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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I’m tired of going high when they go low.

    If the new standard is for Republicans to cast doubt on the legitimacy of every election, except for the ones they win, then we should, at the very least, be scrutinizing every single aspect of the election. Refuse to concede, demand recounts, hand tally the electronic ballots, search up and down and under every rock for evidence that the other side is guilty of some foul play.

    Because if they had done that in the first place, they might have uncovered shit like this before it was too late to stop the wrong candidate from getting inaugurated. If they had bothered to put up a fight instead of maintaining decorum that the Republicans never bother to show, maybe they would have discovered what many of us already suspected - that Elon Musk somehow tampered with the voting machines to swing the election in Donald Trump’s favor in key swing states. They practically admitted as much on stage, and nobody batted an eye at it.

    I don’t expect to ever live to see another fair election for the rest of my life.




  • Not all the protestors are involved in criminal activity. The news is constantly reporting that 95% of the crowd is peacefully exercising their right to protest, but a small minority of people use the situation to their advantage and cause chaos. The media then reports on these (accurate) instances of violence and then right wing talking heads run away with that and paint the picture that everyone is looting and rioting and attacking cops.

    It’s also a known tactic to have provocateurs incite a riot so that the people in power can use it as an excuse to crack down on an otherwise legitimate protest.


  • You can withhold paying your federal taxes from your paycheck. Most people don’t because they don’t want to get stuck with a big tax bill in April with no way to pay it if they spent that money or lost it on a bad investment. if enough people all did that at once, regardless of state, it could put a big financial burden on Trump. The government heavily relies on this steady source of income, and unless you make a lot of money, you are probably getting a federal return every year, which means you gave the U.S. Government an interest free loan of sorts.



  • Trump verifiably tried to steal the 2020 election on live television. Even though he failed, his attempt came close enough to succeeding to give pause for thought. There are fewer guardrails now than there were before to prevent something like that from happening again.

    So, to that point, I say why wouldn’t trump cheat again? He was never punished for his last attempt. In fact, he was rewarded for it!

    We’re never having another election that won’t have doubt cast on it from either side. We burned that bridge on January 6th.



  • It’s exactly this, 1000%. I work for a small company that had a return-to-office mandate a few years ago when Covid began initially winding down as access to vaccines became widespread. I was working fully remote and had leased an apartment over an hour away from the closest branch office in an affordable part of town. We had our most profitable year ever in the nearly 50 year history of the company in 2020 when literally every employee was working remote. Morale was up, I was saving money that wasn’t going to gas or car maintenance, and I was feeling positive about the future of work-life balance.

    Then, one day, I get called in for performance review, and it was all smiles and sunshine and then they said “You’re doing a great job Furbag, but we’d like to see you back in the office for a minimum of three days per week.” That was the first and only negative comment I had ever received on a performance review since starting for the company. When I escalated the results of my performance review to management, wanting a more clear explanation for why I am being asked to commute 1+ hours in to work almost every day from the outskirts of the bay area, they told me exactly what you said “We’re paying for this building, so we want people physically in the office to justify it. Also, every other industry is doing return to work mandates so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.”

    Naturally, this is still a sore spot for me. The company didn’t learn it’s lesson and still follows industry trends like little lemmings (and not the good kind that post here) while looking into buying up more real estate in other parts of the state to expand operations. They could be selling the building I’m working in now, and use the profits from the sale to fund everybody with equipment to work from home (desk, chair, monitors, hardware, etc) and work would continue as usual with a lot more employee satisfaction and work-life balance, but I’ve learned that owning real estate as a business is in itself a prestige that the C-Suite loves to show off to it’s competitors. “Look at this historic building we own, isn’t it grand?”, “Oh, you think that’s grand? We rent 12 floors of a 40 story skyscraper in San Francisco, beat that!”.

    Managers need the physical locations to continue to exist so that they can justify their own existence, and they’ve fully convinced gullible CEOs that productivity will wane if people are allowed to do work from home “unsupervised”, even though there’s plenty of data that suggests the opposite is true.

    /endrant




  • This is, sadly, the truth. For all people like to bluster about political action, most people are kept just comfortable enough to feel like they have something to lose if they attend protests or speak out. The stuff that Trump is doing right now is bad, but it’s enough degrees of separation away from affecting the average person that someone who isn’t tuned in to the political messaging will probably not notice. Even if they did notice, would they be motivated to risk losing their livelihood and shelter over it? It won’t get bad enough for civil war until food or water becomes impossible to acquire. Bread lines are the last step before the ruling class loses control over everyone beneath them.