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Cake day: March 6th, 2024

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  • I don’t get this. Y’all on Lemmy are constantly screaming about, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” about people like Trump and the GOP, but you won’t acknowledge the same about Democrats.

    You’re right, Bernie is older than Biden, and some of the Squad are in their 40s/50s. I never said otherwise. And AOC is the youngest a president can be.

    Bernie ran on a progressive platform, Biden did not, and Harris is not, by her own admission. The Squad have progressive ideas they push and campaign on, Harris and Walz have not shown support for these same policies. She’s showing all of us that is not a progressive candidate, which is all this discussion is about.

    She’s the far better candidate compared to Der Orange, no one should be voting for Trump. This isn’t a “y’AlL nEeD tO vOtE tHiRd PaRtY” comment, or one telling anyone to stay home, or any of that.

    Harris is just not a progressive candidate, and a 60 year old woman who’s lived her entire life in the upper middle class has much less in common with the average person than someone like AOC.

    That’s what this whole comment chain was about: someone asked why Harris may have pressure behind the scenes to oust Kahn as FTC chair, and that would be the only reason I could think she’d do it: her wealthy donors want a less progressive FTC chair so they’ll stop going after the oligarchs, and Harris’s campaign seems to be very “return to the status quo” like the Democrats always seem to be doing.


  • I don’t get this. Y’all on Lemmy are constantly screaming about, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” about people like Trump and the GOP, but you won’t acknowledge the same about Democrats.

    You’re right, Bernie is older than Biden, and some of the Squad are in their 40s/50s. I never said otherwise. And AOC is the youngest a president can be.

    Bernie ran on a progressive platform, Biden did not, and Harris is not, by her own admission. The Squad have progressive ideas they push and campaign on, Harris and Walz have not shown support for these same policies. She’s showing all of us that is not a progressive candidate, which is all this discussion is about.

    She’s the far better candidate compared to Der Orange, no one should be voting for Trump. This isn’t a “y’AlL nEeD tO vOtE tHiRd PaRtY” comment, or one telling anyone to stay home, or any of that.

    Harris is just not a progressive candidate, and a 60 year old woman who’s lived her entire life in the upper middle class has much less in common with the average person than someone like AOC.

    That’s what this whole comment chain was about: someone asked why Harris may have pressure behind the scenes to oust Kahn as FTC chair, and that would be the only reason I could think she’d do it: her wealthy donors want a less progressive FTC chair so they’ll stop going after the oligarchs, and Harris’s campaign seems to be very “return to the status quo” like the Democrats always seem to be doing.


  • I told a cousin once I wasn’t going to be lectured on morality by a woman whose sole contribution to society was how much money she could spend at a liquor store. That whole post I wrote was honestly, according to my brother, some of the best criticism he’s read, quote, “You called her a lush without ever actually using the word, while also going up one side of her and down the other, saying everything the rest of us wanted to.” That cousin, to this day, will not interact with me at family gatherings.

    I also once threw shitty advice I was given back into my boss’s face in my resignation text, to the point where he mentioned it felt “personal” when he called me to try to get me to stay. That was the resignation friends/family told me I should be a writer because, “You have a knack for telling people to go fuck themselves in a way where they thank you afterwards.”

    My go to, though, when someone insults me is to usually respond, “I’ve been called worse by better.”



  • Well, to start, politicians will say anything to get elected, so their words mean absolutely nothing, regardless of party affiliation.

    This article was the first I’d even heard about Harris potentially ousting Kahn, so that’s potentially a good sign. However, Kahn and the FTC have been taking swings at the oligarchs via their Google monopoly lawsuits, going after Apple, etc.

    Harris (and Walz) are centrist Democrats, they are not progressive. A progressive candidate would be calling for the minimum wage to match where it’d be if it was tied with inflation, around $26/hr, not bringing up the $15/hr debate that should’ve been done a decade ago. She hasn’t signalled support for Medicare for All as far as I remember, she went back on her promise not to expand fracking, and she’s made no mention of enshrining LGBTQ+ rights into law or stopping weapons sales to Israel (she has said their would be contingencies, so she still agrees to help the guy actively working against her with her opponent), all progressive ideas.

    So, she likely doesn’t support these things because her party, and more importantly, the donors who line their pockets, don’t want her to. She’s a career Democrat, she’s not that much younger than Biden in comparison to someone considered progressive, like AOC, so her policies are going to closer align with the Status-Quo centrist Democrats versus the We-Need-Change-Now progressive Democrats.

    Tl:dr: Harris is a centrist Democrat whose party (and by extension, her party’s wealthy donors) do not want progress made, they want a return to the status quo, as their policies have shown (Palestine, M4A, Fracking, etc). Her donors likely don’t like that the FTC chair actually has a backbone, and since the status quo is more important to the Democrat Party (look at how they treated Bernie) than progress. So, the donors are likely pressuring her behind the scenes to put a Garland-esque Chair in charge of the FTC: someone with no backbone.



  • When I had my clearance, we were told if we had a conversation with a foreign national at a bar, we had to disclose it, even after we had already received our clearance.

