It’s not about decreasing how much each person has - quite the opposite, actually. It’s about increasing the efficiency of how we distribute our resources so that more gets to those who need it because we already have far more than we need but most of it is wasted or artificially made scarce to increase profit.

The US throws away something like 60% of the food we produce annually while kids starve and politicians talk about getting rid of free lunches at schools.

The “overpopulation” fear is really just misdirection from the greedy few to keep the rest of us from questioning why we let them get away with everything.

It can in the sense that many forms of generating power are just some form of water or steam turbine, but that’s neither here nor there.

IMO, the graph is misleading anyway because the criticism of AI from that perspective was the data centers and companies using water for cooling and energy, not individuals using water on an individual prompt. I mean, Microsoft has entered a deal with a power company to restart one of the nuclear reactors on Three Mile Island in order to compensate for the expected cost in energy of their AI. Using their service is bad because it incentivizes their use of so much energy/resources.

It’s like how during COVID the world massively reduced the individual usage of cars for a year and emissions barely budged. Because a single one of the largest freight ships puts out more emissions than every personal car combined annually.

We haven’t even seen any real effects of the tariffs yet. The last time a US administration did this, it caused 10 years of some of the worst economic downturn in world history - the Great Depression.

Got you pushing too many pencils, Dillon!

I had a FedEx driver the other day tell me that they separate packages into multiple deliveries sometimes even though they’re all being dropped off all at once for the same reason. Cook the metrics so it looks like they’re making more deliveries in a certain timeframe.

Most items have at least doubled in price since then, so it’s a good thing to point out. Hell, the price of Taco Bell has doubled since the 90s alone. College prices have risen more than 1,000%.

Add on that we also have more expenses considered “essential” today as well. Things like the internet and cell phones didn’t exist in the 70s, and are incredibly important to simply keeping a job today.

They never said that everybody has a right to drive. The reality is that, at least in the US and similarly planned countries, cars are priced like a luxury and treated like a necessity by the powers that be. Anything that isn’t driving a car is an afterthought.

I mean, I’d personally rather see an anime girl themed desktop than those weird statues rich people sometimes have in places like on their coffee table that are stuff like a woman in the boob + butt out pose with no limbs or head. That shit is just creepy looking. I know it’s supposed to be reminiscent of broken Greek and Roman statues, but why do they always have to be posed and objectified like porn stars? At least with the anime girl, I know that I’m talking to an otaku rather than Hannibal Lecter.

I think it’s also the speed and number of connections leading to the topic change. I think many neurotypicals would jump from the carnival to the rodeo, or to the bee story, but they wouldn’t jump all the way to wondering about wasps from talking about the carnival in one go.

From the outside, the topic change is so different that neurotypicals can’t follow the connections.

Hillary also had to contend with Bernie as her opponent in the primary, a much more beloved candidate who polled better than both her and Trump, and was also handicapped by the Dems running a crooked primary by saying that they didn’t have to and would never pick Bernie as the candidate, even if he won the primary. She also called herself a “Goldwater girl” during the campaign, a man who ran for President on segregation as a campaign promise. People also had a negative view of her because she’s a Clinton, and there was a bit of dissatisfaction with “political dynasties” after the Bush era.

And Harris ran a campaign that tried to appeal to conservative voters with promises such as building the wall on the Mexican border and campaigning with Cheney, which caused her to immediately begin losing percentages in the polls amongst independent voters. She also has a legacy of questionable actions against minorities of color during her time in California, which I saw a number of people criticizing.

Not to say that sexism and racism didn’t play a part because oh my God, even here in liberal Massachusetts I see that shit. But they also did the usual Democrat campaign strategy of not appealing to their base because they were courting a mythical moderate conservative voter that doesn’t exist, and that’s a losing strategy. Dems fall in love, Republicans fall in line. AOC is so popular because she speaks to the issues that people have, and she does so passionately.

Despite that, I unfortunately remain unconvinced that she could pull out a presidential victory because of the aforementioned racism and sexism that’s so prevalent in this country. As someone wiser than me once said, racism is so American that when you criticize it, people think that you’re criticizing America.

It also goes along with their mentality that trans men are simply poor, defenseless women who have been brainwashed into wanting to become strong, powerful men. And also how trans women must be mentally ill. Because how could anyone not want to be a man? Women who want to be men are understandable but misguided, and men who want to be women are sick and to be both pitied and hated - but especially hated.

The Republican party is a cult - especially the cult of Trump. All these grifters selling hate to conservatives have made it that much harder to convince them when they’re wrong, and the odds of them doubling down on those beliefs when they are challenged get more and more likely the deeper in they are. There’s a point where it becomes almost impossible to pull people out of a cult and there’s largely no line that they won’t convince themselves that it’s okay to cross.

I think that’s where we’re at and have been at for quite a while. Republicans convince themselves that they’re the good guys fighting the good fight against whatever the party tells them is bad, and believe that their bigotry and hate is justified.

The trick is to get an entire neighborhood in on it. That way you can schedule shouting matches in the front yards of the houses neighboring the open houses as well.

A lot of these minorities also always think that they’re different because they’re “one of the good ones” and will reap the same benefits.

My friend told me once about how people in cults have a sunk-cost fallacy to the cult’s beliefs that makes it harder to get them out the longer they’ve been in.

People are more likely to double down on their beliefs when proven wrong because they’d have to admit that they were wrong and so were all the things that they did following those beliefs. And nobody likes to admit when they’re wrong, because nobody wants to believe that they’re the bad guy.

What the fuck are you on about? I never said that they started street brawls with the church. I agreed with you about them hating and attacking socialists, added that they only kept the name for the party because of the recognition factor/popularity of socialist policy at that time in Germany, and then said that if I remember correctly, Hitler made agreements with the church for funding and support despite his personal feelings on the matter. Nowhere did I say the Nazis beat up Christians or members of the Church.

Yep. Hitler also hated Christianity IIRC, but allied with the church for their financial aid and the support of religious voters. They definitely weren’t above using the name of something that they hated and actively attacked to allow them to grab more power, and it makes them neither socialist nor Christian to have done so.

Socialism was also popular at the time and they were using that to increase their appeal.

“Quiet quitting” would be 37 or even 38 in your example. Basically doing what’s in your job description, but nothing more. Setting clear work/life boundaries where you aren’t accessible to do work for your boss/manager outside of working hours (even if they just want you to answer some emails while you’re on vacation or whatever), and not doing stuff that you aren’t qualified for/isn’t in your job description and that you aren’t getting paid extra to do.

People have started refusing to let companies expect more than they’re paying for, and it’s pissed them off, so they’re calling it “quiet quitting.”