Khotetsu

Unfortunate that they're so into the red pills then. I don't think Premarin has the same effect.

It's also easier for the ruling class to simply ignore protesters, and it doesn't get your message seen by the general population. This is why the civil rights movement included marches that ground entire sections of cities to a halt and why MLK supported groups like the Black Panthers. Disruption and inconvenience are necessary to enacting change. Even with mass public support, nothing really happened for civil rights until MLK was killed and billions of dollars worth of property was torched. A week later, the civil rights laws were created, approved, and enacted.

It sounds like your job requires no talent and you could be easily replaced. Is it so?

Just because there are other people out there who can do the same job as you (or them) doesn't mean that it takes no skill, nor that replacing them can be done at a snap of the fingers. But nobody is irreplaceable. That's how companies see their employees. Even you.

Very true, but it's precisely that wealth disparity that concerns me. I've seen the current US wealth disparity described as being on par with the disparity in France just before the French Revolution happened, where the cost of a loaf of bread had soared to more than the average worker made in a day. I worry that the more than half a century of anti-union propaganda and "get what I need and screw everybody else" attitude has beaten down the general public enough that there simply won't be enough of a unified effort to enact meaningful change. I worry about how bad things will have to get before it's too much. How many families will never recover.

But these are also very different times compared to the 1920s in that we've been riding on the coattails of the post WW2 economic boom for almost 70 years, and as that continues to slow down we might see some actual pushback. We already have, with every generation being more progressive than the last.

But I still can't help but worry.

The US economy literally depends on 3-4% of the workforce being so desperate for work that they'll take any job, regardless of how awful the pay is. They said this during the recent labor shortage, citing how this is used to keep wages down and how it's a "bad thing" that almost 100% of the workforce was employed because it meant people could pick and choose rather than just take the first offer they get, thus causing wages to increase.

Poverty and homelessness are a feature, not a bug.

What is this "passing lane" of which you speak? All I've ever seen in America is the fast lane and the slow lane(s).

And only end up being farther back than if they had just stayed put, as everybody else had the same thought, making the new lane the slower one.

I've seen Christmas stuff for sale before Halloween stuff in stores before.

Hell cannot exist after death because we are already living in it.

Dollar General in the US based their entire business model on tricking people like this. They sell stuff at 75% the price of places like Wal-Mart, while hoping people won't notice that the item is half the size of the one at Wal-Mart so you end up actually paying 150% of what you would if you went somewhere else. They also run all the local stores out of business so that people don't have any other nearby choices. Very scummy business.

I stopped finding this as funny when I learned that some of the "leaks" have been stuff like a person quoting a Wikipedia entry on a WW2 tank, or a recent one where somebody quoted an internationally available manual for a jet.

Still hilarious though that it's such an issue that "Do you play War Thunder" is a question asked by the US military in job interviews.

How does that work? Unless there's been some drastic improvements very recently, or billionaires are included, US wages have been losing purchasing power for decades.

When I last checked a few years ago, when accounting for inflation, average US wages had dropped about 5% compared to the 70s while the price of goods had increased by anywhere from 50-100% in most cases, with some things increasing by 200% or more. College, in particular, is up like 1,100% or something from the beginning of the 70s. Another absurd example is a taco at Taco Bell, which has doubled in price since the 90s, when accounting for inflation. The cost of rent has doubled since the 70s and has gotten even worse in recent years. The rule used to be not to spend more than 30% of your wages on rent. Now it's don't spend more than 60%. It used to be feasible to buy a house on the wages of 1 person. Now, it's barely viable to afford a house on the wages of 2 people.

Wealth inequality is the worst it's been in US history. According to the IRS, more than half of Americans made less than $20k last year - I think 51% made less than $15k. At a previous job where I made roughly $25k a year, I was making more than the bottom 60% of Americans. Raises haven't kept up with CoL increases for years now. The average American works 50 hours a week between 2 jobs and switches jobs every 2 years because it's the best way to make sure you're paid what your skills are actually worth.

I can't imagine where the data you saw came from, but that has the same vibes as when they said that people were going to take their COVID checks and use them to buy cars.

Or for buying too much stuff. Or really, whatever problem is currently happening. It's the Millenials fault somehow, we'll just figure out how later.