effectively raising ground level

I can’t say I follow what this means. Moving everything we have at ground level up? I understand that this kind of thing has happened historically but only in periods where we barely built a couple of stories high.

I’m looking out over the Tokyo skyline right now and there’s every level of building. How do you get everyone to agree on the one right height?

Do you want to suggest a measurement scheme in which underground building is cheaper? As is I don’t understand your point.

Even setting aside the deceptive propaganda around this, “they” meaning right wing voters of modest means, still have two problems with tax funded services of any kind. The government may not be “taking money away” as in making it vanish, but they are taking away the choice of how that money should be spent. Conservatives see a moral hazard here where their taxes will pay for the poor lifestyle choices of others - and actually they are right, just not the way they think they are. It’s not abortions for slutty brown women they should worry about but metabolic syndrome brought on by their own white neighbors horrible diets that will burden the system most.

Their other problem is they don’t want to benefit from this kind of public good themselves. They see it as “taking charity” and although white people accept plenty of advantages, they like to stay proud about it. It doesn’t help to say “look, you’re getting something here.” So there just isn’t any way of making them comfortable with the setup, even when it isn’t being grossly distorted to them.

The whole “I don’t take no charity” is a very old American value and part of a complex system we have for giving people ways to feel superior to others. We don’t have a formal class system in this society but we service the same instincts in a hundred other small ways. Farm subsidies? Of course! Do you know how important farmers are? Healthcare supports? What… so I can pay for abortions for some illegal immigrant who couldn’t keep her legs closed?

We’re terminally stupid here and everything is about feels I don’t see how we’ll ever get past all this.

True that’s how I get my flu shots and such. It’s often extremely modest accommodations. Once my feet were resting on a pile of discarded coat hangers and other detritus from the drugstore’s retail floor.

Yes I mean nothing is free if we try to be strict about it. The word would have no meaning. I think we all understand “sold at zero price” but there are always people in the crowd who want to pop up and say “it’s not free! someone pays!” Typically their next move is to start breaking down who pays and why it’s unfair. I have no patience for them.

There are so many health services that can be delivered en masse at very little cost. I once lived in a “3rd world” country with state sponsored healthcare. They had an army of nurses in shop storefronts delivering vaccines and basic meds for common illnesses. Just walk in. Nothing fancy - one of them literally reused hypodermic needles after sterilizing them with a bunsen burner. But how fancy does it actually need to be?

Hello Nebula

I’m actually with you - I don’t believe any one president can just wave a magic wand and do away with regulatory capture forever. I’m not sure what I said specifically that made you think I put that all on the president.

However it would be equally fallacious to say he can do nothing. It is still a very relevant question, which no one seems to want to answer: what CAN the next president DO to restore trust? Not necessarily restore it ALL but begin to heal the situation? No colorful metaphors. Actual actions that are within the power of the office. This is a real question.

That’s a list of problems. I guess I just have to keep bringing you back to “what should the next president do?” You know, about them.

But if I ask you that are you going to compare me to a bully harming someone? That’s my WTF here.

What? I’m literally asking what the next leader should do to start improving the situation, not asking anyone’s forgiveness. If you can’t name one actual concrete thing, just admit it.

It’ll take decades to make up for completely but what can the next president do to regain some trust?

This makes sense. What never makes sense to me is when people worry about viruses from ice cores that are a billion years old. Because it works both ways: viruses have to be pretty well adapted to you in order to harm you. There are no such viruses long before humans even existed. I’m sure there are exception, as with viruses that manage to jump species, but I wouldn’t worry much about viruses from before the time of mammals, yet some people freak out MORE the older the ice core is. They’ve seen too many movies about ancient evil escaping old crypts.

The more you know, the more there is for you to possibly worry about. Ignorance is bliss! Here’s a fun anecdote to calm your jitters.

Once upon a time I was trying to reassure my coworker who had an upcoming appointment. “I’m scared! I want to do it but I’m scared of the pain! It’s going to hurt!” she groaned.

I asked “where on your body are you getting the work?”

“On my stomach,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, “that’s a good place. It won’t hurt that much. You have a lot of fat on your stomach.”

She just frowned at me. One of the other cooks walked in and she shouted “He just called me fat!”

“The rhetorical ‘you!’” I tried to explain, to no avail. I never heard the end of that one from her.

This is a good example of how the past doesn’t go anywhere. Those drugs are still around as much as they ever were, or in even greater numbers. But we all know what they are now and what they do. There’s nothing to talk about so their names drop off the cultural airwaves. They’ve settled into the culture. You don’t hear about them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not around. The past doesn’t go anywhere. The future is just laid on top of it.

