brenden2

I appreciate anyone who has the courage to do this. I've done it before, and it's definitely hard. Congrats and I wish more people would stand up for themselves and others.

It's always better to receive downvotes and do the right thing, than merely sit by and go along with the hive. Especially when you know in your gut the hive is wrong.

What people say in debates is irrelevant. The only thing that matters are their actions. People keep falling into the trap of listening to the speeches, but ignoring the actual policies, policy implementation details, and the whole bureaucratic side of things. People are hyper focused on the TV version of reality, and completely ignore the day to day humdrum action.

I think part of the problem today is the TV-ification of politics. For example, Trump is obsessed with "ratings" and Twitter likes, rather than actually doing anything meaningful. What's incredibly bizarre is how many other politicians have started copying him by focusing on grandstanding, Twitter likes, and getting more news airtime, rather than actually getting work done.

TIL RealNetworks still exists.

Wealth of Nations is such a good book, I implore everyone to read it. I think a lot of people misunderstand what Adam Smith was about, and it's good to go back to the early ideas of what capitalism was meant to be, and how far we have diverged from it.

I just checked and my actual words were "basically changed nothing", which to me means "made some changes, but they were inadequate".

I appreciate your passion, but Obama still didn't follow through with his promises, and whatever change he enacted wasn't enough.

Police accountability, inequality, corporate welfare, domestic surveillance, ... the list goes on.

Just FYI, I was agreeing with the parent (and I agree with you). QE is free money for rich people, and a big slap in the face to the poor.

This is great, thanks for sharing.

I would like to point out that it's still cherry picking, and ignores the cases where Democrats voted against sensible legislation. They supported the Patriot Act for example, and recently supported bailouts for large companies that didn't need free money from the government but still got it, all while keeping it difficult for people to access unemployment benefits.

And yet the gulag is still there. It's a binary thing: either he closed it or he didn't. Clearly he did not.

You can go through the voting records an various bills and see how they voted, it's all public data. I challenge you to do it one day, and you can see the difference between what they say in their speeches and what they actually do policy wise.

You can also cross that data with polling from the respective senators or representatives on individual policies and see how they line up. You can see quickly that they do not represent their constituents if you take the time to do it (I've done it myself).

The Federal Reserve injected trillions of free money into the markets, so naturally they went up.

So what, we're supposed to wait 100 years for sensible policy? What are you advocating? Why can't we fix things now?

Instead of apologizing, I think people need to understand the system doesn't work. It is fundamentally broken, just like the police.

Why don't cops go to jail for breaking the law? Because they are the ones who investigate themselves for their crimes. It's the same with politicians: they make the rules and write the laws for themselves. They go on TV and say things they think people want to hear, but when it comes to action they don't follow through.

Politicians are glorified TV personalities and aren't actually held accountable to their supposed policies. They wage a war of disinformation against citizens to get votes, and then engage in gerrymandering to make sure they stay elected.

This is exactly right. At the end of the day they only answer to the people who write the biggest cheques and pay for the fanciest dinners and vacations they get to enjoy.

What you're saying only serves to support the argument that the tracking is wrong in the first place, IMO. Google doesn't have a right to follow everyone around the web and flex their muscle just because they can. Since they have a monopoly and nobody is even close to challenging them, someone needs to step in and regulate them.

And now the DEA has been mobilized against citizens to quell protests and criminalize dissent. The DEA is now the Gestapo.

What Google is doing is wrong. That's literally what the lawsuit is about.

They didn't have helicopters, underground bunkers, and air force one.

For someone in desperation all I hear is further reason to riot and loot. Nobody cares about these people, and politicians keep going on TV saying how they're going to put everyone in jail or shoot them.

If you don't run a viable business, should your business continue to exist? Which one do you want, socialism or capitalism? In a capitalist system, failed businesses are allowed to fail and don't get free money from the government.

Assuming they had to pay the full amount, sure, it might make a dent, but it's also a one time event. It amounts to losing ~11 days of revenue, less than 2 weeks.

The pandemic demonstrated that luxury retail is non-essential (you can still buy your Gucci bags online). When luxury retail was closed the world did not fall apart. Nobody is protesting because they can't shop at the Apple store.

That may be true, but as someone who has been actually poor before, and have also known many people who were born into money, I don't think rich people really understand what it means to be poor, hopeless, and also discriminated against.

These are mostly big chains, I think they'll be okay.

It hurts insurance companies, but it's great for anyone who fixes or repairs windows.

Agreed, I (unfortunately) know many of these people. They simply don't understand the problem, and do not want to empathize with "the other side".

It's worth trying to help others understand why people are angry. People need real help, police need to be held accountable, and we can't just keep shoveling cash into the pockets of the rich.

Indeed, peaceful protests are good for the status quo because they're easy to ignore. They want you to sit down and be quiet so they can ignore you. Once you start to inconvenience rich people, or god forbid cause the stock market to go down, real change will begin to happen.

Someone commented and deleted, but in response I'll leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNfqr-rzj5I

It's an interview with Cornel West. You may not agree with his political philosophy, but he "gets it" with regard to the current social unrest. If you want to understand what's happening, you should try to empathize with what he's talking about.

I think this plays into the current social unrest as well. People have been trying to separate the looters and protestors, but they seem to completely ignore the extreme inequality that exists throughout the US, especially in this period of high unemployment.

People at the bottom have it bad, very bad. Being ignorant of that problem is just going to make it worse. Lashing out at fancy retailers in fancy neighbourhoods makes a lot of sense as a way of sending a message to rich people, whether you like it or not.