The issue wasn’t “try hard enough”. It was how systematic disenfranchisement hobbles people far more than their genetics.

Once you brand someone as “lesser”, their actual capacity is irrelevant. They won’t be given the opportunity to succeed (much less to fail and try again) while the presumed-superior cohort is offered advantage after advantage in order to prove they are better.

Okay, but the moral of the story was that “superior” people weren’t actually superior. They were just racist.

The protagonist outwits and outperforms them all.

WTF does his VP have to do with the fact that there was a 100% Republican block against his policies

Obama had a bigger advantage in 2009 than Trump has today.

Joe Biden being a creepy racist crook with deep ties to the insurance industry is why health reform failed.

🌎 👨‍🚀 🔫 👩‍🚀

indefinitely preempt

So he’s on paid vacation. Getting an eight figure salary to do nothing ain’t so bad for a guy who got into comedy selling “Women jumping on trampolines” as his main gimmick.

Excited to see what kind of mindless AI slop they get replaced with.

Any time some group or party does something heinous in this country they are given a pass to “maintain unity”

I don’t believe Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers or David Koresh and the Branch Davidians were “given a pass”, particularly after national news declared them public enemies.

Quite a few organizations and organizers get squashed hard. It’s within the state’s capacity. Trump seems to be demonstrating the degree to which these norms can be violated.

However, at the barest minimum those who were part of the Confederacy should have been barred from holding public office of any kind or participating in anything that would influence public policy beyond maybe their right to vote

Well, they’re long dead. I’m more despondent at Biden giving the J6 instigators a free pass.

I would not hold my breath

he had to fight tooth and nail for everything he managed

That’s the line his voters are fed.

But when you’ve got a VP owned and operated by the insurance industry and Larry Summers authoring your Treasury policy, I’m more concerned with who he was fighting for.

“Fat little larva” is a very funny way to refer to your kids

Anything bad?

I hope you motherfuckers like raisins.

Most people aren’t celebrating the killing of Kirk

I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure

Okay, but what if we just repeal or ignore that rule in order to conduct a pogrom of WrongThinkers?

Also, any real pilot would be able to explain why flying cars are a bad idea…

Every helicopter pilot can explain why helicopters are dangerous. But they’re all still getting up in the morning to collect a paycheck.

In theory, sure.

In practice, a large number of autonomous vehicles traveling at high speeds might not be able to keep clear of one another consistently.

don’t even bother having a society

Societies are the mechanism used to pass down historical accounts and ingrain in future generations the value of current cultural practices. The only way you have a functional state is with a current society of people who advocate, educate, and lead us towards its replication and expansion on behalf of future generations.

have them just kill and gang rape everyone they want to, it’s cheaper that way

There’s more to life than its spot price at auction.

This is insidious Soviet Mathematics.

You provide general goods and services at cost and leverage economies of scale to grow your GDP despite suffering a comparatively small population in a largely pre-industrial country. You exploit camaraderie and inventiveness and curiosity rather than press-ganging serfs or periodically looting colonies full of ambitious, talented, and productive people. You educate the public en mass, instead of just relying on the gentry to pioneer scientific research and development. You build at scale, rather than doing vanity projects restricted to a handful of elites. You pursue projects that appeal to the general public, rather than following the whims of a handful of aristocrats and military commanders.

Only problem is that this can take a generation or more to show real material progress. And even as you’re improving your own community, you may have wealthier neighbors who can outrun you, at least in the short term. You might not be welcome into the network of post-colonial trade if you don’t have friends in the imperial core. And so you become increasingly self-reliant and nationalistic, which others claim signals your hostility to a global rules based order.

If people in your community can be bribed, coerced, or duped into turning on their neighbors, the network of self-reliance can fail. Your economy can drag. You don’t reap all those benefits of scale. You’re exposed to the violent intrusion of foreign militaries and the looting of the colonial era. And people lose faith in your system of social welfare, because they fail to see it benefiting them in the modern moment.

The hard math of capitalism is that there’s more easy money to be made fucking over ten neighbors than helping one out. And while the long term trajectory of such a society is decay, an insulated tier of individuals can bring in windfalls over the course of their adult lives that make life significantly easier and more luxurious.

For folks in their prime years, there’s a real economic incentive to use your superior strength and that of your immediate circle to loot your elders and tyrannize your kids. This feels justified when you were abused as a child. And by the time you’re an elder, there’s little you can do to protect yourself from the next generation, save to pit them against one another with your accrued savings.

Pragmatically, you need people who understand the bigger picture and have a sense of place within the community over the longer term. For folks who don’t see a future among their neighbors, playing nice isn’t pragmatic at all. It’s a sucker’s game.

Basically why the grid exists to begin with. You’re not supposed to be solving these engineering problems on a household budget inside a single home.

You’d be better off simply reducing your consumption or finding alternative methods of power (nat gas or maybe wind or geothermal) during the longer winter nights.

If you really want to go crazy, you should consider investing in a bigger home with better insulation and roommates. An apartment/condo block can at least leverage economies of scale, if you’re dead set on DIY. More people benefiting from the setup dilutes the cost per person.

Every time this joke is posted, it gets funnier

Obama lead us out the Great Recession

He presided as we left the Great Recession, under a policy of Keynesianism both he and Bush Jr had embraced.

He didn’t lead shit. He did what his handlers told him to do and looked pretty on TV.

The real economic vision of the Obama administration was not meaningfully distinct from Bush in '01 or Trump in '20. Bail out the plutocrats. Let debt collectors feast on everyone else.

Trump who spent four years trashing everything

We dipped back into recession in '14 and flirted with recession in '16. Trump took a bad situation and made it worse. But Obama never actually fixed anything.