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  • When I was growing up, being a garbage collector paid well enough to own a house and send kids to college. It was a bit smelly, yes. But it paid well. And because it was a government job (local not federal or state) it was secure and had good benefits. People were not laid off or the city would stink.

    Also, this was before a lot of automation so there were more people working on each truck

    I do not know how it pays today.

  • Every horrible bill has an optimistic happy sounding name that goes well with baby talk. The happier baby talk it is, the worst it will be.

    One will know the end is near when they pass “funsies time” . Seriously, I’m headed for the hills if I hear that

  • There was no way to prevent a lot of last night. I think many people there were caught by surprise.

    And it’s difficult to tell when an attack will happen, one has to shift through all the genocidal noises by the American and Israeli governments, and predict who will be in power that week to restrain the bastards. This has been going on for decades. Each month a new existential threat, it seems.

    Although before it was easier to predict, and maybe they underestimated the sheer insanity of the current White House

    There will be no way to prevent future attacks; one cannot bunker down everything permanently

  • I’m cynical, but isn’t this just going to the Supreme Court to be decided by those 5 assholes based on their reasons?

    And chances are those reasons will be batshit?

    So what we are really watching here the required preliminaries for a ruling that will cripple the country

  • That is a great question, and one I spent hundreds of hours thinking about. I still don’t really know about the answer.

    I have some fragments.

    I think it is a deep rooted cultural thing we are talking about here. One that is generations old and will continue for generations more. Also America is a huge country and for each thing I mention here , there is some areas not doing that .

    Most Americans who vote, trust the counting of their votes, and the more obscure the vote counting is, the more they trust it. In other words if they are completely baffled by how it works, they will believe in it. And they are told by a father or mother figure that it’s accurate, then they will go along with it, without questions.

    Americans are like Russians in that large segments of their cultural elite don’t understand democracy. But it’s the American flavor. They understand voting, but there it stops. There is no instinct with most voters that participation is only half of democracy , the other part is counting. They distrust simple counting like mail in ballots but fully participate in the most convoluted vote counting with childlike faith and hope.

    Many fundamentally do not understand that counting can be simple and done to the satisfaction of all participants, even if they do not like the results.

    So when one suggests paper ballots counted in front of people, allowing recounts for any reason. It’s challenging faith itself.

  • I’ve been trying to get people to think about using the British or French ways of counting ballots.

    But I was confused why I made so little progress in the USA.

    I finally decided it was cultural. There was something about Americans I did not understand. After a few more years I realized it was people who were politically active , and the journalists who reported on politics, who had this filter, or taboo about addressing any of this.

    For example, if you talk to disenfranchised blacks in rural east Texas, they readily understand and agree. But if you talk to black progressive activists in Texas, they have the filter. Same for poor white fundamentalists in my area and their conservative representatives.

    So, I think it’s more the price of admission to politics now, than anything else. And those who cannot ignore don’t participate at all

  • American protests tend to die down after a few weeks unless there is constant new irritation applied.

    Continuous mass roundups of people with indefinite detentions, in harsh conditions will probably help keep this protesting active.

    But I don’t see how it can get much worse. The police and federal agencies are pretty much at maximum limits for being evil for them. New people will have to be recruited to do worse.

    And while there will be mass beatings and the occasional death, and tens of thousands of kidnappings. it’s not enough to tip things over to the next stage unless people in the administration try very hard to achieve that. And I think they are too incompetent to succeed making things worse.

    Something unexpected would have to happen first?