The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.

There is nothing wrong with MSG either

But the truth is, Democrats can win every single election this year and in 2028 and they would not be allowed to govern by this Supreme Court, which has chosen over and over again to overturn precedent and sow chaos.

Unfortunately, to arrest the slide into right-wing authoritarianism, you have to adopt their tactics sometimes.

But you don’t have anything to worry about. The democrats aren’t going to do any of this, and we’ll be in an even worse state in 2032.

Not to mention, they all prey on people. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and people would come in regularly and drop everything they had on scratch-offs. And a lot of these people clearly did not have the money to spare. It's gross.

And "more cybercrime" is a far, far cry from the sky-is-falling doomerism I was responding to.

Stop mistaking science fiction for science.

The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.

But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.

No more Merrick Garlands. No hand-wringing over appearances of weaponizing the DoJ. The next president needs to appoint an AG who enforces the law, and if they don't do it, they need be fired and replaced by someone who will.

But I tend to agree that the ultimate winner is going to be Google. Maybe Microsoft too.

That just isn't true. Plenty of services do just fine after experiencing hypergrowth, and a few outages are not an example of tech breaking. That's a fairly common occurrence.

And it is next to impossible for average people to get adequate care for their kids with autism without Medicaid and early intervention can make the difference between someone who can live relatively independently with supports and someone who will spend their adult life chemically restrained in an institution. So they are in between a rock and a hard place.