    I was put through a multi-hour polygraph interview from hell, where I was told I didn’t know how to breathe and was threatened with being failed and losing my clearance, because I was having issues remembering online foreign penpals from high school.

    But motherfucker is talking to Putin on the regularly, and he’s a billionaire with billions worth of government contracts? Tell me again, US Government, why any of your citizens should give a fuck about anything, again?


  • I’m 30 next month, I joined the military right out of high school, and I specifically remember them teaching us a bit about 401k’s because of our ability to participate in TSP.

    The instructor very clearly told us, the average American needs $1 million in their retirement account when they to to retire to live comfortably. Not extravagantly, comfortably.

    Just a couple weeks ago I saw an article saying the average American now needs $2 million in their retirement account to be to retire comfortably, and this is assuming they don’t have a mortgage payment, etc.

    So in 11 years, the amount needed to retire comfortably has doubled, and yet my wages haven’t doubled… Minimum wage hasn’t increased in decades, sure they’re talking about $15/hr now, but that should’ve been 10 years ago. With inflation, minimum wage should be around $26/hr, yet even in my blue state, it’s like $15.60/hr or something, it’s barely over $15.

    Throw in the recent news about the inevitable and quickly approaching AMOC collapse and the climate hellscape that’s going to come with it… Our futures were robbed from us for profit, and even if I started making triple what I make now, I’ll never be able to retire, nor do I even have a retirement account anymore (I cashed mine out to help me during some really rough financial times right after the pandemic, y’know, when the government told the average American to go fuck themselves). And I was one of the few among my friends who even had one.

    So, like many people around my age, my retirement will either be societal collapse in the next couple decades, or a bullet to the head (if I could even afford the bullet) as I die in old age, homeless, while we probably have six trillionaires at that point.





  • America: our mail system is. USPS processes 23.5 million packages per day, and processes and delivers 318 million pieces of mail every day, to every single household in America, 6 days per week (7 days per week for packages).

    They will throw mail sacks onto the backs of donkeys and trek them down into the Grand Canyon to deliver to tribes down there. They will deliver by bike, plane, boat, truck, car, etc. Hell, name any other organization where you could hand someone a letter and $0.62 and ask them to take it to Alaska for you, and they’d say no problem.

    “Post” roads in the U.S. are named as such because they were roads built specifically for the movement of “post” across the country, and people have even argued that USPS (then the Postal Service) created the layout of the country as we know it.

    And despite what many may think or know, USPS is incredibly efficient when it comes to mail and delivery compared to other countries. I remember them telling us during our orientation (I used to be a mail carrier) that back around 2013, representatives from USPS were actually flown to Germany to teach and help them start delivering 6-days per week. USPS taught Germany how to be more efficient at something 😂



  • He also repeatedly says to her, in between very shallow breaths, that he can’t breathe, and she just continues taunting him and laughing and drinking.

    She also placed him in the suitcase so the lid was against the floor and his knees were pressing into his chest. He literally couldn’t expand his body to intake enough air, and even if he could have supposedly gotten out, how is he going to open the suitcase upside down in his position, with the zippers both on the outside and his arms probably pinned?

    I still think about that video.


  • True, but you also wouldn’t have the world’s largest economy and one of, if not the, largest governmental budget in the world like Trump does.

    And he also wasn’t paying for it out of his own pocket, it’d come from whatever federal budget covers the costs of military/veteran funerals.

    The entire motivation behind this is clearly racism and sexism, plus his overall disdain for veterans/our military in general. Probably stems from a jealousy he has, since veterans tend to automatically be held in higher esteem than grifters like himself, and he knows he could never have handled bootcamp, nevermind the actual military.


  • Every person is three meals away from being radicalized. Not my quote, not sure who it’s attributed to, but I’ve seen it on the internet over the years.

    I agree, shit will really hit the fan when people can’t find food/water anymore, or at least have it not be readily available. Personally, I think it’s coming sooner than people are expecting just because climate change will compound on itself year over year, and we’re doing damn near nothing to mitigate any damage (still pumping ground water up like it’s an instantly renewable resource to water golf courses in the dessert, for example).

    But radical people tend to be desperate for change, and most people get desperate when they start to actually get hungry.


  • I worked in a private school kitchen briefly, and was absolutely shocked they still had butcher block benches for food prep and such. Like, the school was built in the 50s/60s at least, and these things looked original. We always put some barrier between the food and the actual table surface when we worked on them, but still…

    I even brought it up at one point and was told the health inspector never mentioned it. Personally, I both believe that (health inspectors are very 50/50 on how thorough, and most aren’t looking to shut places down), and find it hard to believe they never mentioned the tables that had obvious grooves in them from knives of yesteryear, and discolorations from whatever organisms were growing in the pores and what not.

    But outside of that, yes, 100%, professional kitchens would either need dozens and dozens of wooden boards to cycle through throughout their shift. Every kitchen I worked in used plastic, and you can buy the boards they use in pro kitchens online from restaurant supply stores.