I’m confused with ages here, have we standardized this?

• Greatest Generation (born roughly 1901–1927)
• Silent Generation (1928–1945)
• Baby Boomers (1946–1964)
• Generation X (1965–1980)
• Millennials (1981–1996)
• Generation Z (1997–2012)
• Generation Alpha (born around 2013–2024)
• Generation Beta (2025–2039)

Like how we used to do it back in the day! You’d Google for stuff, can you imagine it kids?

One of the reasons I think the game Alters is very good, it goes into this exact topic.

Nah it’s fine, the jobs are gone anyway because China used to buy monstrous quantities of soybeans from the US, and will buy 0 in the last trimester - here’s a link from Reuters. Brazil, Argentina, Chile have ramped up their production massively to accommodate the demand.

Since the jobs are now in other places, no point migrating to the US.

That’s one way of solving the migration issues - nuke the economy and destroy the jobs, so people no longer come.

For all we know, it’s a 50/50 that the customer service guy receives back an email back from that email that supposedly is not accessible saying “WTF I have no idea what you’re talking about, was my account hacked?”

But since you’re that gullible - hey bro, that wallet in your back pocket is mine, I put it there when I washed my jeans. Hand it back now, I paid for it and I’m 100% entitled to it!!

Yeah, I agree with all of your points.

I’m not American, but my understanding of the system is that the long term plan for the country isn’t meant to be set by the president, but by the legislature - passing laws and creating federal bodies that steer the country.

Instead, there’s absolutely no laws being agreed upon, only presidents that try to impose their view for a while until they’re replaced by whoever’s next who then breaks everything.

The courts are then thrown on to the spotlight and asked by the country to fill up a role who’s not actually theirs, and I don’t even want to go into the issues with appointment of judges.

Not that the system in China is any better, they just happen to have a guy who’s ruthless enough to hold onto power with no opposition, and seems to actually care about his country - but he isn’t gonna last for ever, and there’s zero guarantee that the power struggles after he’s gone won’t tear the country to shreds, or that the next up isn’t a fucked up moron like the orange…

The worrying part is that they kinda seem to be implementing good policies for (at least some of) their people.

There’s a lot of disturbing stuff, and probably a whole lot more that we don’t even know about, but social security, education, healthcare - my impression is that they’re going the right way, while the US looks eager to go back to the Dark ages.

Just with STEM degrees, they’re producing almost 5x more graduates than the US, and they’ve surpassed the number of doctorates a long time ago too.

The current world balance won’t hold one more generation.

Well played sir, well played.

Yeah what we’re questioning is the “in earnest” part, because in the past she’s * checks notes * she’s batshit crazy, and it worries me that I don’t know her goals here.

Are you sure? I thought Denethor was one of the first Scottish High Stewards.

Does it still look like it’s from 1998?

It works very well for my light personal needs, but I find the UI to be an eyesore…

Make no mistake, this is certainly being circulated in the astroturf groups all around. There’s always someone honking “dems did it first so it’s ok” and dimwits will eat it up because fact checking and thinking is hard.

Case in point, you haven’t had his wife either, so I’m on the fence on this one.

While you may be able to derive some small amount of nutrition from boiled and mashed potatoes in your rectum, it’s usually advisable to consume them through the other end, since starch digestion starts with salivary amylase.

If you’d rather consume the potatoes anally, it’s advisable that you find someone to spit into your anus to help the digestive process.

Safety advice: please note that the mouth is lined in stratified squamous epithelium, which is better prepared to handle rough mechanical/chemical/biological stimuli than the simple columnar epithelium of the rectal ampulla. It is therefore advisable to ensure the mashed potatoes are sufficiently cool before uh ingesting scooping consuming.

Reminds me of the Cristiano Ronaldo statue thing, except that one was actually funny as hell.

For those unaware, Madeira’s airport was renamed after CR7 and they made a whole ceremony about it. Cackling beside him are the Portuguese president and the prime minister.

You’re missing half the plot here, yet I’m the summer child. Newsflash: the day and age when people elected the American president is long gone.

The cult is irrelevant, they’re not even cattle - they’re yeast: when they’re fed with oxygen they leaven dough, when they’re starved of air they produce alcohol. It’s the moguls who own their feeds who control their output, not trump. He tried to grab a hold over them, with truth social, newsmax, etc but didn’t get anywhere.

Case in point, the constant Epstein talking points. Why do you think this has come up now? Was there any progress in the investigations? No. Was a smoking gun found anywhere? No.

But do you know what is actually relevant? The “big beautiful bill” - this has the big pocket people very, very concerned. Musk is the higher profile example, and I’m sure many others have been reaching out to Trump “under the table” to change it, but since he’s being headstrong, they’re giving him a taste of what to expect if he doesn’t bow down - get dragged into jail, kicking and screaming, and the very rednecks who right now would gag on his orange shriveled balls would be the first to shove a broom handle up his ass.

With sufficiently bad economic policies, the powers that be will let the pitchforks rise. Our best bet is that we can catch them too in the chaos.

Fighting a raging forest fire with kindling is a viable strategy - if successful, it will lead to the fire starving itself out. Sure it’s risky, but it will put it out for good, while throwing water, even assuming it does anything at all, would still be one stiff breeze away from re-flashing.

But let me be more specific with what I mean: last April, we were very close to one of these breaking points that would have killed the Trump presidency. If you recall, amid the Chinese tariff escalation, the stock market got very panicky and turned to treasury bonds, as it usually does when things get a bit crazy, but this time it didn’t work. It raised alarm bells everywhere, and wise enough people (and I suspect Jerome Powell played no small role in this) forced the White House to do a 180 and stop their bullshit.

I wonder what would have happened if the tariffs went ahead, but I’m 99% sure that Trump wouldn’t be president right now.

will inevitably lead misery and the deaths of thousands of people. People who can’t afford to stay alive die.

You seem to be under the misconception that this is the future, or even that it is reversible.

It is not. The only way the current US political scenario will change, peacefully, is as a consequence of the power struggle between the oligarchs and the would-be dictator.

Then there’s the non-peaceful options, which are the only ones that effectively bring back power to the majority. The issue is that people will gradually adapt to anything, so the only way to prevent the long-term crawl back to the middle ages is for things to get so bad, so quickly, that people actually get up and do something about it.

In any case, let me know if a few years who was right. If either of us live to see it.

Powell getting replaced by a trump bootlicker is probably the best that could happen.

Sure, in the short term it would massively fuck up the economy, but that would bring trump’s downfall all the quicker.

It’s a shame about the TACO tariffs too. If they had all gone into effect as the dorito wanted, the economy would be so fucked up right now that you’d have the whole nation, except for the billionaires, out in the street with pitchforks.

It will come, it’s just taking longer this way.

Exactly. They seem exceedingly effective at what they do - enabling the absurdly rich to become obscenely rich.