I know what the solution is, and it’ll never happen here: decommodify housing (and food, water, healthcare). It’s a sign of how expertly propagandized Americans are that capitalism’s primary virtue is supposed to be the efficient allocation of resources, it very clearly fails in all sorts of sectors to do so, and…

To some degree, making it free can improve service as it cuts out the time spent procuring fares or arguing about them when someone doesn’t have the right amount.

Conversely, make public transit free and raise income taxes by a tiny fraction to pay for it. Trying to implement sliding-scale fares is a bureaucratic nightmare. Clawing back on the tax side is way easier. Poor people don’t pay income taxes so the move avoids regressivity.

“It really ramped up when Reagan” is an acceptable comment about most of our current problems.

All of them made serious money by exploiting workers. That’s how it works. So in my estimation, if you’ve managed to hoard an ungodly sum of money, you’re an asshole. Agree to disagree I suppose.

Overworked, underpaid, constantly scrambling to get ahead, always on the precipice of disaster, riddled with untreated mental illnesses and substance addiction, subjected to a never-ending torrent of propaganda, alienated from our fellow man and regularly told the problems in our lives are all OUR fault while we get…

There’s a solution to letting the mentally disabled / substance addicted wallow on the street. Harder to solve the meathead with a quick trigger issue.

Your first paragraph is true, the rest is needless bootlicking. Charity is bullshit. It’s what the most exploitative gangsters on the planet do for PR and tax write-offs. Charity wouldn’t be needed if we took those ill-gotten gains and allocated them democratically to things that benefit society.

I can simplify this: Ford was an asshole, Vanderbilt was an asshole. The through-line on a lot of these rich assholes is that they made their fortunes by exploiting workers (and. sometimes working with Nazis). That makes them assholes. Brilliant assholes, but still assholes.

2nd Gear:

“a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues during the Bush administration”

When the majority of your force is commuting in from Long Island by car, yeah, they require a lot of parking.

Because he has no coherent ideological prism through which to analyze events. He’s a typical reactionary. He’ll go whichever way the events of the day push him, consistency be damned. Add in a healthy dose of ego and narcissism and you have the perfect concoction for a thin-skinned dweeb who is motivated largely by…

I mean, I’m a huge critic of “autonomous” vehicles, but I see this as a good thing. Your average human would plow through despite conditions that make driving unsafe at pretty much any speed. Hence why we see massive pile-ups multiple times a year.

The phrasing in these articles takes as a given that “free speech” is an unalloyed good. That’s debatable in itself. But it also serves to pit American “ideals” against Chinese “ideals” in a sort of attempt at moralizing while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the US conception of free speech is extraordinarily…

Recently drove a Model 3 as a rental. Largely awful car with an interior that would make a poverty-spec Mitsubishi blush. Yes, it accelerated quickly. The steering/handling were bizarre. Rough ride, noisy, twitchy overly-boosted steering.

A hybrid Telluride would have been much more compelling. 

Make transit free and tax the hell out of personal/commercial vehicles. Also, you spend $11 BILLION on cops per year. My guess is you could carve a billion out of that and nobody would notice except for maybe the cops looking on their phones at the subway station who would get slightly less bullshit overtime.

The history of personal transportation is also spiteful and racist, i.e. building highways through predominantly black neighborhoods and thus saddling them with lower property values and higher rates of cancer and asthma.