Joke’s on you…

146 rural hospitals closed or stopped providing inpatient services from 2005 to 2023 in the United States

Where we’re going, we won’t have hospitals

the lives of their constituents

No corporate lobbyist is going to suffer from this decision.

Isekai but you just reincarnated as another kid who lives down the street and then your old self and new self become best friends.

Paxton’s definitely in campaign mode. I wonder how many of these lawsuits disappear after the GOP primary.

The US is where the plurality of cars are bought and sold. You can’t just ignore it, especially if you’re one of the Big Three domestic automakers.

What Ford’s running into is a soft cap on the volume of debt Americans are able to assume in order to buy their bloated flatbed trucks and SUVs. It’s 2008 all over again.

The announcement amounted to an admission by Ford that it had overestimated demand for battery-powered vehicles and underestimated the staying power of vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel. Other big automakers, including General Motors and Stellantis, have also recently changed their plans and placed a far greater emphasis on combustion engine vehicles and hybrids.

The U.S. auto industry’s move away from electric vehicles is also a result of a reversal in government policies since President Trump took office in January. His administration has slashed government incentives for electric vehicles while promoting fossil fuels. This month, the administration announced plans to significantly weaken fuel economy standards, which would reduce automakers’ incentive to make electric cars.

This is the nut of it.

We had a public incentive to shit our method of engine manufacture to all electric and now we don’t.

The federal government is artificially subsidizing fossil fuel production and consumption, while penalizing wind and solar as well as lithium battery production.

But don’t be too worried folks. At the end of the day, we’re gutting the consumer economy with stagflation anyway.

Degrowth, baby! That’s Trump’s future.

One Piece is the straw hat.

He finds it in the first episode.

There. Saved you 1100+ 22min episodes full of fun and adventure and friendship.

You’re welcome.

I assumed the Ghost of Christmas Imperative would just be shouting “CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS!” over and over again, while blowing an air horn that plays carols.

So to ignore class and imperialism in your advocacy for trans rights means to effectively throw the majority of trans people under the bus.

I mean… this is literally what the liberals have said they want to do, re: 2024

Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

The number of policies liberals seem willing to support shrinks with every election cycle as reactionaries in national media flog them for speaking out. Police Brutality in 2014. Health care in 2016. Climate Change in 2018. Student Debt in 2020. Opposition to Genocide in 2022. It seems 2024 was the year we had to stop caring about LGBTQ.

I wonder what we’ll be asked to give up next in our quest to win that “Moderate” voter.

The Naked Gun reboot was a wild ride. Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson hit it out of the park.

Very helpful if your goal is to impose increasingly draconian state security measures and tighten control over the economy from the executive level. Economic manipulation becomes a carrot-and-stick tool for compelling private adoption of public policies.

Trump’s done an excellent job of enriching the friends in his immediate social circle, so from their perspective (and the perspective of their associated industries) the economy is “doing great”. Then the outside groups get labeled as “Gone Woke, Go Broke” failures and Trump leverages public discontent to intercede in their industries, buy out private firms, force out C-levels and managers under the auspices of “fighting DEI”, and replacing them with cronies he can then lard up with federal money.

This isn’t a novel strategy, either. American liberals sought to open up business leadership to minorities and women with a similar set of carrot-and-stick regulations, contracts, and subsidies. Reagan-Era conservatives employed similar strategies to force Evangelical Christian groups into big law firms and onward to the courts, as well as stacking them on the board rooms of big businesses.

Trump’s adopted the playbook to force a more explicit form of fascism across the Military Industrial Complex and the associated network of (already heavily reactionary) public-private partners.

One would like to believe this alarming tilt towards Barbarism would wake Biden-Era liberals up to the dangers inherent in the heavily privatized economic model they’ve championed. But all I’m seeing is ambient smugness, followed by ineffectual liberal reforms insisting people are “getting what they voted for” when the rotten economy beings to crumble in earnest.

They spilled for our sins.

Hallelujah.

First 9 years of school is absolutely mandatory where I come from

Attendance is mandatory. Failure is always an option.

Then after 12 years of school you still need a degree for most job listings.

You can find jobs (even good paying jobs) that don’t require a degree, but they tend to be labor intensive, health hazardous, and with awful working hours. There’s a job I’m always seeing open in Houston for non-college recruits that involves hosing out shipping containers at the port. The job starts around 6pm and you’re in a giant rubber hasmat suit dealing with tanker ships full of toxic chemicals. The bosses want you to work 12 hour shifts, you’re in close with heavy machinery on a dock, and you’re surrounded by carcinogens that you have to meticulously shield and clean yourself of and hope your PPE is keeping you safe on the clock.

$80k+/year. The bigger companies looking for people with experience will pay north of $150k.

You can also work out on a rig for $150k+. You can drive trucks overseas (Americans working in Iraq could earn $200k+/year back during the occupation). If you do have military experience, there’s a ton of money working as a “consultant” in Private Defense. No college necessary. But… you know… there’s trade offs.

The glut of US tech workers is due to the excessive number of H1B visas being issued.

That’s been part of it. But even with the H1B and the outsourcing, there’s a ton of technology to be administered, maintained, and repaired. We’re a technology economy. The glut of US tech workers is due to induced demand.

Why hire an expensive American new graduate when you can hire someone from India with 3-5 years of experience at 60% market rate instead?

Because you need to be able to communicate your needs fluently and India is in the wrong time zone. You can outsource some of your work some of the time, but follow this logic to its conclusion and you begin to ask why you’re even in business in the states. Why not just invest money in India’s private sector if you’re so convinced their workers can do a better job at a lower price? Why have an American business at all?

Replace me with an AI and I will laugh my way straight over to the brokerage where I short your stock.

Chevron replaced their whole IT department with Indian outsourcing companies a year ago and they’re already falling apart from the inside out.

I mean, me too. Glad I never had a talent or penchant for art. I’d be broke.

All my friends got married and now half the table is spouses with a few spots reserved for a cameo from one of the kids

how fucking notoriously US diplomatic staff in china absolutely cannot keep it in their pants

Hardly unique to China. Obama’s SS famously all got busted visiting prostitutes in Brazil while scouting venues for his visit.

But it always seems to get blamed on the Yellow Peril when it’s in the news

Adding an “AI art” tag to filter against would go a long way