Is the US a dystopia?

ED 209 finally goes to market

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

You have 30 seconds to comply.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle🕸

Paywall avoidance version:
https://archive.ph/IuC4b

Thanks!

Sorry if yr paywalled out, but I’m only a few graphs into this and had to post it…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/us/jrotc-schools-mandatory-automatic-enrollment.html

Kids being forced into JROTC programs, mainly in Black and poor areas of major cities.

That is disturbing. I'm surprised the word "draft" never appears in that piece

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLxi1kzpkQY

a quarter billion and they still hired the interior decorators from every airport hotel lobby

related:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/

^makes its point, then restates it, makes it again, then churns out its point several more times, then...

much like your posts

A mom was kicked out of a Rockettes show because *facial recognition tech* at MSG identified her as working at a law firm involved in a suit dealing with the venue. https://t.co/5Z0Oa79Scc

— Hannah Recht (@hannah_recht) December 20, 2022

related to the above
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-rise-432-park.html

also fuck dolan forever

"A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?"
https://www.propublica.org/article/literacy-adult-education-united-states

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/fatal-police-shootings-unreported/

"As fatal police shootings increase, more go unreported."

"This morning I discovered something *extremely* alarming happening in the car market, specifically in auto lending," CarDealershipGuy, an anonymous account held by a CEO of a car dealer group whose identity is unknown, wrote on Twitter on Dec. 15.

Despite its mysterious owner, this account is highly followed in the industry because it is well informed.

"I'm now convinced that there is a massive wave of car repossessions coming in 2023," CarDealershipGuy continued.

The anonymous CEO explained that over the past two years, many people took out exorbitant loans on cars, at a time when car values were inflated. Because of the shortage of vehicles due to supply chain problems, these consumers had no choice but to buy cars that were overpriced.

But car valuations are now plummeting. The value of some cars has sharply declined, putting some buyers at risk. They owe banks more than what their cars are worth...

US life expectancy is at its lowest in 25 years

I sure hope they plummet enough that I can buy one

A life?

I definitely had thoughts of JG Ballard's 'Concrete Island' a couple weeks back when I noticed the big tent put up in an interstate 75 turn off.

Yeah, there's a whole city of tents/vans/cars under the freeway in west Oakland

Yeah, there's a whole city of tents/vans/cars under the freeway in west Oakland

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, December 22, 2022 2:20 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I used to have some friends who lived far north on Wood Street, near the Target in EMeryville basically, next to the tracks. Back then, they called it "Trackside," and it was mostly veteran homeless folks, SSDI queens, and train kids with drinking or heroin problems. I couldn't believe pictures I saw of the Desert Yard this year— I used to walk my dog through there every morning. And in 2009, when I first moved to West O, the whole area was just...pampas grass and some young bums hanging out.

A Hooverville blown up.

yeah, and there's been like 200 fires there in the last year, some quite large/serious - I think CalTrans has started a cleanup, but the last time I walked down Wood St. by the tracks, there were *literally* hundreds of burned out, upside down, abandoned cars - some with residents, most without. The days of a few scruffy campfire trimmigrants with dogs on chains are over, it's like a whole thunderdome city down there, right beneath the commuters on their way to work

I hesitate to say anything about the demographics of people living there— I lived in a converted UHaul truck and worked fulltime for my last years in the Bay Area. Yeah, I was a punk and would occasionally hop a train or whatever, but most of the time, I went to work just like everyone else who could afford a fancy apartment.

Mr Beast Makes Iced Tea With $2000 Ice Cubes

The U.S. is a dystopia where old men yell at clouds.

Trump-supporting billionaire Home Depot founder says ‘nobody works anymore’ because of ‘socialism’ and the ‘woke people (who) have taken over the world’

https://fortune.com/2022/12/29/bernie-marcus-home-depot-woke-people-socialism-labor-shortage/

Gee, I'd sure love to go work at a place where the gazillionaire owner thinks the labor force is too lazy, too fat, and too stupid.

you guys fucked up by killing all the anarchist terrorists who came to your shores

why do people with seemingly limitless resources keep arriving at the same stale fucking ideas, I would be so embarrassed to put my naked self interest on display to the word like that

Listen, I work hard. I sit for at least five hours every day in a big office where people come to me constantly to make reports and lay out elaborate plans to increase our market share or profitability by fractions of percentage points.

The decisions I make before my personal chef serves me lunch will affect the accumulated wealth of a score of hedge funds, several national wealth funds, some ivy league endowment funds, and more than a dozen foreign billionaires. Believe me, it's getting harder all the time to wring another billion or two out of those tens of thousands of spoiled, lazy, selfish workers out there in my stores who kick and scream every time they're asked to work even harder or accept benefits cuts for the sake of the team. It's this crazy worthless socialism that's ruining us I tell you.

People don't want to be fungible assets of my shitty company because of socialism.

“We used to have free speech here. We don’t have it,” he said. “The woke people have taken over the world.”

Dude is 93 and this is how he's spending his time

I hope it's a good sign that they're so freaked out about socialism, for far too long they were content just to be smugly dismissive of it

does this mean that obama isn't the evil master behind everything? because i swear i was hearing for a while there that obama was behind some sort of big scheme

They've been exactly this freaked out about socialism forever - 1920, 1950, 1980, 2022 the song remains the same. The billionaire psychos were convinced Dwight Eisenhower was a commie stooge.

but sometimes they actually seem to mean socialism and sometimes they seem to mean basic liberal democratic rights for their employees

They seem to think the great unwashed are getting regular and generous checks from the gubmint.

They are, and I’m sure this is no surprise, morons who got lucky, and don’t understand anything about the world because their wealth has insulated themselves from the world the rest of us inhabit.

A YouTube ad for gofundme is bleak as hell.

Got an extra tenner? Find someone whose insurance doesn’t cover their insulin!

The Rust Belt is turning into Mississippi right under our noses, I am not sure that we will ever recover, not with these massive business owners utterly unconcerned about living and working conditions for their workers and for communities where their stores operate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/health/fentanyl-xylazine-drug.html

All that military spending and the US winds up losing an Opium War to itself

That article was awful and is being excoriated by the harm reduction community— porn for cop-lovers and those who want to criminalize drugs

any chemical relation to krokodil?

As we're seeing in Brasilia, dystopias are contagious.