> LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this

I'm in LA right now. If I didn't read the news I wouldn't know anything is up.

Living in LA is so great. The only thing I regret in my life is not getting here sooner.

I can imagine but wait until you visit a walkable city!

LA is walkable.

However I don't really like walking everywhere or taking public transportation so LA is the perfect city for me because it has many municipal places I can park my car and then walk around.

Let me explain LA to you since you clearly don't understand it.

LA is a combination of many smaller cities. Each one, on it's own is a small micro city with everything you would expect. You can live in Santa Monica, Pasadena, Burbank, Sherman oaks, West Hollywood, Ktown, Beverly Hills, Sawtelle, etc. each one of those places has a very vibrant and walkable area with cute shops and restaurants and easy public transportation. If you live in those places you don't necessarily need a car.

The problem with LA is that you might want to go from one of these places to another and the walk would take a very long time because LA county is bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island. But you can walk it if you want.

LA is currently the only city in North America building new subway lines. And is doing so rapidly.

> LA is walkable.

You and I have different definitions of walkable.

Mostly in the 70s, sunny, sidewalks everywhere, an actual street food culture, a bus network that spans the entire county and about half a dozen rail lines. Where does the goalpost have to move for people who have clearly never spent much time in LA to see it for what it is?

> LA is currently the only city in North America building new subway lines.

That is demonstrably false. As I type this comment I can hear the sounds of excavators digging out a station for a new subway line in Toronto.

Panama Metro Line 3, too, which is underground for 5km.

All the extensions under construction to the Seattle‘s link light rail are grade separated and subway standard (or 3/4 if you count the Tacoma extension).

which Toronto? The biggest known Toronto isn't in the US.

"[...] city in North America [...]"

It's also mostly low density, single story housing which of course means that the distance to get anywhere will be quite substantial.

Density is pretty dispersed in hot pockets. You have places like koreatown with 45 thousand people a square mile.

> LA is walkable.

> However I don't really like walking everywhere

Hint: If you don't like walking, then your city is not walkable. In actually walkable places, everyone likes to walk because it's so much better.

Hint: if you read the parent comment, you see that "LA" is actually a collection of many smaller cities, and that "LA" is geographically bigger than some states and so of course it is not completely walkable. LA is 44 miles long and 24 miles wide. And that's just the city of Los Angeles. The county of Los Angeles is 4000 square miles, and has over 80 cities, most of which are only separated from each other by a road. But LA Metro is the (geographically) largest public municipal public transportation system, so you can take a bus from one of of LA county to another.

Downtown is walkable. Hollywood is walkable. Echo Park is walkable. Pasadena is walkable. Santa Monica is walkable. Long Beach is walkable. Culver City is walkable. Bevery Hills is walkable. Glendale is walkable. Burbank is walkable.

> Downtown is walkable. Hollywood is walkable. Echo Park is walkable. Pasadena is walkable. Santa Monica is walkable. Long Beach is walkable. Culver City is walkable. Bevery Hills is walkable. Glendale is walkable. Burbank is walkable.

In the same way that Everest is walkable. None are walkable cities by any reasonable definition.

No matter how accessible you make it, humans in the modern era can't just walk around 15+ miles a day and do any other kind of commerce. LA is just a huge, hilly city. Even with full bipartisan support and unlimited funding, it's a fundamentally harder problem to make LA walkable compared to something like Copenhagen.

Well, yeah, that is the point.

Making a walkable LA would mean making a much smaller urban area (or series of much smaller) with much higher population density and ideally rewilding most of the LA metro area. It is functionally impossible in the current political environment.

100% this. The person above has never been in any actually walkable city. Can't blame them, these are very rare in the US. (I haven't seen any yet).

I'm out walking around LA all the time. Santa Monica alone is a beach town with an amazing ocean front. You don't need a car at all. I'm seriously sitting here doing the Obama shrug meme.

It's stupid that I even have to point out a few things. Like that I was born in Europe, have been to Germany and Japan, and lived near NYC for a time so I probably know better than some European about my own city.

Santa Monica *beachfront* is decently walkable. Santa Monica as a whole is not walkable. All the other examples (Downtown?) are also completely not walkable.

At least my definition of walkable does not mean "you can technically walk there" it means "if you live here you will not want nor need to use your car"

There's three new stations in downtown which extended the blue and yellow line.

Santa Monica and downtown are now directly linked with the yellow line.

Having public transport is 5% of what makes a place walkable

New york comes to mind.

