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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • I agree with all of that.

    Maybe … 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors… are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies… at least more than half of the time.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if … there really wasn’t something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.

    I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos…

    But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.

    The thing with the CIA’s Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I’ve ever been in, or hear about from a friend.

    General incompetence and … wasting time over petty stupid bullshit … just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life… but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.



  • Yep.

    It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that… as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.

    Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were … you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration…

    And then they said things like … is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is … quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid ‘policies’, that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism… all very much in line with … a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism…

    And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and ‘everything/one you don’t like is fascist’ was born.

    … And now here we are, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump is ‘the joker, baby’ all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late… and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.



  • I tried to type out ‘megalomaniac’ and unintentionally misspelled it as ‘magalomaniac’ in a comment i made somewhere yesterday.

    Went back to my comment, noticed this, and then realized… no, wait, this is a good misspelling, and wrote an addendum.

    I entirely support ‘magalomaniac’ and ‘magalomania’ as terms, lets get them in the DSM 6.

    Aside for Psychologists

    (And before a psych major or phd says ‘DSM V is the last DSM edition!’… no, its not, otherwise the TR version of V wouldn’t … be a thing… arguably it is the DSM 6…)


  • I get that.

    What… would actually make much more sense would be to index the minimum wage to some other, per state metric.

    A fraction of median income, some formula that actually does a good job of estimating a minimum standard of living…

    But, that will never happen, because … well basically half of voters and half state legislatures fundamentally either do not understand how to, or believe in laying a foundational safety net layer for society.

    The income and CoL disparities within the US are… basically as wild as the differences between EU member states, but our governance systems are… well, pretty much fundamentally broken at this point.


  • More than that would create private business deserts in poor areas, forcing the locals to exclusively patronize corporations. More of the population would need social program assistance to help pay for the increased cost of our domestic food supply.

    … If we’re talking about Arkansas… all of that has already happened.

    You know Walmart is… from, and based in Arkansas, right?

    20 ish % of the population is already below the poverty line… and the poverty line is basically ‘lets assume you have no rent and are homeless and just want to be able to buy food’.

    That means 20% of the state is already getting SSI, SNAP, TANF, etc.

    The US Federal poverty line is about $35 dollars a day. about $13k a year.

    If you converted that to a full time wage, thats about $6.75 an hour.

    The US Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

    50 cents of difference.

    Hasn’t changed since 2009.

    From 2009 to 2025, if you go by CPI, a single 2009 dollar is worth about $1.50 2025 dollars, that is to say, prices have risen by 50% in 16 years.

    Arkansas is literally an economic disaster zone.

    41% of the state struggles with getting their basic needs met, multiple independent observers and international aid agencies have compared the level of poverty, lack of education, access to healthcare… to areas of the world recently devastated by wars.

    You say the cost of living is 36-37k.

    That must be for a single person.

    As of Nov 24, the median individual income in Arkansas is $29,740.

    That makes the median wage about $15.50 an hour.

    The median individual income in Arkansas cannot afford the average cost of living for a single person.

    Arkansas is already the state equivalent of a mentally unsound person being deemed incompitent to make their own decisions and be declared a ward of the state.

    Bumping up the min wage would be more like doubling the care and support staff for the assisted living facility that is Arkansas, already massively dependent on Federal subsidies to the poor… and the laughably tiny tax rates on giant megacorps that allow said megacorps to dominate its economy.

    If you want to see what unchecked hypercapitalism looks like, you’re looking at Arkansas.


  • Median one bed apartment rent, across the entire US, is $1550 as of Feb 2025.

    Lets knock 20% of that off, to approximate a median studio apartment instead, give some leeway to poorer parts of the country.

    (there are not as good or reliable general stats counted for studio apartments, but a studio being 20% less than a one bed is… hopefully a reasonable, napkin math aporoximation)

    Ok, that’s $1240.

    Alright, now we use the ‘rent should be 30% of your income’ rule.

    Thats $4135 a month, rounded up very slightly to the nearest 5.

    Ok, 40 hours a week, roughly 4 weeks a month = 160 hours.

    4135 / 160 = $25.85, again rounded up to the closet 5 cents for simplicity, so thats your actual minimum ‘living wage’.

    If you wanna say a studio should be 30% off a one bedroom?

    Math works out to roughly $22.60

    If you wanna say an actual one bedroom should be the standard, works out to about $32.60

    Any way you look at this, $17 an hour is too low, that’s still… you can’t even afford a studio (as in, you cannot pass the rent to income threshold without a cosigner or double deposit or somethingnon your lease) you need roommates, you’re still living with your parents.




  • Ok whew, we are truly almost back to the 1890’s, Trumpublicans apparently favored era of America.

    19th Ammendment was passed back in… 1920.

    Basically this undoes women’s suffrage, so married women either just can’t vote, or will face massive uneccesarry hurdles voting.

    And of course transfolk as well, they’re now pretty much formerly formally (ducking autocorrect) disenfranchised.

    I wonder, do we have bootleggers (smugglers) for abortifacients, birth control, horomone therapy drugs yet?

    I guess that’ll be the ‘growth market’.





  • i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

    I don’t know exactly how that post counter … actually, technically counts posts, but:

    1:

    Zip going down could have uncounted all posts anywhere made by zip accounts.

    2:

    There could have been some kind of… propogating post count negation effect, as various other instances reacted differently to zip users posts on their instances could not pull them anymore, on different time scales.

    3:

    If a zip user had a … top level comment, on another instance, its possible all lower level comments responding to that comment may also have poofed out of existence, in some respect.

    I may be misusing some terminology here, and this is just spitballing, but yeah.

    Almost all of my .zip account’s posts/comments… are not on zip itself, and its possible that that is fairly common amongst .zip users.