Direct Democracy, perhaps? One way to not have these parties is to not have representatives at all.

I’m not sure there’s a name for thinking the parties shouldn’t exist. If you tell us what you think SHOULD exist we can probably tell you what labels apply to that.

He didn’t actually DO anything, just gabbed in the internet. That kind of influence does not last. But there will always be some hateful asshole to take his place.

That’s a really good way of putting it. We have the wealthy, the poor, and the poor who’ve been given scraps by the wealthy and are complicit in protecting them. The “middle class” believe they can gain more in scraps than they can by revolution. And so it continues.

There’s an expression I am comfortable with and I wish more people could be.

NOT “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Rather: “I’m sorry I made you feel that way.”

You can say this to someone without accepting blame for intending to hurt them or trying to hurt them. It’s just an acknowledgment that your actions had a consequence. Some people think that they have no responsibility for unintended consequences of their actions, and that only what they intended matters. Of course it’s important what they intended, and where they were coming from, but they can also accept that perhaps they didn’t think of everything or fully appreciate what their actions would do. We all make that mistake.

Yeah, that’s why I said we need flexible and short term housing. The trick is to make renting serve the needs of renters, because those needs do exist. Today it’s more about serving the profit margin of owners.

When I rented out my property, for example, I felt it was my responsibility, my job, to offer a residence where everything worked. I maintained the place meticulously and paid for every repair. However if you simply scan reddit you’ll see thousands of posts from renters who, for example, have a broken down refrigerator and will have to pay to fix it themselves. I find that disgusting - the landlord holds the renter responsible for anything that happens while they are there. So the landlord gets their monthly debt service paid for by the rent, plus profit, plus they enjoy to market appreciation, PLUS the renter is on the hook for all maintenance? Fuck that.

It’s true that it everyone is in a cash position to buy a house, but that’s made worse by housing being so expensive. And housing is expensive in part because of the hoarding and rent-seeking behaviors of landlords and investors. So renting is a “solution” to a problem it partly makes itself.

If people don’t have cash to buy houses, I’d look at that as a problem for lenders. Someone else renting out the house doesn’t necessarily have to be the only solution. I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate renting because we need some very flexible housing / short term housing.

But if we imagine a world where renting is incredibly restricted, perhaps to 4-unit apartments and up, instead of every single residence on the market, I think we would see a more affordable market where more people COULD be in a position to buy a house.

I’ve been a landlord and I know how it works. The liquidity problem you mention is real, but so is rent seeking. Landlords may help make housing available, but they absolutely do not help make it affordable. Quite the opposite.

Think about payday loans services. They help make money more available, but they make it as expensive as they can. No one believes they are providing a valued service at affordable. rates.

It’s possible to offer loans and rental housing at really reasonable rates, but that’s not what we have in our society. Investors and the wealthy buy up all the property, creating scarcity, this causes a price bubble which shuts out many buyers who get priced out. Then the renting begins, and I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but I couldn’t afford to rent the house I own.

If the property is giving you any kind of return, you’re extracting profit, so the property is less “affordable” than it would be if the resident owned it.

As always: “if a headline ends in a question mark, the answer is ‘no.”

You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.

/s

In tech it’s often a bad thing to have 37 of something. How many phone operating systems can app developers reasonably serve? Does it benefit consumers to have 19 different graphics chip standards?

Okay I was like “that sounds like a terrible method” but the R is for “recreation,” and “dreams” is more like life aspirations than what did you dream about last night. This makes more sense now.

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I try to imagine what it must be like for a neurodivergent person who doesn’t value small talk to get through everyday interactions, and here’s what I came up with.

Imagine that everyone else wanted to dance with you for 3 minutes as soon as they saw you. All day people are rushing up to your desk and busting moves and pulling you up out of your chair to dance with them. You just think “wow what is this point of this shit - can you all just calm down and do some work?”

You aren’t a very good dancer and you protest that you don’t want to do this, and no matter what you try everyone is just saddened or offended that you can’t dance. It’s not your fault you can’t, and you don’t see why dancing should even matter. Multiple times you given in and try but your awkward hip gyrations don’t register for anyone else as even dancing at all. Some people think you’re actually mocking them or the whole dancing ritual with your awful moves.

I’ll try to be generous and imagine that she thinks it’s easier on you to hear bad news from her than to go out and actually fail.

That’s the only remotely humane explanation I can come up with. But this is not at all what I would do. If my kid was enthusiastic about something, I would help them, let them fail, and tell them if they did their best and let them know they can keep trying.

I never tell my kids they are bad at something. I will tell them if they haven’t been practicing enough, or if others have practiced more than them. But that’s to help them understand that it’s about the effort you put in, not “how good you are.”

It does sound like you have a habit of rushing in with grand ambitions. “I’m going to make it to nationals,” etc. My kids do this as well. They learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube and then suddenly they’re out to break the world record. For whatever reason, it’s no enough for them to just solve the cube for fun, or just work on improving their own times. I guess it’s because kids don’t yet have fully formed self-esteem and are always looking for outside validation to prop them up.

You might benefit from thinking about what you get out of the sport and competition specifically.

Sure but their premise is that addiction comes from life problems. Thats like saying “no pill can cure depression. - you’ll still have all the same problems.”

Depression is its own thing, not a reaction to life problems. Addiction is much the same. It even has hereditary components, like depression does.

In fact I would posit that a lot of homelessness is caused by drug addiction. At least as much as the other way around if not more.

No it doesn’t hurt. I’m really just trying to answer your question. Why don’t we have better names? Because they’re for the clinicians, who need the terms to be precise, not easy to pronounce. And literally nothing is easy enough for a patient with dementia or Alzheimer’s to remember.

Do you have much experience with people with Alzheimer’s? It’s not a question of keeping the spelling simple. They lose their own names. And anyway what is this scenario where any damn thing depends on their ability to spell their clinical condition?

So maybe they can deal with them some healthier way then? It’s a fallacy to say that drug addiction is simply a response to underlying emotional problems. Past a certain point, addiction takes on a life of its own and causes more problems and emotional trauma than almost anything an average person ever faces.

Christianity loves to pretend it’s still a downtrodden little secret society, with their sneaky Bible verses in tiny print and their fish symbols and such. It’s hilarious fantasy play, because they are a global hegemony and spend a lot of time persecuting others.