only they banned “camping in public” because one of the council members who isn’t a jackass asked “so, we’re also going to fine people who nap in the park in business attire, right?”. They were trying to frame it as an act of compassion by saying that they’d give them the choice to go to shelter or take a fine, but when I reached out to the homeless court program here that’s over that, the guy running it told me that there were only half as many beds available as we need. He still thought it was a good idea. I went to the city council the night they passed it and pointed out that the city doesn’t have enough beds, and this is just going to end up being kicking people out of their tents and telling them to freeze. I got the standard “thank you” for my comment and they passed it anyway.
Well, at this last council meeting, a homeless woman showed up to tell the city that they trashed her tent and camping equipment and told her that it would be thirty days before any shelter was available. She asked them point blank “you guys who threw away my tent, you’re going back to sleep in a warm bed tonight, but what am I supposed to do?” The one council member who voted against the ordinance took the chance to gently kick the mayor in the nuts and diplomatically pointed out “I remember when the ordinance was passed, it was framed as a way to connect people with services. I guess I just don’t understand what services we’ve connected her with here.” He spoke softly, but it felt like he hit the rest of the council with a steel chair. A lot of people in the crowd started mumbling about how terrible what had happened to her was. Chef’s kiss moment. Now, thankfully, our PD has been working hard on being a direct connection between homeless people and services they need instead of just tossing them to the labyrinth of different disconnected aid groups, and one of the officers that was there got to work trying to connect her with some shelter, but that only happened because she showed up and called the council out.
I guess the point is, it’s worth your time to get involved in local politics.
Yeah, tbh, it seems like it should be a lot closer to midnight. If things are this bad and we’re still over a minute, what’s it going to take?
potatoes can keep your ass alive and can dead ass be grown in buckets and sacks and basically anywhere tbh. They’re not picky plants, either. Just watch a couple YouTube videos to get your bearings, go buy a couple potatoes from the grocery store, and plant those bitches. You’re probably going to want to try and get potatoes that haven’t been treated to keep them from sprouting, or else give them a good scrub and let them sit on the windowsill till they start sprouting. You could also go and buy seed potatoes, but that’s really not needed and it’s a higher up front cost. Plant them literally anywhere; heavy clay soil, shade, use whatever you have; potatoes have preferences but they don’t really give that much of a fuck. Plant some french marigolds alongside for a good edible flower that will help control the pests that like munching on potatoes.
Learn to Forage this one takes some time, dedication, caution, and research, but you would be absolutely blown away just how much you’re surrounded by edible weeds and unrecognized fruit trees. Get in the habit of identifying the plants that you see (plant net is a helpful tool) around you, learning about them, and spotting them elsewhere as you go through life. See someone’s fruit tree bearing fruit? I can just about promise that if you go and ask them nicely, they would be absolutely grateful for someone to take all that fruit away before it becomes a mess they have to clean up. Make sure you show your gratitude if that’s the case, whatever that looks like for you; for me, it’d be leaving them some of the picked fruit or bringing some of the jam that I made from it.
Ditch the car if you can. Shit’s expensive, yo. Especially if you live in a city, a bicycle, e-bike, or motorcycle can do most of what you need out of a car most of the time if you get creative.
Skill up start learning the simple stuff- how to patch and darn tears in your clothes, how to cook on a budget (there’s great depression cookbooks around that are pretty good), how to repair and service stuff, how to jam and can your leftovers, how to entertain yourself cheap with card and dice games or drawing, and a really huge underrated one is how to talk to other people. If you’re terrible at dealing with other people, get to fucking work on it yesterday and thank me later. I found the book Verbal Judo to be enormously helpful.
NETWORK bring small gifts to your neighbors when you can, share your good fortune with them, ask them how you can help, start getting involved in the lives of the people around you and get to know them. If you don’t have some kind of regular meeting you go to with otherwise unrelated folks, find one. This is a way to build resilience, because there’s going to be times where things aren’t so rough for you, and times where things are extra rough. That’s true for everyone. If you have other people who can lean on you and you can lean on, we can all help smooth out each other’s journeys through the downturn.
Don’t be afraid to get ghetto. Do what you’ve got to do. Summer’s hot, man, go ahead and put foil on cardboard and put that shit in your windows. Winter’s fucking cold; it’s easier and cheaper to heat small spaces than big spaces, just don’t catch your shit on fire or give yourself CO poisoning (NO combustion indoors, that includes using a kitchen stove for heat! Make sure the heater is completely by itself on a non-flammable surface). You can’t eat a lawn; fuck that grass, plant potatoes, onions, and marigolds. Will some people find it impossible to mind their own goddamn business? Certainly, but it’s a small price to pay for surviving. Need a coat? Go to Goodwill, go to a garage sale, shit, ask your neighbors if they have one they don’t want anymore. Don’t be above asking for help. Don’t be a fucking thief, but keep your eyes open for opportunities; people throw all kinds of good shit away all the time, even during downturns. If something breaks, prioritize whether it needs to be fixed now, patched now, or if it just has to wait; if it’s just about keeping up appearances, it can wait.
Start prepping now set aside an emergency stash of:
Cash (my rule of thumb for rock bottom minimum is ~$100/person). This is cash for absolute emergencies, treat it as a non-renewable resource. I would say not to use it trying to stay in your mortgage even though you don’t have a plan for the month after that.
Food: brown rice, dry beans, macaroni (whole grain is best), and bulk powdered potatoes will get you a long way. Learn to use these ingredients before you actually depend on them, and have a bulk supply on hand. Also, set aside some salt and pepper to keep you from completely losing your fucking mind. Each of these individual things can really help you stretch your meals or tie together a few other random ingredients into something edible. They’re not a complete nutrition source on their own, but they’ll just about keep your ass alive. Add to your food stash as you see fit, but try to keep it cheap, flexible, and durable.
Medicine: prescription and OTC. Needing Tylenol for your kids (or worse, Albuterol), or Imodium or ibuprofen for you, and not being able to get it is a super dog shit feeling. I’d say set aside three times as much as you think you need for the stuff that they don’t sell in bulk, and twice as much for the stuff they do sell in bulk.
Luxuries: if you like coffee, set aside a couple containers of it. It doesn’t have to be great; Folgers will rock your fucking world once you’ve been without coffee long enough. Same deal with chocolate, dehydrated fruit, or candy. Basically, give yourself something to look forward to once in a while.
This is hardly a comprehensive list, you know your own unique needs and situation better than I do, and there’s going to be other better or worse advice for that here. Go with what fits for you.
I hate to say it, but things get worse than you think in a downturn. Lots of people get depressed and blame themselves for what’s happening. Please remember that the way you feel isn’t the way you’re always going to feel. Shit sucks, and everything is temporary.