Is the US a dystopia?

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.

Here we are now
Subjugate us

The Washington Post has its problems too but man the Times is such garbage.

I don’t think the Times is all bad, but about 80% of it is shit, yes. I simply don’t have the time to check the many other sources that might give me a more nuanced perspective, and it’s the devil I grew up reading every morning, so I know what to expect.

I also like to hate-read the Op-Ed section.

what personal knowledge of tranq situation in on the board? is this a fake “crisis” either due to infrequency or severity of effects?

“So called harm reduction” reasonably pisses the group off. the rest of article seemed hyper gross, but reality can be that way. is there a reliable non-tranq fentanyl avenue that’s not so dire for recovery or intervention?

fake crisis but a problem that could easily be solved with tested supply at safe injection sites and infrastructure for more active outreach of test strips.

but i’m a full legalization of all illicit substances guy, so my personal take on the issue is maybe biased.

ty i appreciate it for sure- i am def not in space i know.

I also live in Philadelphia and so the continued portrayal of the city as some opioid mecca doesn’t do anybody any favors except the outlets printing the portrayals and the police state.

Philly is a hard place, but KnA is legit one tiny strip of blocks in an enormous city that is, in many ways, kind of great.

Northeastern cities that aren’t New York or Boston are so underrated. I love Baltimore dearly and there’s so much cool stuff and cool people.

https://theappeal.org/angola-prison-children-death-row-louisiana/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7haUShzBsrc

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

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-investors-snapping-up-colorado-river-water-rights-betting-big-on-an-increasingly-scarce-resource

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lights-massachusetts-school-year-no-one-can-turn-rcna65611

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=falApGAB8Rc

the video, the challenge, the ads, the presentation, the everything

they’re all kinda baked into th

... those bangs.

jealous of her mcr shirt

omg i loled at the poll where you could choose "you are god's little soldier" some other shit and "vanilla extract" and vanilla extract won

A good dystopia is packed with minor daily frustrations IMO.

So there's a great Thai restaurant in my neighborhood called Kiin. Yesterday, I searched for their website to order some takeout. Here's the Google result. pic.twitter.com/JFCyvXV9be

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralis✧✧✧@ma✧✧✧.f✧) (@doctorow) February 24, 2023

This “Climate-Friendly” Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk

The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.

Staff members said in interviews that Mr. Becerra continued to push for faster results, often asking why they could not discharge children with machine-like efficiency.

“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line,” Mr. Becerra said at a staff meeting last summer, according to a recording obtained by The Times.

This quote, from that article, is particularly thread-appropriate:

Underage workers in Grand Rapids said that spicy dust from immense batches of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos made their lungs sting

Ford is seeking a patent for a system that would enable its cars to annoy users with endless notifications and constant beeps and chimes or even lock owners out of the car entirely if they miss a payment, according to a patent application published last week.

i'm amazed it's taken this long. they'll put the repo men out of business, and then when they can't make their payments, take their cars too.

(I mean fuck the Repo industry ANYWAY, but this is way worse.)

really should just post the Youtubes to evry track from The Coup's Steal This Album itt

It goes on to say that it's probably intended for self-drivers, so the cars can just turn around and drive back to the dealership

I dunno, cars driving themselves back to the dealership sounds less dystopian than repo men stealing them back.

completely removes some of the tools people can do to keep their rides a little longer and prevent repossession though

like parking at other people's houses, etc.

frankly repossession of any type is bullshit, automated or not. if it's going to happen, it should have to go through court only, dragged out as long as possible

(I don't mean long extended court costs type thing that'll hurt the person impacted even more, but like rather that if the dealer/seller is trying to get the car back, it should be like eviction where you can't just throw someone on the street, you have to go to court, and it takes a while, so someone has more time to rectify it or at least be prepared for life without a car, not just walking outside and seeing no car like happened to my mom a decade ago).