SnotFlickerman

Commander Shepard tried for both Liara and Ashley at the same time.

this one time, as a treat.

Thanks for this, at least it gave me a chuckle in these dark times.

The wealthy are no longer constrained by borders, so they don't actually care if the US hegemony fails. They have investments all over the world.

Quite true! Our economy has been held together with duct tape, hope, and the money printer going brrrrr for the better part of two decades now.

People forget that something like the TSA was essentially a jobs program to boost Bush's weak economy.

I remember working in TV and getting very upset at my coworkers defending Bush and Henry Paulson asking for $700 billion to bail out the banks, telling them that if we didn't solve these problems the hard way at the time they would grow and fester and become harder and harder to fix without complete disaster. I often wonder if my coworkers recall that conversation the way I do.

They treat it like most people treat a EULA.

Kind of an antagonistic response for what was actually a fairly neutral statement. Thanks for making it clear you're not here with good faith intentions, I guess.

People need to accept that the world's wealthy are tired of having to pay a premium for intellectual labor from US citizens. They can get it cheaper elsewhere, and they plan to.

The goal is not to bring the rest of the world up to the US's standards of living, the goal is explicitly to bring the US standard of living down to match the rest of the world. They want us to accept lower pay and a lower standard of living, and they're willing to tear it all apart and divide us so we're at each other's throats fighting for the scraps that are left.

As I've said before, the wealthy are in "let's strip mine this removed!" mode because they have decided the US citizenry do not offer the value they want or need anymore. The "shining city on the hill" is now a slum and they want to keep it that way.

Literally I have been saying for at least a decade now that it has felt like wealthy have had a plan to just give up on the US, and now it's coming to fruition. They've extracted the wealth, and now they're hanging us out to dry.

but protesting is just how you communicate that there are numbers to make it safe to resist

An important and oft overlooked point about protest, messaging about the power and safety of numbers.

At least parallel systems on a smaller scale, I guess.

Everything starts small, my friend. A lot of leaders don't become leaders because they want to be, but because they were already putting in the work. You may find yourself in such a position someday, out of sheer necessity and due to the fact that you were laying the groundwork for future efforts. Don't sell your efforts short, small things add up.

I just want to say if you are indeed a Chinese person, thank you for sharing your unique experience with folks from the west. I can't really tell for sure based on your post history whether you truly are or not, so for the moment, I'll take you at your word.

I do want to say that I deeply agree with this statement from your comment history:

I’m saying that all new energy electric vehicles are industrial waste.

Because yes, we could be doing so much better for the environment with bicycles and public transit such as buses and trains. The lie of cars is that they offer a freedom to go where you want when you want, but in large cities, that lie is shown for what it is, because when all the cars are on the roads at the same time, traffic happens and nobody gets to go anywhere they want at the time they want.

The largest worldwide protests in history (at the time) happened on February 15th, 2003, to try to prevent the War in Iraq from happening.

The war happened anyway. Take that for what it's worth.

(We even have JD Vance saying Europe didn't do enough to stop the war, as if the giant protests weren't enough)

Stop protesting and start building parallel systems we can rely on when we all need to General Strike, which is coming quite quickly. We will need systems to feed, water, clothe, house, and in general care for one another during a nationwide general strike. While people aren't wrong that being armed will probably be a necessary part of that, in the USA, that's the only part people seem to focus on, forgetting that you cannot eat bullets.

Excel is the one thing LibreOffice still falls behind on. It's really hard to compete with Excel, specifically.