Of course the entire city of Los Angeles isn't walkable. It's 500 square miles, or over 10x the size of Paris (40 square miles).

But LA has a great many neighborhoods that are very walkable, and it has public transportation connecting all those walkable neighborhoods.

And in response to your spurious claims about Santa Monica: the entirety of the city of Santa Monica is just as walkable as the cities of London and Paris, and definitely more walkable than the outlying neighborhoods like Versailles.

Downtown Los Angeles is also very walkable, and there are tourists who make that walk every day.

LA with a subway system would be insanely clutch. Throw in a regional rail to SB and SD, and I won't need a rental car again when I go out there!

Man this is America. If people had any interest in walking, our national health picture would look very different. Even huge swathes of people voting for public transit in the US are doing so because they want everyone ELSE off the highway.

It's not just about a lack of interest in walking. If your infrastructure is extremely hostile to walking, it's outright dangerous and unreliable and force people out of it.

>our national health picture would look very different.

It wouldn't, you'd need to change the food industry for that to happen.

No, consistent exercise is more than enough to make a significant difference. I didn’t say it would be fixed, I said it would be very different.

you know what they say: you can't outrun a bad diet.

I’ll take that still. It’s bananas to me that more people aren’t in favour of public transit only for that reason.

THe history doesn't help. LA is a huge area and California is traditionally very rocky and hilly. The great weather and modern industrialism is the reason people continued to flock here after the Gold Rush. But anyone playing Orgeon trails knows how rough getting to California was to begin with.

There's definitely amenities that can be done to make LA walkable regardless, but I understand that nature did not intent for this settlement to be human friendly.

Have you seen other american cities outside of NYC and Chicago? LA is walkable in a lot of places,plenty of side walks. Southern cities are particularly atrocious because even if they were walkable, the heat makes walking impractical in the summer (which can be > half of the year).

Southerner here, bless your little heart, we are fine!

Live in Houston, and no we're not. The only break we get from punishing heat is hurricanes and floods, but that often comes with significant power loss throughout the area, making the heat even worse.

Also live in Houston; the heat is uncomfortable but is nothing that some Gatorade Zero can't fix. It's a walkable enough city if you live in the loop. Not NYC walkable but not nothing. Outside of the loop; forget about it! A small price to pay for being able to wear shorts and sandals all winter!

No, we're not. been wanting to take a walk for ~2 months now and couldn't because of the heat. Maybe in more inland cities it is nicer, but within ~200 miles from the ocean it is unbearable.

This is such a tired argument. Yes, YOU like it, that doesn't make an objective goal for every person on earth to achieve.

> doesn't make an objective goal for every person on earth to achieve.

The walkability of cities is linked to increased happiness in people, so there actually is merit to saying that it is objectively good. Walkability encourages you to literally walk past large amounts of people, local businesses and plenty of outdoor activities that you have the opportunity to take part in.

There are walkable parts of LA, just LA itself isn't very walkable. But if you confine yourself to westwood around UCLA, you can even walk all the way to Sawtelle for Japanese food (although it isn't a very nice walk).

maybe he doesn’t feel like stepping over needles and passed out homeless people in order to get somewhere

Let me guess: you are wealthy.

I have to work to live here.

Contrary, I couldn’t wait to leave LA. I regretted moving there as soon as I did and I’m much happier now that I left.

I love seeing when someone finds the right place for them. Why is LA so great for you?

GOP and Dems have been nearly evenly matched for years in Congress now. There was no prospect of dramatic legal overhaul i.m.o., let alone any new Constitutional amendments.

Graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...

This is also not how Congress works as meant to work - deadlocked yes, but not a deadlock driven by partisanship.

Republicans get primaried for supporting Dems.

This creates the reality which is sold in their information and news networks. Dems always have bad bills, and see - no Republican is supporting it.

Dems have oddly bad party discipline. Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled, and yet this doesn't happen. They've not yet got serious.

Party discipline contributes to the decline of democracy. It reduces the representation of opinions down to whomever sets the party line.

Better than party discipline would be more effective intra-party debate, discussion, consensus processes etc. It's probably slower than line enforcement tho'.

I agree in most other times. But in current dire times of this constitutional crisis, a bit of discipline is necessary. We gotta resist wherever we can and slow down process until the people can speak.

There is no constitutional crisis, stop gaslighting as if the dems do not stop attempting to force their ideals then you will see more of this “constitutional crisis” as you call it.

> Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled

Why? If we had a couple more Manchins and Sinemas right now, you know what we'd have? A majority.

