Well, it’s plausible if you take ‘us’ to mean the corporate ruling class

Je parle aussi dragon. Foos!

I turned down a promotion this year for several reasons, one being that i didn’t want to supervise my friends. I didn’t want the awkwardness, and i was afraid my imposter syndrome would get much worse. My friends know too much, haha

I have crazy high hours on Skyrim because I replayed it in French and Spanish. It is a very fun way to get the cheapest language immersion ever (though your vocabulary becomes a little, um, specialized)

Musk has now surpassed Carnegie. You are right about Mansa Musa (for now), but the gap is closing. According to google today, Musk is at $334B, Carnegie peaked at a modest $309B, and Mansa Musa had about $400B, though there are quibbles about personal wealth vs. kingdom’s treasury. If you want to compare Musk and Musa, I think you could reasonably add the GDP of the US to Musk’s fortune, since he is one of the puppeteers behind Trump. All figures adjusted for inflation, by the way.

Haha right you are. It is in his nature, I suppose, to grasp and grasp after already being the richest person in history. In a better world, we would put people like Musk in a nice, humane institution.

Yes. I would go even further, and say that pollution is the necessary result of capitalism. Capitalism is the mistaken belief that exponential growth can continue forever in a finite ecosystem. My country targets 2-3% growth annually - this implies a doubling of the economy every 30 years or so. It has already been almost 2 doubling periods since human consumption began to exceed the Earth’s sustainable capacity. Even the fucking shithead most responsible, Jeff Bezos, acknowledges the problem. Does anyone really think going to space is just a ‘hobby’ for that sick fuck?

This may sound naive, but I think that most people are good and would favour sound environmental policy if they could count on getting food, shelter, and healthcare without destroying the planet. It is no coincidence that republicans are pro-business and anti-healthcare. Oligarchs want people to remain so desperate that they can never act on their conscience.

If you’re LGBTQ or a racial/religious minority, the wet and windy thing that is coming to kill you was just elected president

Yep. Fortunately for Elon (and, you know, fascism) he doesn’t need it any more. For Elon, it is already ‘Mission Accomplished’. The richest, most thin-skinned losers on Earth already control the biggest economy and the biggest military. What more could that shitstain hope to get out of Twitter?

Pretty sure corruption was a literal campaign promise. “Vote for me and I will put my chief donor in charge of ruining your stupid lives” turned out to be a compelling message

Yep. Especially when you’ve been using computers for 40 years, as I have. Do you know how many times MS (or any tech company) has moved each and every button? Do you have any idea how many times something as simple as saving a document has changed since I started my career? Over the years, I have saved documents to at least six different types of physical media including the local hard drive. Then I had to start saving to a network drive, then a different network drive, then a cloud drive, then a different cloud drive. I have worked with Linux, Windows, Mac. Techniques and keyboard shortcuts I learned in the 80s and used for decades get changed/dropped/redesigned. I have had to go back and alter little programs I wrote years ago because the corporate file system was redesigned for the 25th time and now all my file paths have to have forward slashes instead of backslashes for the code to run… When I ask a less experienced colleague where to find the screen share button, it is because I know they have only had to relearn its location 1-3 times, so their memories won’t be all jumbled yet.

yep. trump controls all three braches of government. who is going to do something about it?

i’m worried about that too, especially since many people who voted against him belong to vulnerable groups. however, i think his largely ignorant and poor supporters will get their fair share of suffering as he simultaneously destroys the economy and the social safety net

The cleanup took forever.

My mom started developing dementia about a decade before she died. 5 years after we first noticed the changes, she could barely form a sentence. That is when I mourned her because that is when I lost her. When she finally died I felt mostly relief. I will always miss her but I was happy when her suffering finally ended.

Me too. But i’m gonna fight these fuckers anyway. Please hang in there. I don’t want to fight alone.

The thing that really gets me down is the futility of my job. I am a public servant, so i don’t have to worry about being exploited by the rich in the same way. I work decent hours and have good benefits. However, a lot of the work i do seems aimless and poorly thought out. Many of my projects get cancelled after months of work due to changing priorities. When i get home, i tend to ruminate over the pointlessness of it all. If i sit there and really think about how i am spending my life, i get really down. Video games and hobbies occupy my mind to the exclusion of bad thoughts.

You say ‘politics’ like it is some trivial thing. Politics involves beliefs on personhood, human rights, racism, equity, crime and punishment, and fundamental ideas about morality. I think it is totally appropriate to make judgments about a person’s character based on their politics.

Now JD Vance should cosplay a Wal-Mart greeter: “Salutations, fellow human”