Will policymakers continue to ignore the signs and force the planet to face the devastating consequences?

yes. yes they will.

my only hope is rapid socioeconomic collapse caused by short-sighted fascist mismanagement, leading to spiraling declines in life expectancy (and therefore drastically lower global population and consumption levels). that’s probably overly optimistic though.

instead of buying a new gun… get a used one! better yet, simply wait to inherit one from a dead relative! even better, steal one from a conservative!

arms dealers hate this one trick!

they’re shutting down offices and programs in order to begin selling off the real estate. get ready to see anything that’s not bolted down auctioned off to the highest bidders. this the looting of America, in overdrive.

thank you! you get it.

people with decades of experience responding to communicable illnesses have been getting fired without cause or driven out of government just for some conservative publicity stunt precisely when they’re needed (which it turns out, is actually all the time). even when no diseases are breaking out, they are developing plans and strategies for the next event. we need these experts.

mmm big egg 🥚

this is anti-THRUG propaganda and I won’t stand for it.

RIP THRUG (76,358 BC - 76, 335)

hope he’s up there in heaven eatin raw guts smiling down on us.

not everything on the internet is for you. even if you’re #not-like-the-other-freethinking-independents, people aren’t required to accept or like what you say. you can either read the room and change how you say stuff, or you can just keep quiet, or you can leave. no one’s making anyone a hostage on discussion boards. we can all walk away anytime we feel like it. it’s called being a grown up in a society. leave or go start your own “this word is okay to say club”. you haven’t been arrested for saying retarded, you were simply kicked out of a chat group. whoopty doo.

agree to disagree.

Lemmy does lean left everywhere else, but it’s all serious af “dystopia is here” stuff.

this community reborn with the amazing effort from @[email protected] has brought some much needed humor and lightheartednes.

subbed!

the DOGE claims, even if true, are a tiny fraction of the fraud perpetrated by PPP loan recipients (businesses).

taxpayers did get ripped off - by corporations and their owners - using money that should have gone to household instead.

Biggest fraud in a generation: The looting of the Covid relief plan known as PPP

"[PPP recipients] … couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.

… The program authorized banks and other financial institutions to make government-backed loans to businesses, loans that were to be forgiven if the companies spent the money on business expenses. Nearly 10 million such loans have already been forgiven. Many of the loans-turned-grants were for millions of dollars, public records show.

Experts say millions of borrowers inflated their numbers of employees or created companies out of whole cloth.

the takeaway here is that when government bailouts happen, the money should be given directly to US citizens/taxpayers who will actually use it on local commerce and transactions that stimulate domestic economic activity. instead, it was a free for all to anyone who could prop up a fake business. the clowns in congress trusted in trickle down economics, and it put hundreds of billions into the hands of oligarchs… then they just FORGAVE THEM without any meaningful investigation or prosecution.

congratulations! 🎉 you showed them all! you’re definitely not bitter about it are you?

such a shame your kids and past friends won’t talk to you anymore since you became obsessed with child molesters, transgenderism, and defunding children’s lunch programs. don’t sweat it… at least you owned the libs!

it’s a myth anyways. Gary Stevenson talks about it. ultra rich people are rich because they own physical assets that society (businesses and individuals) must pay them to rent or use. you don’t have to be a resident of a place to invest in it, you can drop cash into places from anywhere. in other words, where money gets invested is NOT dependent on where the investor lives.

it’s naive to think that a billionaire who leaves the country will just walk away from say, a lucrative oil drilling operation or a supermarket chain or a new skyscraper or a data center… simply because they don’t live there? even if they choose to avoid US opportunities, other investors will come along to snatch it up.

billionaires can change countries and move anywhere in the world, but they can’t take a stadium or an office building or a football team with them. the productive resources (factories, shops, commercial buildings, apartments) that enable wealth generation and contribute to gross productive capacity each quarter, aren’t portable.

the physical resources and tools of production will still be here, the parasites who extract rents from them will not. besides, plutocrats don’t pay any income or wealth taxes, so it’s no net loss whatsoever.

hmm … know who else has a lot of oil… somewhere verrrry close to you… you might even be standing on it.

wait, are you saying that we should nationalize the US oil industry to achieve socialism?

I agree!

I love what you’ve been doing here with the place. keep it up! poor trumpy boys must be so upset.

that’s right, Republican voters will finally be rich as soon as they imprison all the blue haired baristas and homeless brown people. surely, the poors and the trans people are to blame for expensive groceries, soaring real estate prices, and making utilities go up!

i sounded kinda cynical but I actually agree with your sentiment, on a more personal level. i have several friends whose families have been split apart (actual people moving away and excommunicated) as a result of the cult like obedience conservatives have tapped into. loyalty to television personalities over actual living breathing grandkids and siblings. truly mind blowing.

the systematic brainwashing of many people using ragebait, disinformation, and targeted messaging has revealed a deep corruption in the media ecosystem and shown us how easily many of us can be convinced of opposite views we once held sacred. there’s a principal in psychology called “belief change blindness” which essentially shows that rather than admit we were wrong, we change our minds and just forget that it happened, instead creating an internal narrative that we’ve always believed the thing we currently believe.

im convinced that the most successful political operatives in modern times have weaponized our own psychological weaknesses against us, knowingly, in the same way that game developers use rng loot drop mechanics to tap into gambling addiction reward centers.

they do whatever the ultra wealthy tell them to do.

ideology is not a functional concept in modern politics. it’s all vibes and manipulation in the service of the 1%

keep going!