I’m pointing to observable cause-and-effect.

I don’t buy it.

In 2008 when the travel industry crashed in the wake of the market crash, and again in 2020 after COVID lockdowns started, we saw significant decreases in pollution.

Meat isn’t the problem. Fossil fuels are.

I don’t have kids, but I do have a brother who is young enough to be my child, and I was very happy when he broke the nose of his bully.

That motherfucker had to learn.

allthatsinteresting.com

In fact, it didn’t.

Hoverboards actually do exist. And for bonus points, so do speeder bikes. You probably already know about real-life jetpacks.

I wish I could live another 100 years to see better optimized versions of them.

Went to turn it off.

Apparently I already did. Marvelous.

Hello friend.

This point has been discussed elsewhere in the thread. I hope you have a nice afternoon.

I dunno, H.

I may be wrong in saying it’s indicative of a crash, and I’m okay with being corrected.

As to inaccurate or inflammatory, maybe it feels that way if you’re on the winning side of the equation.

I think we should be inflamed about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that thirty years of high functional unemployment being ordinary is an objectively bad thing, but when you couple it with the increasingly supercharged price gouging and inflation the US has experienced over the last several decades, things that seemed improbable before suddenly become feasible. (Like making fascists electable.)

I hope you’re right.

That ship sailed under Reagan, and it’s never getting back to port, sadly. Thanks to him, families now needed two incomes.

Then, Bush and Clinton came along, and you needed not only two incomes, but two college degrees. Now, with Dubya, Obama, and Trump, not even that’s enough, and they’re capping student loans instead of regulating student loan interest, so your only real shot at being a doctor now is being born in the right zip code.

America, baby. Dig it.

Also, not so fun fact, but this got me curious so I looked up the unemployment rate during The Great Depression: apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well, so I feel like that reinforces the point I’m making a bit.

We’re already there. The only reason we aren’t calling this a depression is that the stock market hasn’t been affected much.

But when 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, it’s hard to argue we aren’t already largely ‘crashed’.

Yes.

Which is odd because, since getting a keychain pedometer I actually don’t keep it in my pocket or take it most places.

I wish I’d married a Canadian in 2004 when the getting was good, haha.

I even speak some French.

In 2016 there were tens of million of Americans who couldn’t absorb a sudden $400 expense without going further into debt.

That number’s probably grown significantly since.

I’m glad you had the means to make it out.

The vast majority of Americans, sadly, do not.

They do indeed.

My parents are deeply religious, but have never figured out that it’s my siblings and I who actually answer their prayers.

Around 14 days out of the whole year they have a pretty good football team.

That’s it.

Yes.

Either they’ve been identified or it’s an animal with mange. For fun, go compare drawings of the Dover Demon with featherless owls, for instance.

Don’t go searching for hairless bears, though. They’re nightmare fuel.

Only when taken out of context.