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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I agree that she should run, but as an independent candidate because the DNC will never give her a honest shot in the primaries.

    Americans however are unlikely to elect her especially due to electoral college as there are plenty racist and misogynistic voters in the swing states.

    But if she’s able to raise money in the process to give her a real shot, US will finally have a viable third party candidate. If it looks like she’ll only split the Dem vote without winning, the raised money can be used to support progressive candidates in local elections.

    Either way, I think US needs a progressive liberals party and soon because there’s a lot of House and Senate seat elections coming up and as we have seen from the GOP playbook, local elections are as relevant and influential as the national ones.


  • American Capitalism, with its abundance of neoliberalism, works on the premise that given no external involvement, the market will take care of itself. Companies will make products that people like, or will be out competed.

    The American dream extends from that idea that workers can work wherever they want and have completely free movement. So if someone is smart or a hard worker, they have plenty of opportunities and will eventually be successful.

    In reality, neither of the above are true. Markets are not capable of taking care of themselves, e.g., because there is inertia, inelasticity, and barrier to entry for many high-capital businesses. Government has propped up most “desirable” large industries through heavy subsidies and tax breaks, like oil, farming, telecom, and tech. Workers do not have free movement, some from self inertia to want to stay close to roots, family, friends, but mostly from the same neoliberal policies that remove social safety nets and fail to provide everyone the basic necessities.

    Add to that the fact that a solely money based capitalist system has no ability to measure environmental degradation, wealth inequality, or population satisfaction. And the government is more than happy to step in when it’s businesses being hurt vs people - think too big to fail or propping up businesses during covid/after natural disasters.

    Even if a true capitalist system were allowed to exist, it is ultimately anti-competitive. A business in a segment that’s doing well will slowly acquire other businesses in the segment to become a monopoly. Eventually the monopoly will keep growing and acquire the largest businesses in other segments. Besides regulations, technology disruptions can break this cycle but those are fairly rare, and are mostly a recent and likely short lived phenomenon.

    Finally, capitalism requires economy and population to keep growing, in the absence of which, there is complete stagnation of movement and the system will collapse into feudalism, like what happened during the Dark Ages.

    Anyway, I think you are both right and wrong. Capitalism as people imagine it to be feeds into the ideal of the American Dream. But both true capitalism and its reality actively thwart it, by closely interlinking the economic system with the political.


  • This is awful. Now the Democrats will have to set up internal meetings over the next few weeks to figure out the most appropriate language to condemn this, after which they will forget this happened.

    The silence and inaction of the Democratic leadership since Trump took office is a major contributor to the Republicans and the police state to keep escalating project 2025 agenda without impunity.




  • Athletes have always leveraged unfair advantages in sports. There’s a reason there’s super tall players in basketball and short ones in gymnastics. May be they should enforce that average height of teams must match global averages. Countries with fewer resources just can’t support athletes in many sports so why not make that more fair?

    There’s research showing that some women athletes (i.e., born with female reproductive organs) have higher testosterone levels than many men, and even some male athletes. So why are they allowed to compete in women sports instead of men?

    There’s a lot of ways to make sports more fair. Banning transgender people without fair science based facts is not one of them and is plain bigotry. It’s like saying an athlete on anti-depressants should be banned because they are happier and more motivated so have an unfair advantage.


  • I reached out to Roku support regarding this. The rep told me “why are you complaining. You are the only one.” He then disconnected the chat. I’ve reached out to my state’s AG to report this. No action so far but waiting. If there are enough complaints, that might help move the needle.

    What Roku is doing should be completely illegal - bricking the product after purchasing it for full price if you don’t agree to waiving your rights.