Because China’s government knows the last thing it needs is a bunch of unemployed people.

It’s so weird how single-party rule can sometimes be more responsive to the people. Because there’s no illusion: if the people get unhappy enough, CCP is gone.

Meanwhile the US we live with these bizarre illusions about how the people are truly in power, while our government is driven into the ground by plutocrats and their pet priests.

I’m actually with you - I don’t believe any one president can just wave a magic wand and do away with regulatory capture forever. I’m not sure what I said specifically that made you think I put that all on the president.

However it would be equally fallacious to say he can do nothing. It is still a very relevant question, which no one seems to want to answer: what CAN the next president DO to restore trust? Not necessarily restore it ALL but begin to heal the situation? No colorful metaphors. Actual actions that are within the power of the office. This is a real question.

That’s a list of problems. I guess I just have to keep bringing you back to “what should the next president do?” You know, about them.

But if I ask you that are you going to compare me to a bully harming someone? That’s my WTF here.

What? I’m literally asking what the next leader should do to start improving the situation, not asking anyone’s forgiveness. If you can’t name one actual concrete thing, just admit it.

It’ll take decades to make up for completely but what can the next president do to regain some trust?

This makes sense. What never makes sense to me is when people worry about viruses from ice cores that are a billion years old. Because it works both ways: viruses have to be pretty well adapted to you in order to harm you. There are no such viruses long before humans even existed. I’m sure there are exception, as with viruses that manage to jump species, but I wouldn’t worry much about viruses from before the time of mammals, yet some people freak out MORE the older the ice core is. They’ve seen too many movies about ancient evil escaping old crypts.

I suppose you’re thinking of Europe and the Nazis there and not the firebombing of the city of Tokyo, or the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m aware of the usual excuses that these were defensive acts, but seriously, give me a fucking break.

The more you know, the more there is for you to possibly worry about. Ignorance is bliss! Here’s a fun anecdote to calm your jitters.

Once upon a time I was trying to reassure my coworker who had an upcoming appointment. “I’m scared! I want to do it but I’m scared of the pain! It’s going to hurt!” she groaned.

I asked “where on your body are you getting the work?”

“On my stomach,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, “that’s a good place. It won’t hurt that much. You have a lot of fat on your stomach.”

She just frowned at me. One of the other cooks walked in and she shouted “He just called me fat!”

“The rhetorical ‘you!’” I tried to explain, to no avail. I never heard the end of that one from her.

This is a good example of how the past doesn’t go anywhere. Those drugs are still around as much as they ever were, or in even greater numbers. But we all know what they are now and what they do. There’s nothing to talk about so their names drop off the cultural airwaves. They’ve settled into the culture. You don’t hear about them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not around. The past doesn’t go anywhere. The future is just laid on top of it.

Well, that’s what a rhetorical question is. You’re making a statement, not a query, but the best way to couch your statement happens to be with a question mark at the end of it. I’m not sure this is the best example of one, but at least they made an attempt to label it as such.

Aren’t we as humans proving every year that goes by, that no matter how much power and knowledge you amass, you can still be an evil, childish, asshole? God is just a little further along that dotted line. He’s got all the power and knowledge. This doesn’t make him mature or good.

Cutting to the chase, just ask your mom if any man has ever touched her inappropriately or gotten her to have sex when she would rather not have.

Then ask her why she hasn’t ever told you this before.

My anus says that 12 times a day.

The business of business is business.

Businesses want stability, safety, and predictability. Protests really are kind of the opposite energy. Their whole point is to shake things up and reroute the direction of the world, sometimes in big ways. They can also be unpredictable and unfortunately in some cases even unsafe. I remember seeing every store window on Telegraph Avenue broken the day after a big protest. It was sad. The family owned grocery store got it just as bad as the corporate clothing retailer.

Not long ago when the Hong Kong protests were off the hook and things were getting super tense there, some Hong Kong family visited us here in the US for the holidays. The younger generation were super informed and watching their phones and they told us all about the protests, the political actors, the demands, the rhetoric, and the energy in the streets.

Meanwhile, at dinner, the (very wealthy) grandma made a toast and said “Hong Kong needs peace! Doesn’t matter who’s in charge!” There was a super uncomfortable silence and you could see the youngs biting their lips. She has massive business interests there and just wants to keep manufacturing stuff. She doesn’t care about idealism or whatever else.

If a political candidate is really pro business, they don’t go about their agenda by staging protests. The two really just don’t mix. Businesses lobby and donate.

Another way of saying it is that some things are so expensive you don’t do them even if they could be useful one day. Do you have a second house? Your first one could burn down. You don’t? I guess you must be a greedy capitalist thinking only about short term money.

It makes a certain kind of sense to me. Making capitalism serve social goals is obviously a mix of philosophies but if capitalism is serving socialistic ends, isn’t socialism prioritized?

The essence of socialism, to me, is serving the social good as top priority. Not centrally managing the economy. Capitalism can be a “how” with socialism as the “why.”

All accurate beyond debate except for the part about his social programs ending the depression. That point is debatable, the debate being that it was actually deficit spending to industrialize for WW2 that did it.

Agreed. And with sexism, the link is even weaker.

America is only 15% black so it at least suggests that a good chunk of the other 85% were not too racist to elect Obama.

But humanity is 52% women so in theory, women could elect a woman even if every man in the country was in fact chauvinist.

Because by definition the furthest outliers have the least to say about the rest of the group.

Maybe we shouldn’t attempt to generalize about the categorizes by choosing the most grotesque extremes of both.