The question is whether you have more of them in addition to the rest of the party, or instead of some members of the rest of the party. 4 machins in the same number of seats would really make it impossible to do anything.

> 4 machins in the same number of seats would really make it impossible to do anything

One, we did a lot with one Manchin and one Sinema. (To the degree the former had concerns, it was well-founded ones over the inflationary effects of the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Two, not doing anything beats the status quo. A weak majority would be a check on the executive. We’re paying the price for ideological purism.

You would think so, and that would be a reading of the American Legislative machinery which is incorrect.

Simplifying: Congress was never meant to be deadlocked on simple party lines. It was always meant to have people figuring out ways to work together, even at the expense of the party, but in favor of their constituents.

That dynamic is essential to any stable democracy.

This would drive partisanship, probably the most immediate problem in the US and beyond. I am not from the US but the impacts of similar perspectives are sadly more and more widely spread.

If you cannot accept an idea because it was brought forward by a political competitor, you lack the necessary detachment to make good decisions.

Sometimes party discipline is sensible for political pragmatism, but in all other cases democracy is the better solution. It should be handled with care.

Rejecting this philosophy wholesale and labeling it as explicitly anti-American is the sensible political pragmatism at this point.

Partisanship is only something to be concerned with when you're dealing with functioning political parties. In America, I think the bare minimum for a political party should be that it believes in the ideals of America: a government by and for the people.

MAGA is not that, it's an explicit rejection of the ideals of the American revolution. Fundamentally they have a vision for America run by a king who has absolute authority over state, congress, and the judicial system.

There's no meeting of the minds that can be had with such a perspective, our forefathers figured that out and started the American Revolution over it.

I accept this philosophy, as this is the correct way a functioning democracy operates. Independents and Republicans are tired of the riots, the attempts at forcing ideals (such as forcing the use of pronouns, forcing deviation from one’s religion). Maybe get rid of the crazy ideas, stop spending so much money and focus on american citizens before foreign citizens and you’d have more people on your side.

Your rights to practice your religion are not eroded. But guess what, your rights to practice your religion end where they impinge on other people's rights.

Nothing makes your rights more important than theirs. I'm sorry that is a bitter pill for you to swallow.

> This is also not how Congress works as meant to work - deadlocked yes, but not a deadlock driven by partisanship

Yup. We let the pointers take precedence to the point that that they don't actually point at anything, we just like how they look.

And they're still nearly evenly matched and Trump is still doing what he's doing. The Democrats could have done all the same stuff Trump is doing, but for good instead of evil. The problem is that the Democrats are not willing to accept that the system is entirely broken, so they keep clinging to a belief in "institutions" that they think will somehow magically protect us, when in fact those institutions are destroying us.

You can not destroy democracy and rule of law for the good. By definition, you are destroying democracy and rule of law. Even if you believe yourself to be good, and Trump and MAGA are under that illusion, you are doing something horrible.

Democrats could not do it. If they had done it, they would be as bad as Trump is now.

The point is that what we have now (and what we had before Trump) is not democracy and is not the rule of law, and Trump's actions show that, because those actions are taken within that system. We have been living for a long time under the illusion that our governmental system was democratic when it never was, it was only due to coincidence and luck that it appeared that way. When I say "do the same stuff Trump is doing" I mean use similar methods to create a system that actually supports democracy and the rule of law.

Havimg "democracy and rule of law" isn't a question of yes or no, it's a matter of degrees on several only partially aligned axes. Something like that can slowly shift.

You make it sound like "our democracy was never perfect, so obviously we always just had a mad emperor all along"...

Sure, it's a matter of degree, but I think recent events have shown that the actual guardrails we have are significantly less than what we thought we had.

It's like, if you built a bridge to carry 10,000 tons because you need it to carry 10,000 tons, and then it turns out it's starting to fall apart under 5,000 tons, it doesn't make sense to me to say that you should just fix it so it securely holds 5,000 tons, or if it breaks just restore it to hold 5,000 tons. You need to rebuild it so it can do what you need it to do.

If it can be fixed, any civil engineer would clearly prefer to fix it rather than tearing it down and rebuilding it.

This is still not a noce analogy because tearing down a bridge is just expensive (and maybe unnecessary). Tearing down a political system isn't something you can "just do". Most people don't seem to want that and as long as that's the case it won't happen.

US citizens still enjoy vastly more rights, protection and political participation than most people in most countries. If you tear the system down, quite likely what you get will be even worse. Gradual change can be for the worse but also for the better, there's ample historical precedent for both. There's still a lot of ways this could go.

