The Democrats are constantly cutting their own hamstrings by courting the conservatives base rather than their own base. That’s why they always lose. Too many Chuck Schumers, not enough AOCs. The mainstream dems can’t stop suckling the corporate teet long enough to notice they’re getting played.

This chain of comments is approaching Reddit levels of dumbfuckery.

And back then the banks would re-order your transactions to maximize fees. So if you had 180 bucks in your account and you had pending transactions that were 3, 6, 10, 15, 5, and 165, the would change the processing order to 165, 15, 10, 6, 5, 3. That way instead of one overdraft fee you be charged four overdraft fees.

No plan has ever come to fruition without a substantial amount of luck -Reality.

Except that the Nazi nation state no longer existed after World War two. It was dismantled and replaced with a new one, it wasn't even contiguous it was carved up and divvied out to allies who had different ideas about what the new state should look like. The Nazi state didn't have a right to exist, and neither does any nation state. They're just legal constructs and should be discarded when they are harmful.

Saying that the nation state of Israel doesn't have a right to exist isn't the same as saying the people of Israel don't have the right to exist. A nation state is just a legal construct, it doesn't have human rights. The people who live in any region are not the nation state, and they have a right to exist, but they do not have the right to create and maintain an ethnostate that oppresses other people.

The other day I was talking about musk to my GF, Me: “Musk is such a poser, he buys successful gaming accounts and pretends to be a top gamer by claiming those achievements as his own” GF: “Well, yeah, that tracks. Isn’t that what he does with his companies?”.

These aren’t hypotheticals my good man, these are real things that happen to real people. The fact that it hasn’t happened to YOU does not make them “hypothetical”. You’ve never seen a baby capybara, does that make baby capybara’s hypothetical?You don’t have any reason to believe what you do, it’s an article of faith, a belief maintained despite contradictory evidence. Something has fallen so far outside of the realm of your personal experience that you cannot fathom or accept it. You’re basically an economic flat earther, sure people have used “mathematical models” to determine that the earth is a sphere for thousands of years, but it sure looks flat to you. Sure people have used “mathematical models” to show that this sort of disenfranchisement exists, but you’ve never known a poor person, hence you have no reason to believe it exists. The thing that’s neat about reality is that it’s real whether you choose to look at it or not. by recent estimates 11% of eligible voters don’t have adequate ID (via. Brennen Law Institute) and as many as 18% of eligible voters over the age of 65 (via. the American Bar Association), with low income and minority groups being disproportionately affected. You can choose to verify those numbers, or not, you can choose to believe the numbers you’ve verified, or not, either way it doesn’t impact the realities that people, who are not you, face. Personally I have faith that you will continue to believe whatever you find most comforting. my only question is this, if you do not value the accounts of those affected, nor the word of experts who study such things, and you do not trust statistics or “mathematical models”, then how short of actually experiencing it yourself would you know whether it is true or not?

It is understandably difficult to believe these things when they are outside your realm of experience. These people exist, and in greater numbers than you are likely to realize, whether you believe that these people exist in great enough numbers to sway elections is neither here nor there. They have a right to vote and should be included (though it is worth noting that congressional elections are often decided by very narrow margins). There have been plenty of these people in the communities i’ve lived in, and at various periods in my life I’ve been one of these people. You’d be amazed at how you can get by without ID if you have to. A lot of the things you’ve listed don’t actually require a state issued ID, you might think they would, but there’s almost always a workaround. You don’t need it to get a job, only a decent job for a reputable employer. most will ignore legalities in my experience, if they think they can get away with it. You don’t need ID to fill a prescription, just your birth date. ID is not necessary to apply for benefits, most homeless people don’t have proper ID and are still eligible. ID is not necessary to buy a used car from the owner, nor to file taxes, nor to rent a sublet or a room in someone’s home. Lots of people don’t have bank accounts, they use cash or buy prepaid debit cards for things that you can’t pay with cash. You don’t need ID to visit a clinic, You ABSOLUTELY don’t need ID to go to a weed shop. I’ve visited many and have never been asked for one. Heck, I haven’t been carded for alcohol in probably 30 years. So yes, you can do most of these things without ID, it’s just a pain in the ass. Some of the things on your list are just luxuries. What you can’t do without ID you learn to live without, which now includes voting I guess.

A lot of people don’t have IDs or licenses, they cost money, you have to take time off of work to get them, which also costs money, and a lot of people have barriers to getting ID if they lack supporting paperwork, like a birth certificate, bills in your name to prove address, three forms if ID, etc. heck lots of people don’t even have an address at all. People who don’t have easy access to supporting paperwork, who don’t have addresses, or can’t afford fees are all allowed to vote. This cuts a lot of the most vulnerable people in the country out of the democratic process, which is why the righties are always pushing for this stuff. They’d rather that the people who stand to lose the most from right wing policies be unable to vote against those policies.

