This is true. The same problem applies to transportation, health care, food security, etc. Poverty is terrible. Unfortunately, the right wing also seems to hate any effective programs to deal with it. No school lunches, no basic income, no nationalized insurance, etc etc.

The left continues to treat them with kid gloves,

This has generally been bothering me. You’ll have someone on the far right say like “We should kill the jews”, and I say “We should stop that guy. Like, I’m okay with someone doing violence to that nazi” and people are like “whoa whoa whoa we can’t have VIOLENCE.” So basically the right wing can do and say whatever, but everyone else has to hold themselves to pristine standards and just take it.

“Cops brutalize family and shoot their dog”. “Maybe we should fight back.” “Whoa whoa whoa violent speech is unacceptable bro.” Like, ok, I guess I’ll just get shot quietly.

https://archive.is/ktNni

You think there’s no culture in rural areas?

There is less cultural output because there are fewer people. There’s probably a thousand new bands that started in Brooklyn this month. You just can’t have those numbers out in the sticks because you don’t have the people. There literally aren’t enough singers.

Culture matters. People interacting and inspiring each other matters. It’s not that there’s nothing happening out in Wisconsin or wherever, but there’s less. There are fewer people to be doing stuff!

I almost wrote a preemptive response about “where does your food come from”. I don’t think most of the people living outside of cities are farmers.

A quick search says

The Midwest rounds out the top five states with the most farmers:

    Missouri (162,345, or 5% of the labor force)
    Iowa (145,432 or 9% of the labor force)
    Ohio (130,439 or 2% of the labor force)
    Oklahoma (130,434 or 7% of the labor force)

I don’t know if https://usafacts.org/articles/farmer-demographics/ is a real site but it would be awkward for someone to make up these numbers.

That’s a lot of people in the sense of like “I couldn’t have that many people at my birthday party” but not a lot of people compared to like, who lives in major cities. Bushwick, Brooklyn is one neighborhood and has like 130k people.

Food is important but probably not a justification for holding everyone else hostage. Especially when most people living in those areas aren’t even growing food. (Some are second order involved, like the guy who works the Laundromat helps the farmer or whatever). Also especially when the efforts being stymied would help people, like student loan forgiveness or federally funded school meals.

The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

The rural conservative POV is utterly poisoned by decades of racial violence and regressive policies. There’s like a mass shooting every day. Climate change is going to fuck us. Conservatism is not an okay world view.

That said, the answer is probably local government for things that are actually local. Environmental issues cannot be local. You can’t have this town dumping mercury into the water and pretending that’s just fine. But for something like “we want a bike lane here” or “we want a library that’s open weekends” that’s doesn’t need to be federal. But if “local” means “no queers allowed to get married here” then the locals can fuck themselves.

Guns are a whole separate wedge issue. I think they should at least be treated the same as cars- license, registration, insurance, mechanisms to remove the license like DUI. I don’t know how close to reality that is.

I wrote this on my phone so it’s not my best work.

Cities matter more. Sorry, but that’s the reality.

Cities are where people live. People matter.

Cities are where culture happens. Culture matters. You’re not going to have a big art/music/anything scene in bumbleweed, NE because there aren’t enough people there to constitute a scene.

Cities are where economy happens. Money moving around matters. There are more transactions per day in the corner shop by me than a whole week in some country town with 700 residents.

Rural people still have the Senate and local government. Their rep in the house (which should be expanded) also should speak up for their region.

Everyone deserves some minimum respect, but the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane. A minority holding the majority garbage is not good. Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.

Don’t forget about the halo effect. Someone on stage doing a killer set is going to seem hotter. When someone is good at one thing, we start to think they’re good at everything (where being hot is a thing).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

HR is not likely to side with the worker over the company.

There’s also a certain kind of “hr energy” that makes my skin crawl. Like if you worked at a company called AB Tech they’d be up front in the meeting going “I SAY A, YOU SAY B! A!” and I’m just like no, please stop, I’m not that excited to make charts for assholes.

The hr person where I work now seems nice, at least. My old job the main hr person gave me the creeps.

Just guillotine the rich already

In addition to the flying Nazgûl and what not, the ring could corrupt the proud eagle. They’d just fly off with it and then you have another problem.

Switched to Mint for desktop. Been mostly fine. Getting it installed was surprisingly harrowing. Annoyed that most mod tools for games are targeting windows. I guess I have to figure out wine and its whole prefix system.

Republicans are more authoritarian on average, and authoritarians tend to value in-group cohesion more than anything else. They are, by some reasonable metrics, bad people.

If I remember correctly, there was a study where they did like a model UN, and they secretly put all the people who scored high on authoritarian personality tests in group A, and everyone else in group B. Group B did fine- no wars, dealt with climate change and what not. Group A, with the authoritarians, caused a nuclear apocalypse. And after they got a do-over (after they had to sit in silence for a few minutes to think about what they’d done), they still fucked it up. edit: I found it: https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TheAuthoritarians.pdf , page 30

We’re all at least a little susceptible to authoritarian, in-group-above-all thinking. But some people have it bad, and those people suck. They’re really ruining it for the rest of us.

Bugmenot sometimes has LinkedIn credentials https://bugmenot.com/view/linkedin.com

Don’t click any of the scam ones though

I’m told one time in my sleep I sat up, looked down the hall, and said “You can’t see it from here but it can see you.”. Then laid down again and went quiet. My partner at the time was not amused

I play guild wars 2 pvp sometimes. Gosh, people are so whiney sometimes. Like the first couple minutes go bad and they’re like “GG” and just idle in the spawn room.

I still think targeted ads should be illegal. I would accept static ads that are based on the content of the site rather than me as a compromise.

So like if I’m looking at example.com/cool-bikes you can show me bike ads. You don’t need to know who I am or track me.

It’s good enough for the past few decades (centuries?) it’s good enough for now. The Superbowl doesn’t serve a different ad to every viewer.

I’m pretty sure that simply putting a picture of eyes in the scene reduces theft. People are emotional creatures , and if they feel like they’re being watched by someone who doesn’t approve of stealing, they’re more likely to refrain.

As a result of this article, I learned the Faircloth Amendment exists, and seems like anti-social madness.

https://nationalhomeless.org/repeal-faircloth-amendment/

I thought about editing that article to reference Musk and this thing, but it would probably be reverted.

The point is to make it harder for “those people” to vote and participate in society. If you came up with a magical, iron-clad, mechanism for everyone to have ID, the conservatives wouldn’t support it because that’s not what they want. They want minorities to suffer.

That’s not the point. The point is people spend most of their day under an authoritarian regime. Taxes and services are irrelevant to this.