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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s because of how bifurcated the American economy (and society) has become. The absolutely gargantuan wealth inequality leads to a situation that for the majority of Americans they’ve been experiencing a recession for years at this point if not decades, while for the wealthy things are going great. The US economy is literally being propped up by the continued funneling of wealth from the poor to the rich. The problem is the poor are rapidly approaching the point where they have no more wealth to steal. The middle class is almost entirely drained, and even some of the lower end of the upper class is starting to feel squeezed. It’s not sustainable and something is going to give one way or another. The economy can’t continue to function when over half the population can no longer afford basic necessities.

    They probably could have kept the plates spinning for another decade at least, but then a moron got put in charge of everything and started replacing people who were greedy and corrupt with people that were greedy, corrupt, and barely smart enough to remember how to breath. This recent shutdown in particular is very much going to force the issue as all the people reliant on SNAPP and Medicaid (or is it Medicare, I can never remember which is which) are going to find themselves unable to meet their basic human needs from their meager salaries (if they’re lucky enough to be employed). Unfortunately I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in theft and rioting if this doesn’t get resolved real damn soon (might I suggest stealing the tacky gold plated shit from your nearest Mar-a-lago or Trump affiliated business). Even more unfortunately that might be exactly the excuse Trump is looking for to declare martial law. This is what nearly half a century of Reaganomics has gotten us. Maybe we can finally convince some of these idiots that cutting taxes on the rich and removing regulations on corporations does absolutely nothing good.



  • Lol, I’m American, you just can’t spell. Cheque is the correct way to spell it, check is incorrect. You also don’t know how SS actually functions. Congress has treated it like a slush fund for decades and constantly steals money from it. And yes it is a budget item that gets voted on like anything else. You might think it’s an independent account, but that’s just the way it’s reported on the accounting forms, absolutely nothing is stopping Congress from taking those funds and spending them on whatever they want and in fact on many many occasions they’ve done exactly that.


  • That’s the great misconception and lie of Social Security. People think it’s like a government run 401k, that you’re "investing’ in some retirement account every paycheck. That’s not at all how it actually functions though. Social Security is two entirely independent things. First it’s a benefits program like SNAPP or Medicaid. In that regard Congress votes every year on how much budget they’re going to allocate towards paying people Social Security. Literally everyone receiving Social Security cheques in the following year are reliant on Congress deciding to allocate enough money to make sure those cheques don’t bounce. Secondly it’s an income tax. The two are not connected in any way. The amount of Social Security income tax that the federal government collects each year has absolutely no bearing on the amount of funding that Congress allocates for Social Security in the coming year.

    Let that sink in.

    Social Security is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. Always has been. That’s a huge part of why a lot of Republicans, particularly older ones (like ones around retirement age) are hand wringing about falling birth rates. Social Security always counted on the idea that there would be more people working and paying into Social Security than the number of people currently collecting Social Security. In a country with a positive population growth that would always be true. It ceases to be true the moment you have a negative population growth rate though.






  • Pretty sure I wouldn’t get donations from Aipac to start but if they’re stupid enough to donate to me I don’t see why I shouldn’t spend their money and go about my business.

    The reason not to is because of the optics. People will always assume anyone you’re accepting money from you’ll show favoritism towards either consciously or unconsciously. That is generally how briberycampaign finance works these days. Large corporation, state, or billionaire “donates” to a politician, and in exchange they get to write whatever legislation they want or get the politician to vote for or against anything they want.



  • The title makes it sound like a lot more than it actually is. TL;DR: the most recent Republican gerrymander in one state wasn’t as bad as it might have been and it’s expected Republicans will try to re-gerrymander to make it worse. If they do Democrats are going to try to collect 250k signatures on a public petition which would then trigger a legal loophole that would revert things back to the currently gerrymandered but slightly less than it could have been map until after the 2026 election. Nationally there’s still no answer to the multiple Republican controlled states that are rigging elections in various ways.




  • Amiga is owned by another company.

    Kind of. Apparently the rights are a mess and owned by 3 different companies, one of which is Commodore, although it seems like the current version of AmigaOS is owned by a different company.

    The most recent version of AmigaOS is 4.1 which was released in 2014, and requires a PowerPC CPU. It’s kind of hard to argue that’s a modern OS, although apparently a 4.2 release is in the works. The dependency on PowerPC is kind of a problem at this point as their CPUs have stagnated and it’s hard to find any modern ones that aren’t custom CPUs for game consoles (and even then mostly old game consoles).

    Additionally there’s the problem of software availability. The new Commodore OS is just a tweaked Linux install so it gets all the Linux software essentially for free. AmigaOS on the other hand is legitimately its own OS and therefore only runs Amiga software.