I'm a straight man, and I concur.

They could ban american trucks from shipping through that region, that would really sting.

Southern Central Valley of California about a 2 hour drive from LA.

Ok. How many votes do they need to change the rule governing how many votes a constitutional amendment requires?

It wasn’t covered at all in my area.

Why wouldn't they? It's an efficient design, and aside from the whole force thing they seem to be working with the same physics that we are. Why wouldn't they invent philips head screws?

My family had a jolly laugh about that CEO. Several of them have worked with mental health patients and elders and hate the entire health insurance industry, my brother works for cooperate types and as a result has zero sympathy for corporate types and we share memes about it. Whatever other beliefs Luigi may have, he did us all a solid, so he’s ok in our book.

Once I called them because two guys were beating up a homeless guy. they never showed. They called three hours later and asked if I still needed them to drop by. Their stated policy says that they will show up within 15 minutes if people are in danger. I guess homeless people aren’t people.

A society is only good as it's incentives. Because there will always be a segment of the population that will only act when incentivized. How they act is determined by what is incentivized and what is not. We're a society with a long list of really bad incentives. I agree with you that investment always prioritizes profit over ethical concern because we live under capitalism and that is what is expected and incentivized. The sad thing about capitalists is that they often argue against social programs because they think that people will always game the system, and it's true. But there is a name for those people, and that name is capitalist. When they say things like "capitalism is just human nature" and that it's natural to compete and try to gain the upper hand in all situations, they tell on themselves. It's not human nature, it's their nature, and they project themselves onto everyone else. I don't think that capitalists will ever truly go away, that's why we can't seem to have nice things. Any society we create will have some capitalists in it. Some people are just competitive. And capitalism is a way of keeping score. It's not true of all people, but it's true of some. Enough to cause trouble. Any advanced society we may one day have will need a sort of pressure valve for capitalists that will allow them to feel like they're gaining the upper hand over their fellow man. Without a way to indulge those impulses they will always undermine any collectivist society they find themselves in. They're just something that needs to be managed. Investment can be innocuous, or it can be evil, it is almost never good. In the rare case that good does come from investment it is short lived because capitalism is corrosive. The intent to win at capitalism will always determine the decisions capitalists make, so over time everything good they create will ultimately turn to shit.

I don't think a bunch of people pitching in to fund a company is in and of itself a bad thing, but there are several considerations that are extensions of that that stray into unethical territory. foremost is the matter of fiduciary responsibility. When a company is publicly traded they have a legal responsibility to put money in the investor's pockets, and that shapes the behavior of that company in ways that can be very harmful. Intent shapes action, and the imperative to provide profits to investors changes whatever intention that company may have had when it was founded. It means if the company has a choice between fulfilling that imperative or doing something to reduce harm to the world around them they will always make the decision that fulfills the intention. Where if your intention is just to be the best at something, or to provide a service, you would make a different set of decisions. The biggest example that's particularly central in public consciousness right now is the health industry. Health insurance companies have the ability to ensure that their customers are well taken care of and that healthcare is accessible, but providing healthcare isn't the point. Providing profit to their shareholders is the point, so in every situation where the profit, and the doing the right thing, conflict they will always choose the former because that's the whole reason they're doing it in the first place. Even if the CEO wanted to lead the company in a more ethical direction they couldn't do so without courting legal action, if the investors believe their decisions aren't maximizing profits. Multiply this by time and companies gradually become worse, even if they started out great. Enshitification isn't just for the internet. Often this leads to unethical ends, as in the health insurance example where it causes thousands of deaths each year. A lot of it depends on whether the demand for something is fixed or elastic. Say you wanted to purchase a lot of something as an investment, if that thing is FunCo Pop figurines and you're hoarding them banking that they'll increase in value due to scarcity could be sold later at a markup. People can take or leave FunCo Pops, They can choose not to spend their money on your marked up collectibles. Hoarding them would be a dick move, but not necessarily unethical. If the thing you're buying up is water the landscape changes. People need water, every single person needs water. That demand is not elastic, people have to have it or they literally die. If you hoarded that resource so that you could sell it at a higher price, and that prices some people out of being able to access water, it's more than unethical. It's straight up wicked. Your intention isn't to provide water. It's to maximise your profits, and thus your decisions will always be guided by those priorities. It's nuanced. But not very difficult to understand. The world could change for the better, but the profit margins are too slim to make it a worthwhile goal for a savvy capitalist.