>Most people don't seem to want that and as long as that's the case it won't happen.

Most people, as usual, are apathetic and don't care as long as it doesn't affect them.

For those that do: it seems that that's exactly what they want to do. Hence 2016 pushing a supposed anti-establishment Trump (an obvious mistake, but no one ver said the people made well informed decisions). It's a shame the DNC spent the last 3 elections rejecting such a sentiment.

I think there's a lot of ways things could be fixed without necessarily "tearing everything down". More like shifting in a new foundation while leaving a lot of the superstructure intact. Like we could still have a lot of the same basic governmental functions and operations even if the constitution were entirely rewritten.

The irony is that Trump is doing the exact opposite, tearing down those "surface-level" operations without doing anything to improve the foundations ---and in fact causing major cracks in those foundations, thus making it even more necessary to replace them.

Then what was the American revolution?

A bunch of rich, white, influential businessmen getting a better tax deal.

America hasn't actually come that far.

It was a fight against tyranny. It destroyed the rule of a king, thereby ushering in democracy and the rule of law.

>but for good instead of evil

A lot of people have decided that what Trump is doing is good. A lot have decided that it is evil. It is not so clear cut.

To be precise, Biden had around 5 months of presidential immunity. He could have done a lot as a lame duck, but this was not the case when he came in.

And I think it's even simpler than that. the only bipartisan point is that both sides are bought out by corporate interests. Many reps are not looking out for their constituents.

To be fair, we now know that Biden wasn’t sure what was going on.

The result of what your seeing is because democrats did things for 4 years and the majority of Americans didn’t like it.

> but for good instead of evil

This is rich for the party that lacks morality and supports murdering children, forcing the removal of religion, and forcing acceptance of trans individuals lying about their gender. From my perspective dems are the evil ones.

> The planned decline of America won't be like other countries because of post-WW2 "super power" repositioning of country and it's critical role in global trade, communications and finance. All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear.

Yeah, the decline of the British Empire is starting to look sedate and well-managed compared to this.

I'm sure because the USA was there to pick up any slack that Britain dropped, in a way that China is not doing with the USA.

> The planned decline of America won't be like other countries

Maybe bc americans WON'T and SHOULDN'T settle for a decline - they should violently rebel against this mindset and claw they way UPWARDS - there's more room for more growth, even if you lose #1 status and have to settle for #2 for a while you can still catch up etc.

It's good that at least the US and China are NOT infected with this degrowth and "cyclical history" mindvirus that seems to be doing the rounds in Europe and elsewhere... keep being a bastion of endless progress brothers, fight the good fight! There's a whole light cone to eat/infect (if not for us the for the successors we'll build)! Whoop, whoop!

Jokes aside though, most of the open world we live in today owes its existence to ideas, mindsets, $$$ and tech exported from the US, and I'm sure there's way more cool stuff to come from you once you properly clean up the parasitic individuals and institutions that have infected your society. Purge on and keep growing, fight for a deservedly big chunk of the Dyson sphere and beyond!

Nah, Everything has beginning and end and USA and others are very much near their end. You can't build anything new without destroying old. It is painful to live in "interesting times", but it is part of natural processes when corruption eats away society that is falling apart only this time it is very global.

The signs are there, that this is global situation before WW1 or WW2 - status quo has to change, balance of power has to change - USA does not want to start to implement any of those changes and those who are way smarter than me think that USA should stay away from epicenter of anything and join for the spoils only part.

> Everything has beginning and end

Most things of real interest do not tbh. The point should be to learn how to play infinite games. Sure, there's hard-to-impossible prices to pay, and/or to force others into paying. But what if it can be made to work, won't any price be worth it for that... ?

The epicenter is where the fun is at, even if the price might be sacrificing things of value for your average population and some unquantifiable measure of fluff like national-identity or whatever people imagine it's real nowadays.

I'm an unashamed globalist, but would rather have a "world village" with the US (despite that US being maybe quite different from what most gen-pop wants) at its heart :P Imagine all the people...

> All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear.

Suffer compared to what? That's the alternative? Number 1 stays number 1?

The world works in peaks and troughs, swings and roundabouts. What goes up must come down. Time marches on, change happens. This comes with suffering, but is also the definition of progress.

Nothing is the best forever, and the one's at the top who don't acknowledge that are the ones with the hardest fall ahead. That applies to complacent SV leadership as much as it applies to the average American citizen.

