He still is ahead of Kamala by about 2% or 2.5 million votes. Before he was ahead of Kamala + Claudia + Chase + Cornell + Jill + Vermin Supreme + Elmo.

It’s still a closer gap than he lost to Biden by by a lot. But it is also super clear that Harris managed to do worse in this environment than Hillary did in 2016 back when Trump was an unknown crazy person instead of the well known crazy shill for hire.

Some sort of camp to help ADHD folks work on their concentration?

I crushed it and have the American Dream. My experience now is, I’m surrounded by old people, trustfund kids, and people who broke themselves to get ahead.

I have to raise my kids knowing that 80% of their classmates have no chance and hope they luck out and also fall in love with a career path that pays well. All of my friends I grew up with are in a constantly struggle, none of them will own a house. I have friends with PTSD from serving in the military and even with the VA loan option and GI bill they will be lucky to own a house by 50 if ever.

I can’t even talk about my life, my struggles are meaningless compared to those around me. I feel like an outsider in America because I actually did what everyone says is the goal and it is wild to me. I’d give it up in a heartbeat just to feel like I was in a community of equals I felt safe to raise a family around.

I get it, and I agree that most people are not in the right job. This is a big part of why folks want things like a higher minimum wage and socialized healthcare. People often are stuck in jobs because they NEED something from that job and are unable to look around. Then on the other side, sometimes folks find their calling but it pays $9 an hour and they feel a need to try to do better.

I work with a lot of folks for example that got into management because they think that is what you do. They hate the job, they miss writing code, they are awful managers. It’s a very backwards way of living your life.

I am just trying to talk to an ideal and real scenario here. The idea that all jobs suck and that is life is exactly what keeps people down. That is the lie folks believe that keeps them from seeking peace and contentment. We gotta fight that even if we also know that it isn’t easy to find a spot and when you do it might not be viable with the rest of your life.

I am saying yes they would, yes I would. You entirely can find a job that is something you want to do and also not your hobby. Most things folks want to do are someone’s job.

The only place I can accomplish the tasks I’d like to accomplish are at my work. Some tasks are so large that they not only require many many people who wouldn’t normally choose to work together, but a regular flow of resources from others.

People are so lost in capitalism they tie it ALL work to just being money. Even if you remove capitalism, even if you remove money, people still need to work together and resources still need to channel from place to place. Your job wouldn’t go away if money went away. If you look at some of the largest most successful open source free programs in the world, most of the top contributors are all from companies that paid that person a salary for contributing to that code.

He was elected as Dictator many times on a yearly basis and sometimes multiple times a year. He was so vastly popular the citizenry they killed the assassin’s, hunted down an heir and put him in power.

Julius Ceasar and his follow on Agustus were insanely capable leaders that did great things for their country. The empire was so great and lasted twice the time America has, it’s fall caused the Dark Ages.

Rome is a bad example here because technically the Dictatorship was good for them. Rome fell due to corruption that came in via enabling the Christian church to operate freely. Now that is a much better analog here that we enabled religious organizations to become tax free political action committees and uncapped their ability to influence government. This meant the evangelical grifters became the most powerful political entities in America.

Let’s not lump Trump in with Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a war hero and a capable leader who’s final crimes were giving out citizenship and housing.

Trump’s final crimes will be giving all our state secrets to every other government in the world and obliterating our infrastructure.

He is 78, in awful health, and has no interest in a legacy or supporting a successor. He keeps everyone around him at odds and maintains enough infighting that no clear heir apparent could really show up.

So like, he really only will hold power long enough to make everything terrible. So we got that goin for us.

The communication isn’t the problem. They communicated just fine. Increase taxes a little to send money to fight proxy wars overseas without drastically reducing any existing public saftey nets. Give money to companies saying they are seeking green alternatives as a way to reduce carbon emissions. That is the whole set of policies they have enacted.

