We don’t have enough labor organization in the US for a general strike to really happen. Especially considering a large amount of union members vote Republican and for Trump as well.

I think the difference now a days compared to back then is rich and powerful people (plantation owners) wanted the war to maintain their wealth and power. Right now I don’t think really any powerful companies actually want a civil war. They’re happy to fan the flames and play both sides to get the attention off of them and the insane power and wealth they have but I think they all know a civil war would be bad for profits. So because of this I doubt it would ever fully become a civil war, closest it would be is violent protests or things like January 6th which would be put down by the states or federal government before it got far enough to become something like a civil war.

Definitely agree that it would be way worse, that’s why I said it would be the next level of what Reagan was doing. It’s down the same track but taking it to an even worse level.

Also from Oregon and unless I’m mistaken we’re one of the better states at atleast trying to be more renewable about it. I thought I remember learning as a kid we had laws about having to plant multiple trees for every tree you chop down. Not sure if those are still around or how strong they are but I feel like we at least treat the environment better than a lot of other states.

I feel like this is just the next level of what Reagan did to cripple the government. You make it so they can’t do their job effectively then use the fact that it’s not efficient anymore as the reason to get rid of it all.

Even if that’s broadly popular among people who vote in elections. (Which I doubt but lets assume it is). It would be a lot better strategy to push for things that are a bit more radical and actually help people. That’s how you go after the biggest block of disaffected voters who stopped voting or have never voted cause both parties don’t do anything to really help the people.

The issue is rich people don’t want it to happen cause they invest their money in real estate and want the value to keep going up. So they’re gonna make sure neither party pushes for anything like that.

VP candidates can appear as progressive as they want because at the end of the day they don’t really have that much power. I won’t believe any real shift is happening towards progressives till we get a presidential candidate talking about more progressive policies. Until then it’s mostly them trying to pay lip service to progressive policies while chasing the moderate as the Republicans continue to drag the country to the right. If the Democrats really wanted to get more votes they would stop chasing moderates and try to activate disaffected voters who don’t care about voting because from their perspective both parties don’t really care about helping them. But then that would get in the way of the donors wants or stop politicians from being able to make lots of money from trading stocks and they would rather lose than give up that.

Judging by her speech as the DNC I doubt she’s gonna do anything progressive outside of the price controls she mentioned. All the talk about the border and making sure America has the most lethal military and countering Iran took all my enthusiasm for Harris away.

That’s a good idea. I usually look to see who the Oregon Progressive Party endorses but unions would probably be good to look at too.

I mean I think among the majority of people she came out of the convention strong. But yeah as a progressive her speech definitely deflated me, still gonna vote but disappointed overall.

Definitely agree with this. As someone from Oregon where my vote doesn’t really matter on the national elections I make sure to vote still to influence local elections. Only problem with those is that finding info on the candidates can be hard or sometimes there is only one candidate for a position.

This isn’t true for all streamers, just those with partner contracts from Twitch. They are the ones that are required to run ads a certain amount, I think below that they have the option to run ads but aren’t required to but also if you don’t run any ads Twitch will just start putting in ads on its own. And theres no control from the streamers over ads that show when joining a stream, those are always there and in my opinion are more annoying cause it makes it more annoying to switch between streams.

When I see stuff like this all I can think is how crazy it is we’ll look at “third world nations” and call them corrupt when we have stuff like this going on. This is just bribery but under a different name and with rules to only let the wealthy do it.

I mean I will admit I don’t know a lot about European public transit and it is quite a broad region. I mostly have looked at Amsterdam as that’s the big example people use so when I say America won’t reach that level I’m more referring to how nice it is there. I have visited the UK once and I have step family there and the public transit/trains were nice there to actually have them as options compared to America which often times just doesn’t. When I visited I only visited Newcastle and London so again don’t have a ton of knowledge but in general seemed nice. But from my experience not owning a car in America travel within cities is already starting to get pretty good where I’ve lived and I just wish more cities would invest in it and create high speed rail lines between cities for longer trips.

I mean one example in the US I can look to is a city I lived in for a bit, Seattle. They have been actively expanding their public transit and even when I lived there I didn’t use a car to get around and honestly the only problems I had was trips taking a bit longer sometimes and busses running not on time both of which are problems that can be fixed and with the expansions are actively being fixed. If you want an end game for what public transit can look like Europe is a great example. While I don’t think America can ever quite reach that level I think we could definitely reach a point where cars are still required but only for people living further out in the country. Heck if you want a good example for public transit in a larger country the high speed rail China has been building is pretty impressive. Don’t know the most about it but I’ve heard fairly good things about it (of course ignoring the other problems with China, but that isn’t related to public transit). Overall public transit does work and works well especially in the cities that actively invest in it like Seattle and Portland (both of which I’ve lived in/near). The problem in America with adoption just comes from a very car centric attitude which at least in the cities I mentioned before has been slowly getting better as people start to realize that public transit benefits everyone, including drivers. Just because we have to fight to show that it benefits everyone and that building bigger roads doesn’t help doesn’t mean we should just surrender to car infrastructure because it’s hard and takes a long time to push for public transit investments.

Except that is how capitalism works time and time again. Companies will lower prices to gain market share then once they have a large control of the market will happily raise prices and keep any gains in productivity for themselves. The only reason Uber is trying to undercut people right now is because the industry is new and they want to try and capture the market for themselves. Once they do or some situation forms like what we have with internet with Comcast and other providers avoiding competing you can expect prices to not ever be lowered again. If anything this is another reason why I favor public transit over self driving cars because public transit investment is owned by the government and therefore the people, it’s not gonna try and milk people for profit. Whereas these ride share companies already have shown they’re willing to act shitty towards their drivers to drive up their own profits, I imagine these companies would continue to find ways to milk more profit out of the service with self driving cars and with drivers being gone that’s gonna come at the expense of the users.

I just don’t see any gains from self driving cars. We already have ride share services that would allow what you’re talking about to happen but people don’t do it cause it’s expensive. I doubt companies like Uber and Lyft are gonna lower their prices when self driving cars become a thing, they’re just gonna take the extra profit for themselves. All it’s gonna do is encourage more people to drive cause now one of the benefits of public transit, not having to actively drive and being able to do other things while traveling, will now be a benefit of self driving cars too. And on top of that it’s gonna encourage more of the bad practices from the software industry to leak over into cars such as subscriptions services which companies have already been trying to push. Overall I don’t see self driving cars being a benefit for society other than making driving more convenient and pushing even more towards dangerous car focused infrastructure.

With the way cars are now self driving wouldn’t solve the problem of people just using cars to get everywhere. Cause people would own their own self driving car and then you get the same exact problem as you mentioned before except now you also get the convenience of not having to actively drive so why use public transit at all if you can just let your car do all the work to take you to where you need to go. The real solution to the last mile problem is to make better walking/biking infrastructure and to have larger transit networks so people don’t have to go super far to get access to transit. Also you mention having to bike at both ends of your transit and that’s a problem I don’t get cause you can just bring your bike with you on the train/bus. Or since you seem to be leaning towards a rental ride sharing model anyway rental bikes also solve that problem perfectly.

It’s crazy cause the first time around everyone was talking about how Trump is rich so he can’t be bought like other politicians but looks like that has turned around pretty sharply.