If it wasn’t for Marketplace, I would be off Facebook entirely.

But I am not on threads at all, and only get punted over to Instagram with reels that appear on my Facebook account.

“Trickle down economics only occurs when the wealthy bleed.”

Similar, and appropriate. The working class will only benefit once the wealthy are no longer wealthy.

There are so many goddamn stupid people in this country.

You are more correct than you even fear.

Consider this: almost half of all American adults cannot read beyond a fifth-grade level. This bars them from a lot of information and nuance, preventing them from making the decisions that best serve themselves, and forcing them to rely on conservative propaganda that has been explicitly dumbed down to obscure the fact that those choices will hurt them the most.

None of that would have happened with a well-educated populace that could employ bullshit detection and critical thinking.

Hell, I doubt even conservatism in any capacity could survive as a going concern in such a society.

The entire American food pyramid and food ecosystem was explicitly designed to create metabolic disorders and enslave the American people to the for-profit medical system. It’s why raw foods with zero processing (and so, zero additional costs) cost several multiples more than highly processed foods (which cost much more to produce).

Y’all all need to largely remove the bottom level of the food pyramid from your diet, and start viciously curating highly-processed foods out of your diet.

Canada has had 4 shootings at elementary and high schools in the better part of a century. To increase that, you would have to include colleges and universities, and that would only increase that number to nine.

Nine.

Meanwhile, America has almost 300 every year. And that’s only elementary and high schools.

The rectum is considerably larger than your mouth, and can hold a lot more shit.

My phones/tablets would be dead in the water, but I avoid wifi for almost everything not actively mobile. So all my iron - even the laptops - are hardlined.

Unless they’re looking to employ Carrington-event-class interference, my networks are fine.

Any gelatine dish recipe from the 40s and 50s.

the cable sizes in this infographic are all the same gauge?

They’re not. They are clearly marked as different gauges, except the left most two which have different plug types… one is two prong, the other is three prong.

a 50ft 12 gauge extension cord is about $40

$40USD would be $58CAD.

A 50-ft 12-gauge extension cord costs $112+ CAD anywhere in Canada. A 100-ft is $200+ CAD. Like… fffffuuuuuck.

The patterns of behavior between shareholders, boards of directors, and executives is what’s killing people.

Sooooo… the target space has expanded?

At least the population of sociopaths would decline.

They were never a thing in Europe.

Not really a thing in Canada either. Bought a reasonably midrange ($600k) brand-new apartment back in 2006, it didn’t come with it. Also have never seen it in any other house that I’ve visited, except for the wealthy. And by that, I mean in a house that you would normally pay $4-8 million for. Which is certainly upper middle class where I am, but not overly wealthy.

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The Parasite Class. That’s what happened. These are people for whom any amount of wealth will never be enough. So they extract it out of the working class by cramming down wages, making all aspects of life precarious, and raising prices.

We all suffer and the 0.1% accumulare more wealth than they could possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.

North Korea calls itself socialist

They also call themselves democratic.

Are they? Would you call their system democratic? No?

Why one and not the other?

It’s not laziness.

Most people are too resource poor, too time poor, and too exhausted from being violently forced to be profitable to someone else, to have the headspace to do what you suggest.

You can indeed spend every waking moment optimizing your life, but then you would be just one person among tens of thousands who could be successful doing that. 99.999% of people would utterly burn out trying to achieve the same. They don’t have the underlying intergenerational wealth that would give them the ability to do so, or don’t have the free time to do so, or have too high of a cognitive load just putting one foot in front of the other to do so. Vanishingly few people are “just too lazy” to do so, and of those who are, they are the ones who can monetarily afford to be lazy.

It’s why poverty is fiendishly expensive, and why it is almost impossible to escape poverty

OMG, like North Korea isn’t bad, it’s just the US that “doesn’t like them”.

You’re linking North Korea to the conversation about communism, when that alone is a fatal error: NK is equally as much communistic as they are democratic. As in, not in the least.

There has never been any kind of a long-term (5+ years) communist country on the planet. Prior power structures have always stepped in to decapitate communism in favour of a violently autocratic dictatorship much like a monarchy. What remained of communism was only ever kept as a thin veneer of legitimacy, much like a rotting Edgar suit.

religious beliefs aren’t considered mental illness

You’re right — it’s actually brain damage and cognitive impairment.

In a fair and equitable world, communities like this would not exist, because these people would not have that wealth.

All extreme wealth has been stolen from the working class. That’s the only way it can be obtained.