Things have changed. One person lost a green card because they got a “too many fish” citation while not fishing, but being with a group of people who were fishing.

One student had their visa revoked by the US because they were the victim of domestic violence. It’s batshit insane what they current administration is doing.

You know, if we made individual cars larger so they could hold more people or cargo, this idea could get really efficient!

Did some politicians hold up signs while the Nazis laid out a fascist plan in a government meeting? That’ll stop em!

Every time the Republicans get control of the government they fuck over my current career trajectory. They’d been nothing but harmful to me and my family for three decades now.

Georgia elects horrible people: news at 11 (but only the executive branch approved news agencies, everyone else has been locked out to preserve alternative fact distribution)

I’m sure Putin has someone we can outsource the work to instead of directly hiring one of his people.

Thank you. It’s been a goal of ours for a long time, but current events have accelerated things.

It’s interesting times for everyone these days, so stay safe out there.

Thank you, and stay safe too. Yet more interesting times ahead for us all.

My German Visa was just approved. Off to a university asap. We take two STEM professors with kids going into engineering as a group out of the US. I have a feeling we’re just the leading edge of the sluice gates opening.

I like to talk about this in my CS classes. We get compiles to compile code by compiling a compiler with a compiler. It’s an infinite regression problem that terminates with someone writing a compiler in assembly… Which requires an assembler to assemble… So you write an assembler in machine code directly on the processor.

If we lost all of the currently compiled programs one day, even with the compiler source code in hand, it would be some serious work to rebuild our current tool chains.

The GOP is in favor of this.

Americans love to talk shit about other nations being pussies. To be fair, we also love to talk about how brave and special big boys we are. We then run around afraid of everything, but I’m sure those two attitudes are not related.

Our national anthem “home of the brave” is hilariously sad. We got attacked once in 2001 and we’ve been shitting all over ourselves ever since.

He knows, but does he care? Does it actually matter to him? I have been watching and meeting all too many people who have no idea just how dangerous the world can be when there’s no rule of law and institutions protecting us. They want through life focusing on little personal gains and never truly understand how bad the world gets once Conservatives start showing their fascist foundations and the mask comes off.

So… He’s evil. He’s supposed to be a represent of the country at some level. He should attempt to live up to the ideals of a democratic republic. He should take his role as a leader of the whole populace, not just some of it.

These statements are not jokes, they are statements of his role as a leader. They hold weight and power of his office. Claiming his officer’s power is a joke about hurting people demonstrates what he wants to use the power for. He feels the power of the state should be used extrajudicially against citizens of his nation. That’s evil.

Cutting VA benefits.

The feds aren’t doing nearly what they used to. We’re down to non profits, individual doctors, and random online groups trying to be what the NIH/CDC/FDA used to be.

The extra fun part is that all post industrial revolution countries have flat or falling populations. This includes Europe, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, North America and parts of South America, and parts of the South Pacific. All of these regions need to import people if they want to keep using the same productivity and economic systems. The sheep lack of people is going to start causing major issues on all fronts.

This is going to put nations in a position to compete for immigrants with each other. It’s going to be a buyer’s market for young adults. Collectively, they need to make their labor more dear and nations need to treat people better to get and keep them in the future.

There’s plenty of material on the stages of population change in developing nations: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk

The demographic transition model continues to be reasonable on track around the world: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Drug use was huge in the 1950s, 60’s, and 70’s. Strange that people reminisce about those times as a paragon of successful society.

It’s also an era with peak unionization, high marginal tax brackets, and active monopoly busting. It has some of the lowest wealth disparity the US has seen.

The racism and other issues were huge too, but at least you could work a job and feed a family in most places.

But no! It can’t be the current issues are the wealthiest 1% crushing the rest of us. Just because the average salary is quickly trending to a poverty state and home are unattainable to most people… Never. Can’t be that. It must be the drugs causing it. Instead of the damage causing people to seek escape from reality, which drugs offer a means to do… Nope, can’t be that.

Good. Gas prices are much too low in the US. This just continues the cycle of world damaging automobile centric infrastructure and carbon emissions.

I feel you misunderstood. North Korea has elections. Russia has elections. Syria under Assas had elections. Strangely, the dictators always won by huge margins. Many dictators have a farce of a democracy to both give the people they rule a veneer of hope of freedom and to muddy the waters on the international stage.

Stalin had elections in Soviet Russia but he made it clear he didn’t care who voted. He cared about who counted the votes. Once the democratic institutions are subverted and their independence destroyed by a leader that leader gets to choose who sits in the seats: judges, legislators, bureaucrats, officers, and especially elections officials.

You’re right about the citizens being responsible for defending the institutions. In the end, the ultimate responsibility for the health of the republic lies with the people, not the government. The US does not understand just how much we have failed to defend the republic and we are on the verge of losing it.