Well, that’s what a rhetorical question is. You’re making a statement, not a query, but the best way to couch your statement happens to be with a question mark at the end of it. I’m not sure this is the best example of one, but at least they made an attempt to label it as such.

Aren’t we as humans proving every year that goes by, that no matter how much power and knowledge you amass, you can still be an evil, childish, asshole? God is just a little further along that dotted line. He’s got all the power and knowledge. This doesn’t make him mature or good.

Cutting to the chase, just ask your mom if any man has ever touched her inappropriately or gotten her to have sex when she would rather not have.

Then ask her why she hasn’t ever told you this before.

The business of business is business.

Businesses want stability, safety, and predictability. Protests really are kind of the opposite energy. Their whole point is to shake things up and reroute the direction of the world, sometimes in big ways. They can also be unpredictable and unfortunately in some cases even unsafe. I remember seeing every store window on Telegraph Avenue broken the day after a big protest. It was sad. The family owned grocery store got it just as bad as the corporate clothing retailer.

Not long ago when the Hong Kong protests were off the hook and things were getting super tense there, some Hong Kong family visited us here in the US for the holidays. The younger generation were super informed and watching their phones and they told us all about the protests, the political actors, the demands, the rhetoric, and the energy in the streets.

Meanwhile, at dinner, the (very wealthy) grandma made a toast and said “Hong Kong needs peace! Doesn’t matter who’s in charge!” There was a super uncomfortable silence and you could see the youngs biting their lips. She has massive business interests there and just wants to keep manufacturing stuff. She doesn’t care about idealism or whatever else.

If a political candidate is really pro business, they don’t go about their agenda by staging protests. The two really just don’t mix. Businesses lobby and donate.

Another way of saying it is that some things are so expensive you don’t do them even if they could be useful one day. Do you have a second house? Your first one could burn down. You don’t? I guess you must be a greedy capitalist thinking only about short term money.

Then social media happened

Yeah, definitely part of the story. Another thing that happens to all user generated content sites is the following:

• they start small: some person starts a web forum or creates a cool web app
• it grows organically for a time, attracting like minds one at a time
• everything is awesome and the site’s growth picks up speed
• the site becomes harder to maintain. Software development, security, moderation, and server costs all start to get beyond what the site founders can handle as a hobby.
• they reach a size where server costs are beyond what anyone can afford as a hobby and at least one person needs to make the place their full time job
• ads are introduced because you can turn them on and get money - maybe they’re only shown to logged out users or something to control the inevitable blowback
• people will complain regardless but of course won’t donate a cent of their own to help
• ads on UGC don’t pay a lot so you need huge traffic to pay any actual salaries with them - this means SEO growth
• search engines now shower the site with traffic because it has a deep well of excellent content from its early days, and this is welcome because it drives the ad revenue
• costs also rise as traffic rises because the site’s software was never built for this scale and it needs professional attention and / or enterprise grade service. No one has the know-how for the most meaningful performance optimizations or an appropriate caching layer - though many half assed tinkerers will fiddle around thinking they know more than they do
• the shower of SEO inbound blows away any concept of organic growth, which is what made the place cool to begin with. Now you’ve got plain old anybodies joining and probably expecting instant gratification when they ask a question. Just as the operators are straining to grow the site to the next level, it rots out from under them.
• the site operators are under stress. They may have lapses where they disappear for a while
• someone starts an alternative site promising a return to the glory days of like minds gathering organically. At some point major downtime happens on the original site and drives migration to the alternative(s)
• back on the original site, the true blue mods from the old days burn out on all this and leave - probably one of them is the guy who started the alternative site. Dedicated mods with intimate and deep knowledge and judgment start to get replaced by volunteers hamfistedly applying rules-based systems and automation. That’s of course nowhere near as good and starts to erode the users experience
• heroic content creating users are now trapped between the unwashed hordes of the general public and shitty moderators, so they burn out too. The last-douchebag-standing effect takes hold, whereby the whole place is increasingly dominated by the few grittiest nutjob superusers who hold out / hang on the longest and begin acting like they own the place
• everyone wonders gee what happened to this place and they come up with highly specific explanations, but details really don’t matter - this entire progression is nigh universal and you might say inevitable from the start. The only communities that avoid this fate are the ones that have an extraordinarily easy path to monetization which they use very wisely, or the ones that close membership and dole out new accounts incredibly sparingly to handpicked individuals. But this exclusivity works against growth and feels “elitist” and the bills may still go unpaid as necrosis inevitably sets in without more robust growth. One day the site suddenly goes offline.