I wonder how chicory (and optional caffeine pill?) emissions stack up against the coffee equivalent. It’s close enough to coffee for me 🤷

Are there any insights on what the policy implications of new leadership might be? Or is it less a factional takeover and more a “meet the new manager”?

It’s still a fine needle to thread. No matter the reason, loyalty is being sacrificed for competency. Lose too much loyalty and you lose control completely.

We’ve been in a pseudo-birth strike for decades, kids have been increasingly expensive as real wages dropped. The only thing it’s gotten us is regressive assaults on reproductive rights.

My head is spinning from how fast we pivot from jokes about American “freedom” invasions to full throated support of Chinese freedom invasions

It’s not uncommon for a donor to support both candidates because whoever wins will have a debt. Like you said this is peanuts to them.

The other factor is non-monetary support. A $1 billion check to a candidate’s campaign fund has a lot of red tape. It isn’t as effecient as a $100 million donation and $900 million spent blasting propaganda across your personal media empire.

This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you’re rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you’ll never play the game.

More isn’t spent because it doesn’t need to be, not because it isn’t effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.

That’s the secret with a starve the beast tactic. Either your funding cuts don’t impact performance so you can claim there was bloat or your cuts ruin the program so you can say it needs to be dismantled.

Waiting for the handful of weird Maga trolls on here to comment. It’s always funny to see them argue “Commander in Chief” means unlimited authority to do anything with the military.

Pretty obvious you have no fucking clue how the American political system works or any idea what daily life is like.

Half of Americans have less than $500 in savings and something like 30-40% have insecure housing. There’s no social safety net if you lose your job; political activism can easily spiral you (and any dependants) to an early grave. Transportation is incredibly expensive in both time and money, just getting to an urban area for a critical mass movement is quite literally more than people can do.

So that’s how you end up with one of the top 2-3 largest protests in US history being on a weekend and distributed over thousands of cities. And you’re right, concentrating that in Washington DC would be much more impactful. But is it reasonable to expect people to give up their livelihood and stop supporting their family to do that? To throw away everything they have in their lives just by trying?

If you think the answer is yes, that’s perfectly valid. But consider this: if you live in a major city in Central America or western Europe or Canada you could get to DC easier and faster (and possibly cheaper) than the majority of people in the US. Why aren’t you on a plane right now? Oh right, because you’re exactly like your American strawman: you don’t give a shit about stopping fascism.