Mnemnosyne @ Mnemnosyne @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Hey, hey. Elon Musk purchased the US fair and square, we've known that for like 3 months now, no need to go acting all surprised!

Remember when people were posting articles on how stupid and ridiculous DOGE is because it wouldn't have the authority to do anything?

Well, in essence and at its purest level the difference in thinking between Leftwing and Rightwing is the difference between “I want people to have a better life” and “I want to have a better life”.

Not even that. The difference is between "I want people to have a better life (objectively speaking)." and "I want to have a better life (as compared to those people)." As long as their lives are better when compared to those people, the conservatives are satisfied. Even if everyone's lives, including their own, get objectively worse.

Something I've been thinking a lot lately is that democracy is a process. It is a means by which we attempt to ensure a just and fair government for all. It's not an end in itself; we don't want democracy because democracy, at least not once people really think about it.

Which leads me to a saying. "The ends do not justify the means." This is a commonly held statement. However, it also works the other way:

The means do not justify the ends.

That means it doesn't matter if something was done by the rules, using the process, it doesn't matter if we voted for it, it doesn't matter what process was used to achieve it. If the ends are wrong, going "well, it's what was decided democratically" isn't an excuse.

If one person or a few people have a definition wrong, that's a thing that can be corrected.

If the majority of people think that's the definition, and it's been that way for decades, then you have the definition wrong.

To be fair, hasn't made much difference cause one, he got caught, and two, nobody else has done it.

I don't blame any particular person for it, of course. Hell, I share the blame myself. I haven't killed any CEOs or politicians either.

But it's not gonna work unless more of us gather up the courage Luigi had and take action.

Nationalize the companies involved in production and distribution and eliminate profit, making and selling everything at-cost also works.

The job of politicians shouldn't be considered to be to make people feel represented. It should be to actually represent them.

If it was to make people feel represented, then I'm sorry to inform you that Donald Trump is the most successful President in my memory, perhaps the most successful ever, because that is his appeal - he makes the MAGAts feel represented, and he does so very very strongly.

That is how it works as long as no one does anything to stop it.

Same as how Trump is not eligible to be President by the constitution, but that didn't stop him.

I like this template so much better than the Spider-Man one that people constantly use backwards.

There was in fact a Dragonlance movie in 2008, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I have not seen it to know if it was even a little bit good, but hey...there was one!

Not even that, it's just a matter of what's really important. They threw out the filibuster on supreme Court appointments the instant it might've blocked them from appointing those who would give them more power.

So as soon as something comes up that they consider genuinely important rather than performative, it's gone.

Crystal Pepsi.

It's sad that in a country of over 300 million people, only one of us is both marginally competent enough to take successful action against these people, and not a chicken shit coward unwilling to put themselves on the line. And yeah, at least for now, I too am among the chicken shit cowards.

It's deeper than that. It's about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.

Well first, spend a long time practicing tiny handwriting. Like, let's make the absolute most use out of this sheet as possible; it's possible to get the size of handwritten characters down to about 3mm, but let's say 4 with the assumption that I can't get it down that low. That means I have about 74 lines vertically to write in, each line able to accommodate somewhere between 70 and 52 characters, depending on the width. Let's average it to 60 characters per line, so 74x60 = 4,440 characters, times two for two sides of the page. Average number of characters per name is 7, so 14, plus two for spaces, and let's add another two for a middle initial and another space. That's 18 characters per name. This means I should be able to fit just under 500 names on the page if I use both sides as efficiently as possible.

I'll get the list of the 500 richest people in the world, and start going down it from richest on down. But not all at once. First the top name. One week later, the next name. One week after that, the next name down, and so on. After a few weeks the pattern would become obvious and we see what happens. Sadly I have no magical knowledge of who is the richest person at any given moment, so I have to just go off the list I already possess (or any new information I decide to be sufficiently trustworthy). One every week for five hundred names is 3,500 days, or 9.5 years. That is long enough to make it quite apparent this is inevitable and make it seem like it's going to continue forever, and it's long enough for legislation and other things to be done in response. Let's see how they freak out and what they try to do in response.

One timeline, actions can have an effect. But once you time travel you unmoor yourself from normal causality, so you could do things that should negate your existence and nothing will happen to you.

Indeed, if you time travel again you can't affect your own actions anymore. Like, you travel back 20 minutes, do things for an hour, then jump back 5 minutes, when you go back the second time you can't alter yourself. You could go later the you from before you ever time traveled though.

For me, given my age and all...five million.

Which kind of rich do you mean? The 'this person is truly wealthy but it's not unreasonable' or 'this person is unacceptably rich and should have their money taken away if not worse'?

The former can be somewhere around....$10,000,000 or so. Lower the older the person is really (cause I consider rich versus remaining expected lifespan), so maybe even as low as $6,000,000 for someone who's currently 40.

The latter where it's simply unacceptable for people to have that much I'd start the cutoff around $400,000,000 or so.

And slight sidenote on the unacceptable levels: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both are so unacceptably wealthy that they could make one person a day wealthy by my $10,000,000 standard...every day...for 100 years...before running out (and that's assuming they stopped accruing money at the beginning of this)...and still be unacceptably wealthy to a crazy degree.

Oh and all my numbers are assuming no additional income and definitely no interest or investment (but also assuming the money remains the same value it has today).

Primaries are only rigged in that yes, the rules and the entire framework is built to benefit those currently in power, but that is less rigged than the general is against a third party, which is to say, totally, absolutely, and unassailably rigged. Proclaiming it impossible because it's rigged is silly when you're advocating for instead competing in one that is far, far more rigged and has far more structure to prevent any upsets.

We have never actually won a primary and had them ignore it. They use their structural advantages as much as they can, but if we push hard enough to overcome those advantages, they don't just nullify the election and go with their candidate. We do get people like Ocasio-Cortez in there from time to time, when people actually show up to the primaries enough to flip it to the more progressive candidate. If we got enough candidates like her in, not just in congress but state houses and such too, we'd actually start getting places.

Now the bribes and money on the corporate side, nothing we can do about that - we have to overcome it so that we can get officials in place that will do something about it.

Now lemme put it this way. I live in bumfuck Ohio where there's no chance of a progressive candidate being elected. But I still vote in every primary. People who live in places where there is more of a chance of doing something need to be as diligent as I am, if not more, damnit.