I can't fault this way of thinking about the world: change is inevitable, you have to roll with it. If I accept it though, the idea of "planned decline of America" is interesting to think about. If you're at the top, decline is inevitable, it's the only direction. What's the only thing you can do to mitigate the pain of the inevitable? Try plan to work with it. Not sure how I feel about this way of thinking, it feels pragmatic if nothing else.

death, lots of it. wars. famine. disease outbreaks,etc.. usaid being dismantled alone will do that. economic depressions, mass unemployment and civil wars and civil unrest,etc... mid 20th century but x10.

Decline is not inevitable. others like China can rise, there could be multiple successful and wealthy countries. heck, even in a decline, america can become like germany instead of like venezuela. the decline you're thinking of is a lot nicer than what I'm thinking of I think.

Preventing a decline requires established institutions to function as designed. America is not declining because it's like the roman empire, it is declining because the corporate ruling class are strangling the nation for short term profits. It isn't "we the corporations of america" it is "we the people". They've assaulted the foundation of the wealthiest most powerful empire in history and it is collapsing as a result.

I feel like I'm not communicating my point well and you're misunderstanding. Decline is inevitable. Not universal decline though. I believe we'll move forward as a species, but that overall progression is made up of lots of groups constantly declining and improving at different paces and times.

I think you don't understand what I'm saying because you said e.g. "others like China can rise" - my point is China has already risen, and fallen, and risen and will continue to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ages_of_China. Just like the US will. And the troughs will be tragic compared to the peaks.

This is what long term empires do. They rise and fall and rise and fall, and that rises and falls include wars, famine, disease outbreak, advances in war, science, tech, health etc.

I feel civilised societies have said exactly what you've said since the dawn of man "we're civilized, we've moved beyond incivility now" when in reality, they were just in one of the many times where their society just so happened to be leading the way.

Sorry, because I know you don't believe this, and you want to believe "we the people" can stop change this natural cycling, but it's a feature of relativity. Ultimately, you're saying the same thing optimists have been saying for millenia, and here we are, war, hunger, famine is all still happening. Same stuff we've been doing for millenia, just with fancier tech.

What you're describing is human behavior and you're predicting the future based on past patterns. I get that.

What I'm saying is while you're right in that the pattern is likely to repeat with America, it doesn't have to. We are humans, we are capable of learning from history. Not only that, the amount of technology progression and destructive capability of humans has changed drastically within the past century. Lots of things are happening right now that break from historical patterns. Also consider the number of people like you that hold that opinion, your preemptive surrender is equivalent to a confirmation bias. In other words, your prophecy is self-fulfilling because of the number of people that believe in it.

If so many people like you understand history and the variables involved, is it impossible to change course? If you knew lightning will strike you tomorrow, would you not attempt to stay indoors?

Look at the US, we're all calling our country an empire but what empire in history has behaved like the US? the soft-power approach of the US is what I mean as well as using a real-time-connected global commerce/financial market where everyone relies on the US.

Rome fell, but no one depended on Rome when it failed. China has fallen many times but the world didn't depend on Chinese currency or military like it does with the US.

What is more constant than empires falling is people at a macro level acting in their best interest. Even China would prefer the US to have a healthy consumer market until it has it's own regional consumer market that can displace the US. China doesn't want to replace the US navy's fleet in policing the seas and it won't get Europe's trust like the US when it comes to the RMB to displace the dollar.

It's not that i don't want to believe (although I don't) the US will fall, it's just that those prediction have too many assumptions. When China,Rome and other empires were falling, there was no internet or wide spread mass education. Or even things like widespread democracy (a democratic empire?? lol).

The alternative would have been for competition to have a new power surpass the stagnant US, something like Taiwan. Not for US to shoot itself in the foot and completely destroy its foreign policy. There's already so much tension in the world that it wouldn't take much of a spark for WW3 to legititmatize.

If the Dems of 2020 understood that twitter is largely a fringe group of outspoken individuals, they probably would have won in landslide victories. Even if Biden had chosen a strong leader as VP rather than go with a diversity hire to appease the twitterites, we still could have probably avoided this.

The irony is that, if they hadn't fortified (to use Time's winking term) the election in 2020 and let Trump stay in office, his second term would have been much like the first, bogged down by Pence and the rest of the establishment drones around him, including his own kids. In that timeline he doesn't spend four years defending himself against lawfare in kangaroo courts and ducking bullets, and decide to get serious in his second term. He would have gotten the full blame for Operation Warpspeed and the Covid mandates, instead of sharing it with Biden. Also, Elon doesn't buy Twitter and join forces with him, so Twitter remains a safe space for the left.

