Agreed, complete fucking travesty.
As best I can tell, they also more or less also orchestrated the complete regulatory capture of the FAA, to rubber stamp and normalize their high bureaucracy, low actual safety and reliability paradigms.
Oh right, they also uh, totally don't assassinate whistleblowers.
Totally don't do that, nope, not at all, never.
Contentedness pointed out that my 'one of three' figure is evidently an outdated figure, there are a good deal more than 3 of these 'temperate rainforest' climactic zones, but yes, I think the Appalachian temperate rainforest would be another one.
Well shoot, my info/number there is wrong then, you are correct.
If you can't tell, I grew up in the area, and I was just regurgitating that figure I was taught almost 30 years ago... appears I've got a bit of hometown bias, out of date info, whoops.
I appreciate the correction!
While the current Bear Gultch fire is on the other side of the Olympics...
It would be a tragedy to lose the Hoh Rainforest, and the article mentions that it did burn some decades ago.
The Hoh Rainforest is one of ... only maybe three temperate rainforests on the planet, the vast majority of rainforests are tropical.
If you've seen the movie Prospect... you've seen it, much of it was filmed there.
Yeah, that's 3 trees growing out of a larger fallen tree, which itself is still alive, all covered in moss... where the moss isn't, and the trees appear black, that isn't a burn mark, its a layer of a kind of slimy mold or fungus... and of course, ferns, ferns everywhere.
I guess you would maybe describe it as the closest you can get in the real world to the twilight biome/dimension from minecraft...
If i fits, i shits.
Yep.
That's his plan.
He's mentioned it a few times.
"We will then open up large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified,” Mr Trump said in the video. “But we’ll open up our cities again, make them livable and make them beautiful.”
Now he has begun to act toward those ends.
https://shelterforce.org/2025/02/14/trump-wants-to-force-homeless-people-into-tent-cities-can-he/
There is no evidence yet that the Trump administration plans to use federal resources to create facilities like the one used in New Orleans before the Super Bowl.
Ah, well, no, wrong, ShelterForce, see above public speech from Trump 2 years ago, or just look outside right now.
https://homelesslaw.org/statement7242025/
This Executive Order is rooted in outdated, racist myths about homelessness and will undoubtedly make homelessness worse.
Specifically, this order:
- Expands the use of police and institutionalization to respond to homelessness
- Prioritizes funding for states that treat homelessness as a crime and end housing-based solutions
- Cuts off funding for life-saving programs like harm-reduction.
Today’s executive order, combined with MAGA’s budget cuts for housing and healthcare, will increase the number of people forced to live in tents, in their cars, and on the streets.
My guesstimate is that within a year of Trump's collapsing economy and cuts to all kinds of social programs (so, by Feb 2026), we're looking at roughly 10 million homeless people.
You know, just about the population of entire Chicago metro area.
Was probably around 2-3 million back during Covid.
No, the PIT count numbers of several hundred thousand, they're wrong.
Source is me, I used to be one of the people who contributed to that count, as a data analyst for a large nonprofit serving the homeless.
The PIT methodology is a complete joke, it only counts people in shelters or at known permanent encampments (which are all illegal now), you roughly have to multiply it by 3x to 5x if you want to match the demographics of all the people who call in, say they are or will soon become homeless, and then we either can't help them because we don't have the resources, or they don't want to come to a shelter full of traumatized poor people and would rather live in a car (also illegal now) or hop from motel to motel untill they run out of money (2 or 3 months on average).
EDIT:
Trump/MAGA's insane response to Covid unironically may have actually killed enough people, disproportionately in red areas, that it actually caused his election loss, and then subsequent Jan 6th coup attempt.
Now he's gonna more directly kill millions of Americans, an order of magnitude more.
Hehehe!
Gotta continue that FOSS tradition of wacky/obscure names with some kind of esoteric logic behind them.
Sorry, I haven't been alive at any point where the beancounters at finance were not the ones running pretty much all well known American manufacturing companies/brands, for anything, cars, aircraft, tools...
Maybe possibly firearms is an exception.
Maybe.
Yeah, 30+ years is kind of a long time.
