Going to keep doing what I’m doing now: invest every dollar I can spare and ride the coattails of the rich bastards in charge. Hoping to hit my early retirement number in four-to-eight years and have a lot of time to read, game, and enjoy my life afterward.

We’ll see, though. Trump failed so spectacularly in his first term that it’s important to keep some cash to the side in case there’s a market crash. Buying stock at 90% discounts in March 2020 and then waiting a few years paid off my student loans.

For those who don’t know, there are literal ETF’s that follow the investment choices of major legislators, like Nancy Pelosi (ticker: NANC) and Ted Cruz (ticker: KRUZ), so you can, literally, invest legally in our federal legislators’ insider trading.

Neverwinter Nights, probably 10k plus hours over the last 22 years, and Dead by Daylight (1666 hours).

Great games, both. I DM a weekly campaign on Neverwinter Nights.

It is interesting, the little quirks of history.

In between bombing seven different countries, Obama found a lot of time to do symbolic, meaningless shit. (Which most US presidents find time to do.)

Dunno, just make sure your stop-loss orders are set so you don’t get burned when the dip comes.

Go try to eff with a goose if you think you’re so tough.

Science: because prayer doesn’t work.

The ones I’ve played of late are:

Disney Dreamlight Valley

Dungeons of the Endless (Casual, but a tad addictive)

Dungeon Defenders

Trying to fill a 24-hour news cycle requires a lot of bullshit, and Fox, NBC, CNN, CBS, and your favorite news outlet are happy to shovel it.

Stop watching partisan, billionaire-owned news outlets and start consuming international news and non-partisan sites. (Like the AP and Al Jazeera)

Also, watch moderate people on the other side of the political divide. It may annoy you in some ways (like how I can’t listen to Maher when he gets on the topic of Israel), but you’ll learn more and you’ll have more nuanced views, which will benefit you in ways you can’t fully understand until you’re able to think about things in a different way. I’m a leftist, so for me, it’s been Bill Maher, Chris Williamson, or Jon Stewart. More people need to learn what they don’t know that they don’t know.

True, but they could just decide to ignore homeless people like most of the US and other capitalist countries have, but they didn’t.

Finland only has approximately 1000 willfully homeless people. I’d call that solving the crisis.

Haha, it’s all good.

Hey now, don’t knock our infrastructure. KC’s in good shape and we even have free public transportation.

I honestly don’t know. That’s just what I saw. Maybe they were running from it.

It’s wild to consider until you realize that several European cities have literal pee stations on walking paths and it’s not weird to whip it out and do your business completely uncovered.

A few.

I was in San Juan once and, walking back to my cruise ship, saw a van jump a curb, slam into a police vehicle, and then the driver hopped out and jumped off the pier into the ocean.

The first time I visited Los Angeles and saw literal garbage piled 2-3 feet high on public sidewalks. In the days after I saw the tent cities. (I’m from Kansas City, where garbage is very well managed and tent cities are a rarity.)

I once saw a very tall, dark shape in the woods getting chased by cows. It might have been Bigfoot. It might have been a bear or a deer that reared up on its hind legs. It was too far away for me to say for sure.

Nope.

I only have it so people from other roller derby leagues can get in contact with me. That’s the only reason.

Shouldn’t the side that’s beholden to not burning it all down realize that their inaction leads to everything being burned down anyway in the end

They know.

They don’t care. They’re getting rich off of the current situation in Washington too. Hell, they can loan their campaigns their own money and pay themselves back with your campaign contributions at 20% interest. Totally legal, and thanks to Ted Cruz, it’s a practice upheld by the Supreme Court.

It’s really, really easy to get obscenely wealthy being a legislator.

The Democrats pretend to care about norms and rules because that’s what they’re paid to do. Republicans reject and subvert rules because that’s what they’re paid to do. Corporate interests control both parties and this performative dance makes it easier to keep the poor and middle class away from any semblance of power.

It’s called the ratchet effect.

They rationalize to themselves that whatever outrageous thing they used to be opposed to is just different when it’s their guy doing it.

I don’t think most people think things like this through, both liberal and conservative. For the most part they use corporate social media like Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok, and we know objectively that the algorithms feeding those users content are engineered to convince them that all of their opinions are correct (no matter how odd or outlandish) and to keep them perpetually outraged so they’ll continue to consume and click on ads. With AI proliferating, we’re now seeing the fast-tracking of false perspectives and information across the web.

Hell, for most of the last presidential election both sides were making excuses for the fact that they intended to vote for someone with clear, public, unavoidably evident cognitive decline. They didn’t think through that.