Things could have been much different.

how do you mean "let [him] stay in office" ? less people voted for trump than for his opponent, in both 2020 and 2016

Read the Time article[1] on how the US bureaucratic and corporate establishment teamed up to "fortify" the election to make sure Trump wouldn't win, which uses words like "conspiracy" and "shadow election" approvingly. He was expected to win coming into campaign season, since peacetime presidents with good economies almost never lose, so much so that the Democrats ran one of their old war-horses to let him pad his campaign chest in a losing effort, their version of a Dole or McCain. Then Covid brought on mail-in balloting and the opportunities that presented, and the establishment took advantage.

However much you think that did or didn't cross the line from "fortification" to fraud isn't the point. The point is that if they hadn't done so much of it, Trump would have won the election (in the electoral college, which is what matters), and he would be a footnote now, after spending his second term building a few more miles of border wall and probably not a lot else.

[1] https://time.com/magazine/us/5936018/february-15th-2021-vol-...

> If the Dems of 2020 understood that twitter is largely a fringe group of outspoken individuals,

And Elon Musk, former presidential vizir. There's clearly power in Twitter, but it leans right as well.

Replacing him with kamala was the stupidest thing the dnc has done in recent years. What a vote of no confidence towards your own party when you actually bend to trumps bullshit ageism rhetoric and replace him at the final hour with a pick no one voted for. I just do not understand the logic behind the move for the dnc at all. Especially in hindsight when whatever it was supposed to achieve did not work at all.

First, they had to replace him after his disastrous debate performance. Second, who should they have picked? Biden only dropped out in the last minute, so there was hardly any time for building up a new candidate.

Biden insisted on running for a second term, against earlier promises, and failed to build up a strong successor during his first term. The Dems were in a very difficult position. Biden and his inner circle are the ones to blame here. What a historic fuck up!

No one sits on the fence and watches a debate to decide their potus stance anymore, lines are already drawn in the sand at that point. But still they made a move that left many dems feeling disenfranchised having to vote for a candidate that had no primary. And what do you know, trump had more or less the same votes as in past elections while the dems didn’t turn out. I still think they should have stuck it out with joe. At least people voted for him in a primary. His economy was doing well. We emerged from the pandemic under him.

To be clear: I think Biden was a decent president, he just shouldn't have run for a second term. Sticking it out hasn't been an option for the Dems because Biden's mental and physical decline has become obvious by then. His poll results were already desastrous, there was no chance he could have won. If Biden had decided not to run for a second term early on, he would be remembered as the man who defeated Trump. Now he made history as the one who (unwittingly) enabled the second Trump administration. It's a tragedy.

Maybe maybe not. I agree with the other poster they should have stuck it out. The election polled at about even the entire race. There was a small dip after the debate, Kamala got a little bump after she came in, but it all normalized back to 50/50 before the election. Given polarization in America, that was always going to be the case whether it was Biden or Kamala or someone who was chosen through a primary.

I was very confident in Biden's win because in PA where I live, he had very strong support in my community, which is working class white men. Harris lost all that support. My feeling is that Biden would have lost NC, GA, NV, NM, but he would have won PA, MI, and WI, and therefore the election.

I guess we'll never know either way. But one thing we do know is that changing candidates last minute has never worked, and that track record remains undefeated. After Biden decided to stay in, the only wrong move was to replace him.

> Replacing him with Kamala was the stupidest thing the dnc has done in recent years.

Not really. The choice between her and 45 should have been clear as day. She might have not been everybody's first choice, but she was more than qualified, more than competent, especially given the alternative. It shouldn't have even been a question, at all. But with how rampant misinformation is and how rare critical thinking is, here we are.

I think it's absolutely telling (on a number of levels, actually) that the number one Google search on Election Day was "Did Biden drop out?"

I think the neoliberal regime is the exact opposite of the ones capitulating to twitterites. Harris was vice president and in the establishment, they chose to push her instead of making an emergency primary.

> Politics aside, LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this.

Reminds me of the old joke about California's 4 seasons: Earthquake, fire, riots, and drought.

> the previous administration had four years to pass laws and measures based on trump's first four years and they didn't

I don't think anyone anticipated how nutbag crazy things would get and the Dems didn't have the House or Senate to pass these laws anyway. Additionally the SCOTUS ruling made the president a king.