We were great at making stuff... and then all the mergers and acquisitions happened roughly under Reagan, and things just got more bad from there, NAFTA under Clinton, massive financialization, stock buybacks, private equity firms, CDOs, etc etc.
So yeah, we are no longer great at making stuff.
...
I grew up with a super rightwing dad explaining the ins and outs of what you're describing happening to Boeing, where he worked most of his life.
He voted against literally everyone and everything that would have pushed back against the bean counters, and of course now more lately he's voted for the idiots version of an 'domestic industrial development policy', ie, deport all our farm labor and slap import tariffs on literally everything, despite him knowing full well there are 0 complex mfg supply chains with a physical footprint on American soil that do not rely on imports.
People like him are why we were good at making stuff, why we no longer are.
30 years is more than enough time for a population to essentially unlearn a skill, at a societal level.
Despite me being American and thus never being able to afford anything imported, or made with imported parts...
I agree, the few US Saab car owners I knew more or less described their cars as reliable, so long as you keep up with basic maintenance... and then GM bought their car division, and basically all downhill from there, we (USAsians) absolutely fucking suck at making cars, by basically every possible metric.
I wonder if SAAB shares are up...
Nah, we onto shiny crystal psuedo-gems that grow out of mostly granite.
Counterpoints:
It's really, really good messaging, to a population that reads at a 6th grade level.
The entire point is that being a Representative is not supposed to be a lucrative career path to become wealthy, it is supposed to be public service.
Also, overturning Citizens United, in a fully comprehensive way, would make... not all, but a whole, whole lot of currently 'standard' lobbying (ie legalized bribery) completely fucking illegal.
Also also, if you can 'tax billionaires out of existence', presumably by actually effectively taxing their wealth, as well as capping CEO pay, and all other forms of non direct income compensation...
... well then you don't actually have a giant wealth disparity society, you have a functional upper bound once you 'win' capitalism, thus much less dark money to throw at lobbyists as well as an upper bound to how lucrative it csn be to throw away all your principles and embrace your inner sadistic narcissistic sociopathy.
...
I would add to this platform ....maybe the bullet point slogan would be 'death penalty for corporations'.
What I mean by that is something like this:
Ok, your corporation and its executive officers committed some heinous crime, that we normallly punish with fines, fines that are almost always a pittance in comparison to how much money that corp has?
Well ok, first, stop doing fines that way, peg them instead to a % of net income. Not net profits, net income.
If this results in bankruptcy of the corp?
Oh well, too bad.
Ok, then, if a corp is convicted of some massive legal violation, do something like every single C suite level employee in that corp, in its holding company, whatever... yeah they are now all barred from holding any such positions at any kind of organization, in any capacity, for the rest of their lives.
Guilt by association, you were part of a criminal enterprise, get fucked, you asshats obviously will not actually 'organically' create a 'company culture' of anything other than normalizing corruption, so here's a bigger stick to whack you with, to discourage such behavior.
...
Also, its now illegal for an individual to sit on more than one of any kind of corporate, government regulatory body, elected government position, non profit / lobbying board within a 5 year period. Maybe 10 years.
No more incestuous boards of directors where one person sits on 3 to 8 boards all at the same time, and there is now a 5 (maybe 10) year cool down period when you leave one high level board, before you can join another, no more immediate pipeline from industry to regulatory capture.
Maybe the bullet point slogan for this could be 'End the Corporate Deep State'.
Is it technically accurate as a term? I don't care, it feels right, with our current era colloquial lingo.
...
EDIT
Also, the min wage needs to be Federally mandated to be indexed to a State's average median income and actual cost of living.
There is a lot of variance between States economic CoLs and AMIs, but broadly, a bare minimum for a national, all areas averaged together, min wage... is more like $30-$35 literally right now, if you interperet the min wage to be a living wage, as it was set out to be by FDR.
So really, for a broad number, a 2028 platform would need to be at least $30, not $20...
But more specifically, Federally mandate that every State uses an index calculation that takes into account cost of food and utilities, median income, median rent... make it so that its actually possible for annout of high school 18 yo to get a full time job and be able to afford a studio apartment, without going into debt or needing a cosigner.