Everything else they have to say is just that they won’t be awful. They won’t protect abortion, but they won’t get rid of it at least. They won’t increase the minimum wage, but they won’t try to bring back children in coal mines at least. They won’t help make it easier to form a union, but they are not going to actively break up existing ones. They won’t make it cheaper to own a house or decrease housing prices, but they will give everyone enough money they can get locked into that mortgage. They won’t pay for college, but at least they won’t defund public schools in favor of religious charter schools.

They didn’t lose by 2%, they lost by getting less than a third of America to vote for them. This was a crushing loss that shows they are out of touch with the needs of the American people. They won’t fix that by demonizing the voters. They have gone to the well of trying to get Americans to hate themselves for 16 years now and the well is dry.

The US has literally 0 third party representation at the federal level and 10 state senators all libertarian. Even Bernie isn’t technically a third party he just is no party. So to be clear, having no party is far far better in the US than representing a third party even in a local election.

They are short about 4 states right now. That isn’t as huge a gap as I’d like. And they have the ability to get the item out to the states.

Yea, if you want more leftist policies than right, vote and work with Democrats at the federal level and try to get Ranked voting in more places. Exactly like Bernie has. Continue to support your third party in local until they become able to actually get folks elected to even a Senate post. As long as the Green Party can’t even manage to get the most hippy district in the nation to get a single House Rep elected you might as well just cast your vote for Bob Ross.

The we made some mistakes but we are proud of our heritage deal only works when you’re not massively losing due to being out of touch with the morals of your base. It’s easier for me to not see the parallels when they are not sending troops to cleanse Gaza. When you look at the votes for them and realize that it is a combination of both the people who want Democrats and the people who just don’t want Trump and they STILL can’t win it is a huge issue.

It’s the oldest political party in the world, maybe it is time to rebuild it in a cleaner image.

It’s cool though, no way that a President that awful would still be ingrained in our modern politics. Well except for the fact that he is the Founder of the Democratic Party, you know… the “good” guys.

The Republican party is policy wise to the right of both National and the NZ First party as a comparison. They will also control all arms of the government and it is potentially possible for them to amend the constitution without any recourse but it isn’t easy.

So to be clear, they could change our Freedom of Religion and Speech to a Freedom of Christian Religions and “Truthful” Speech and there isn’t a ton that anyone could do to stop them just to give you an idea of the level of power they have taken in this election. It wouldn’t be easy, but the fact that it won’t be impossible should be terrifying.

The goals they have of criminalizing providing abortion services in all cases for the entire country is entirely possible. They could round up every person in the country of a certain nationality and put them in camps like we did with the Japanese during WW2, Trump already cited this act as being something he is considering to deal with immigration.

Historically we killed 90% of our indigenous population. When NZ was signing the Treaty of Waitangi, America was executing the Trail of Tears and rounding up 60,000 Native Americans and making them march 100km to live in a desert, a quarter of them died during the move. We’re not even starting in a similar place here and we’re moving far to the right.

The American people spoke and helped clarify what it means to be an American. It’s fair that some folks who last week felt proud to be an American now would prefer to be almost anything else.

A second loss should be a death knell of the current Republican party. He won’t transition any of his power to Vance or any other Republicans. He could die and we still would see 10% of the Americans to vote for him in 2028 because his death was just media propaganda as far as they are concerned.

We all have happiness, it’s just hard to see it past all the other stuff we got going on in our heads.

The big issue is that physical media degrades. A cassette tape wont sound the same as it did after just existing for 20 years. CD’s and Vinyl records if kept really well can last for 100 years or so but are delicate in other ways and a bad record player can cause permanent damage.

Preserving the experiences of others, art, media is important, but at the end of the day nothing we do is permanent. I know that thanks to online archives I can go and find old music if I need to. I am glad some folks preserve hard copies but a preserved collection isn’t really a functional one and a functional one isn’t really going to last 50 or 60 years at the same quality as what you can get from streaming.