It works great if you’re starting from 0 - you see every keystroke, you get hours of background information you may or may not need. It’s dumping the entire process from start to finish on you. You can follow along, understanding what you can and copying what you don’t

And then slowly, more and more of the excess information is just things you already know. Now you’re looking at a 40 minute video that may or may not have one sentence of information you’re searching for, the entire thing explaining it to you like you’re a total newbie

It makes me want to pull out my hair

History is written by the winners… Every history class we get is written through the lens of “capitalism is the only option”

The great depression is exactly where to look… Let me put together some facts you probably know in a new way

What was the new deal? It was wealth redistribution. Job creation en masse through government programs (to do basically busywork at times), sociatal safety nets, worker protections… Sound familiar?

How did it play out? The establishment fought it every step of the way. America voted in younger and bolder representatives to both parties.

FDR won the election 4 times - until very recently he was said to be “the closest America has come to a king”. But he wasn’t… He was performing the will of the people, and that threatened the establishment. It took 2 generations to slowly dismantle what he put in place

And on the other note… Billionaires can’t build a utopia. They can’t build a company, let alone a city state. They’re genuinely dumber than normal people - they don’t ever build things. They invest in others, the ideas never come from them. They are the manifestations of the financial empire that is a billionaire, they too are prisoners of their own wealth

Oh, they definitely do… Both republican and Democrat representatives have basically stopped doing town hall meetings with their constituents because people just scream at them to stop Musk. There’s frequent protests, fox news anchors are questioning what’s going on with Musk - if there’s anything almost everyone can agree on right now, it’s “fuck Elon Musk”

All things come to an end. Even the US

The crazy thing is the person who told me this as a child doesn’t recognize that it’s happening right now

Maybe it’s the plastic in our brains? I swear humanity is getting noticeably stupider year over year

I don’t think of Congress under Nixon when I think about Watergate. I don’t think they’ve even crossed my mind until just now, even collectively

It is. They’re $2-3 in pretty much every other country

I’ll never forget when one of my coworkers early on laughed his ass off as I started explaining the concept of weird al parody music, then flipped the radio to oldies dirty joke parody music

Ain’t nothin change, humans been humans since forever young buck

Maybe not you…I can’t unsee shit like that. I can’t look at paintings in homes near airports… There’s a lot of people who easily see misalignments of a fraction of a degree without trying

And it’s always worse from a distance, always worse in person

He hasn’t shot us yet, we should try to work with him

Uh…I don’t think that’s right. 40% of 6 is 2.4, so it’d be $8.40/dozen

Granted, I agree that $10 a dozen seems very possible at this point

Nah, we’re in late stage capitalism - the economy is divorced from reality, the way we measure it ie basically based on speculation. And the effects haven’t had time to ripple through yet, that’ll take months

And yeah, we have people dying in the streets and people locked up… But this isn’t remotely at the same scale. This is like at least one person you know will be a victim here on average… This is old people in the suburbs dying on the sidewalk. This is tons more people living in their car, this is people being pushed to crime to survive en mass

It’s hard to explain how bad things are going to get… This isn’t more of the same, this is going to be much less abstract for most people

I feel like this isn’t visceral enough.

It’s so insanely true, but people don’t understand… When they accuse someone of something, they’re about to do it, if they aren’t doing it already

I think this is why I found myself sobbing when my personal AI assistant called me human too many times…

I agree, but I don’t think we have 4 years. It took like 2 weeks for things to start falling apart, a month to dismantle all of our global soft power, and probably like 6 months for people to start dying in the streets. Our economy is collapsing, and with it the global economy

Bird flu could make the jump at any point too… Cutting regulations and public health funding is basically breeding another pandemic. Hell, honestly we might not even know it’s happening until we have a whistleblower

On the plus side, we’ve got constant protests, Europe is stepping up in a big way, and Trump has hurt right wing causes across the globe. We’ve got maga people screaming to get Musk out of the white house, Republicans and Democrats alike are booing their representatives for not doing something, and Trump looks like he’s rapidly aging. Billionaires who handed Trump the presidency control the media, and you know what most people aren’t seeing? The daily speeches trump is making, weirdly turning everything into something about real estate development. People hate Vance - Trump seems to be setting musk or his son up to be his successor, but they’re pretty universally hated too

We’re over the cliff - the pax America is over, there’s no going back. Things are going to get rough, things are going to get complicated, but an end is a new beginning. Maybe we can start building something better. I think we will. To me, the only question is how many people will die along the way, how long will we have to endure this slow (but now pretty fast) decline before we get past this

Or maybe this is just the end for our species. Either way, I don’t think there’s a “next time” in 4 years… There’s no going back. Only forward, into the unknown

You mean the guy who dropped out?

Biden won on basically not being Trump… That strategy only works when Trump is still in office. Public memory is short, shit is fucked and people want change desperately. Billionaires control the media, and they managed to convince enough people that Trump would be good for them (whether financially, religiously, or because they’re racist)

And let’s not forget, Trump barely won, no matter what he says. Between voter suppression and the manipulation we know of, that margin is razor thin - districts called it long before they finished counting votes

It would have been a blow out if the Democratic party wasn’t fucking around. Obama won on “change”, and didn’t deliver… People are so desperate for something different and the Democratic party is actively resisting the demands of their own supporters, let alone the people

She was the VP, and who else did Democrats have? They didn’t primary and changed horses at the last minute… They had no one built up for it and little time to do it

I didn’t even hear very much about her being black or a woman - Trump took some shots, and they tried that angle on Fox and such, but most of that fell flat. They ended up calling her a communist and running on the economy - it seems extremely telling

Honestly, she did great until her advisors told her to ease up on the rhetoric and attacks, and basically crippled her already watered form political positions to the point it was “we’re going to do good things in a nuanced way, but we’re not going to take firm stands”