Man, a lot of you Americans need to unionize. None of this happens at my work and it's precisely because we're unionized and have a contract that specifically says that our employer is bound by strict rules. Granted, we don't get a month paid vacation, but we can't be denied time off, can't be compelled to be on call, can't be forced to work overtime and we have PTO accounts, healthcare and a pension that get paid into on a weekly basis.

Yeah, it's so strange that people confuse you with a Kremlin bot when you repeatedly spew the same fucking bullshit talking points as the bots themselves.

I'm GenX as well and I will straight up admit that my wife and I got lucky, purchased a house in a "distressed" neighborhood in Portland because it was all we could afford, and now, 20 years later, the neighborhood is fully gentrifying and our house and property is worth way more than what we owe on it.

I'm conflicted as to how to feel about it. While on the one hand we very innocently bought the place because it was in a shitty neighborhood and was all we could afford, on the other hand I now know that we were what the urban studies people refer to as "bohemian colonizers," meaning that without knowing it, we were, by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification.

Again, I am of several minds regarding how I feel about the whole thing.

You know, that actually makes sense. 14-year-olds. It would explain a lot about hexbears.

Where, oh where are all of our apologists?

Maybe still figuring out what the "talking points" will be?

We're all waiting for the inevitable bullshit.

This mirrors the experience of anyone who has studied linguistics.

Because everyone speaks at least one language fluently, they tend to assume that they understand how languages work, while having zero awareness of the fact that people have spent generations studying language and communication at the PhD level and that almost nothing about what we reflexively intuit about language actually holds true.

And I say this as a purely amateur linguistics nerd who does not claim any real formal expertise in terms of academic credentials.

Great concentration of wealth is also highly destabilizing. We are seeing this play out before our eyes in real time right now.

Conversely, if you actually are an expert on a specific subject, reading any comment thread about it is very disheartening and will leave you wondering how much bullshit you've accidentally ingested and taken at face value from other threads about which you are less knowledgeable.

Capitalism is fine as long as its well-regulated and is only one component of a larger system. It's no accident that the best countries in the world to live in all rely in part on well-regulated capitalism together with robust democracy and relatively high levels of what in the US would be called socialism.

My cat's name is Nancy Reagan. She's almost lived up to it. And no, she doesn't like you either and if you try to pet her you'll get what you deserve.

Some cats have official titles. I had another cat whose title was "Chief Inspector." He was known to do home invasions and conduct snap inspections of my neighbors houses. He had more friends in the neighborhood than me.

None. My wife doesn't know about tact, or the polite white lie or anything like that. She doesn't have time for that bullshit. It's one of her endearing qualities.

Tax all of them! What part about it do you not understand? Do we need to spell it out for you? WTF is wrong with you?

Meritocracy in the US is almost entirely a myth, outside of a few sports.

Free will as it's popularly understood doesn't actually exist.

Most shoes are bad for us and cause injuries over the course of our lives .

Is it not the case that kale, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage are all basically derived from the same plant?

This is what I've been told, but I am very ignorant of such matters and while you will say that I can simply Google the issue, which is true, it's never been enough of a priority for me to do so, goddammit.

As for Sequoia sempervirens or Sequoiadendron giganteum being forms of broccoli, I do in fact know enough dendrology to know that it's bullshyte.

More than one thing can be true at once. Sure, saying "excuse me" is perfectly reasonable, but it's also true that a lot of people are obnoxiously oblivious of their surroundings in public.

Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn't really count since most of us know it's a scam.

For most people most of the time it's a perfectly fine quality of life. That said, it's a huge country with tons of variation so if you're looking for bad qualities, there are always plenty of examples to point to.

What pisses me off is that we are nowhere near as good as we could be and as we claim to be. There are some very powerful and objectively evil forces in this country.

That's a startling number. It goes far towards explaining some of the responses my comments get.

I don't care what anyone says, it's just a fact that the vast majority of people who use these huge trucks as daily drivers do not actually need to. Obviously there are exceptions, but they are relatively uncommon.

I use my mid-sized pickup as a daily driver, but that's because I used to need it and my work situation recently changed. My plan is to get a little commuter car as soon as I can and use that as my daily driver and keep the truck for when I actually need it. The gas savings will pay for it, and again, I don't even drive a full-sized pickup.

Who's this "we?" In the US at least, conservatives are plowing full-speed ahead with outright denialism.