Bill Gates the Microsoft guy? The one that just demolished competition? The same company that ran afoul of US antitrust law? Bill Gates the guy that had a non zero number of African nations ask him to stop helping, that guy?

It’d be funny if it was just about grilling and craft beers with nothing spicier than a Full House (the original) joke, but I somehow doubt it.

I mean, I guess, but why complicate this stuff. We already have the systems and administration to do taxes. We could break up monopolies and enforce the laws we already have.

I’d keep it real real simple for folks. We should stop letting corporations and their owner class privatize the gains and stick the rest of society with the losses. Take the 2008 fiasco, if we are bailing out a bunch of companies we should be bailing out a bunch of home owners.

Very simply. Raise their taxes.

Less simply. Remove the cap on social security tax. Tax long term capital gains beyond a certain amount as regular income. Put the top rate income tax closer to 90%. Fix the god damn estate tax situation. Why on god’s green earth do the children of Sam Walton occupy so much space on the Forbes 400.

I could see your scenario being scary if the “reasonable” GOP members and funders split off and started sucking all the “conservative” liberal groups that normally vote Democratic but could be swayed to embrace even more neo-liberal policies.

As long as there is a large concentration of a anti-education, anti-intellectual, and nationalistic brained people in easily gerrymandered areas there will probably always be a conservative party. The GOP has been playing their hateful scared brains like a fiddle for a good four plus decades, and they won’t go quietly into the night.

Maybe if we didn’t have a poorly planned two party system they’d have far less actual power.

Seeding the land for the next generation of American pickers?

Also makes you wonder what else he’s lied about. Are we not getting super affordable butler robots that are also best friends?

They had the same message back in the AOL days. Even with the warning people still had no problem handing over all sorts of passwords and stuff.

I always try and take advantage of double sided printing when it is available. And my partner and I both drive reasonable vehicles and not oversized gas guzzlers.

As far as addressing the boomer problem, I’ve been just waiting for them to age out as the ones I know don’t respond well to logical or rational arguments. The boomers I know that are supporting Trump lack critical thinking skills and struggle with abstract thinking. This has made them easy prey for conservative media that for one seeks to short circuit any higher order thinking by triggering fear responses in their viewers.

If I had three wishes, I’d use one to try and fix this problem by massively expanding our education system. We are saddled with an antiquated system designed for a time when factory workers were needed and scheduling had to be done around farm labor availability. So I live in a progressive city and our state is finally doing free school meals. How insane that in 2024 there’s a need for free meals in a rather rich country and also a good chunk of our population are opposed to giving out free food.

I guess that is one way to present a nice picture for the people at the top. Here’s the way I see it. This neo-liberal experiment has been a massive disaster. We’ve allowed the elites to dismantle so much of our social safety net, and all for what… cheap smart phones with facebook? The very same phones that help power the culture war. A war so devastating it has captured and rotted the brains of large segments of our population.

Meanwhile, we the general citizens have been getting fleeced in one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the public to the private. And what are these elites doing with all their new wealth? Buying up every available asset that can produce a dollar and writing the rules to benefit those with excessive wealth.

I’ll leave with an example from the housing market, because it has been so popular lately and because it is a perfect example of this wealth transfer. This is broad and general. People and institutions over extended themselves and got drunk on paper asset inflation during the housing bubble. The gov’t bailed out the big institutions and stuck the common people with the bill. This resulted in tighter lending for the regular home buyer and cheap available funds for institutions such as hedge funds. So tons of available housing stock sitting on bank’s balance sheets were easy pickings for funds.

This reminded me of the hit 90s movie Super Mario Bros with John Leguizamo when the lead characters got the goomba guys dancing in the elevator.

Absolutely. It is also never a bad idea to have at least 6 months in expenses saved up in cash for emergencies. And another 10 thousand to keep an attorney on retainer.

That’s why you get AFLAC for the other stuff.

So your plan is to hand power to the minority of people? And you think we should agree to this minoritarianism, because the rural / conservative view holders would get resentful?

Why don’t we just hand the country back to the indigenous people and let them, an even bigger minority than the rurals, run shit for a while?

Anyway "rural / conservative view"s are already represented in their communities, towns, cities, and states. By their local, city, and state governments.

And by your “logic” shouldn’t all those conservative counties that vote red be forced to give greater weight to their liberal residents, yah know so their liberal voices aren’t drowned out and they suddenly become resentful or something.

This seems like a wild misuse of government services. Aren’t the police in the law enforcement game and not the drug abuse game? Why aren’t the city bus drivers also teaching these programs and getting to drive around sweet ass cybertrucks?

Well Jesus is part of the Christian pantheon and those guys are just practicing Judaism with blood magic.

I’m just concerned that if we don’t give them the money they’ll make windows 11 worse.

Is it too late to return some of these spots to France?

The state of things is the US dollar is still king. We export our inflation because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. Yes there are other states that would be interested in de-dollarizing, but what’s the alternative? Flying planes of gold around the world like Russia?

This unlikely to change in the near future, because there are few other currencies large enough to fill the role and there are exactly zero other countries with anywhere near the military power to maintain reserve currency status.