uboat53

[uboat53]

if you wanted Democrats out of power: congratulations.

Now, having gotten your wish, you have NO right to complain to me about him for the next 4 years.

This is a bare minimum courtesy. I am not going to indulge anyone’s little hypocrisies, and I will be ending friendships over this.

[uboat53]

Numbers time? If you're basing your idea of budgeting on something you learned in the 1980s or the 1950s, then it's going to be almost completely wrong for the present day. I point this out because a lot of older people's advice is based on how things worked when they were young and the example their parents set. It's important to realize that a lot of this no longer really applies to what things cost now. Let's look at some specifics.

INCOME

Before we get into costs, let's talk about income. After all, if your costs double but your income triples, you're still ahead while if your costs go down 10% and your income gets cut in half, you're still in terrible shape even though things are cheaper.

Average yearly wages in inflation adjusted terms are up about 30% from 1958 or about 60% from 1950 (man, people got a lot richer over the course of the 50s…) which is when most older people today were growing up and when their parents were setting themselves up. If you start your baseline from 1985, when many older people today were starting careers and families and buying homes, average incomes are up about 35%. Those are going to be our baselines going forward, keep those in mind as we look at costs.

HOUSING

Housing is the single largest purchase most people will make and it will probably define your financial life. Now, before you can buy a house, you'll need a down payment which you'll need to save up while renting a place in the meantime. So it seems relevant that rents have gone up about 140% since 1950. That said, they're only up about 5% in inflation adjusted terms since 1985, so if your baseline is the young adulthood of the Baby Boomers, then your perspective is actually okay as far as rent goes.

Once you're set to buy a house, though, things are different. The average house is twice as expensive in inflation adjusted terms as it was in 1950s and 75% more expensive than it was in 1985. This is about twice as much as the respective 60% and 35% increases in incomes. Rent may be comparable to the 80s, but buying a house is much, much more expensive.

COLLEGE

College didn't used to be an important factor, only about 5% of the Baby Boom generation went to college, but these days over 1/3 of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are going and that number is only rising, so it's an important thing to look at. I should note that my data for 1985 and for 2020 are both for public colleges while my 1953 data is for all colleges, so keep that in mind as we go.

In inflation adjusted terms, college is about 60% more expensive than it was in 1950, which about matches the increase in average income, but it's 150% more expensive than it was in 1985! That's important remember, because our 1985 number is for public colleges while the 1950 number is for all colleges. In other words, public college today is closer to the cost of private universities in the 1950s than it is to what public colleges cost in the 1980s.

Not only are more people going to college, college is a lot more expensive than when most members of the Baby Boom generation or their parents went.

MEDICAL CARE

Medical care is a tough one because it's really random. Lots of people need basically no medical care while other people need a lot just to live a somewhat normal life. That said, anyone, no matter how healthy they are, is at risk of spending a night in the hospital due to a random accident, so we're going to use the cost of a hospital stay as a proxy for health care costs generally.

The average hospital stay today costs about 12 times more than it did in 1955 and almost 6 times more than it did in 1980. As I said, this is going to be a stochastic cost, but it's clear to see that it is much, much, much easier to get knocked off of your financial path by a freak health scare today than it was in the fairly recent past. In fact, of all the costs I looked at, health care costs increased by the most and it's not even close.

TRANSPORTATION

Let's face it, we're a car country, so let's look at the cost of a new car and the cost of gas. Gas has been fairly flat. There's been periods of ups and downs, but the average price of gas is only about 25% more than it was in 1950 and it's almost exactly the same as it was in 1985. Once you factor in the rise in incomes, it's actually cheaper to get around today than it was in the past.

Of course, you actually have to have a car to get around in first. In this case, though, the price of new cars has gone up only about 70% from 1953 or about 35% from 1985. This is in line with the increases in incomes, so it's fair to say that affording a new car is about as easy as it was when the Baby Boomers were growing up and coming into their own.

FOOD

Of course, everyone needs to eat, so let's look at food next. Overall, food costs are slightly down since the 1950s, about 4% overall. Some specific items like milk are down a lot, over 60% since the 1950s, though up about 24% since 1985, while other items like bread have been basically flat over that whole time.

Overall, I think it's fair to say that the cost of food has been about flat while we've seen a significant rise in income, so it's definitely easier for the average American to feed themselves than it was not too long ago.

THE FUN STUFF

Finally, let's look at the cost of the things we do with our leisure time. This is an important category not just because it's important to have time to rest, relax, and have fun in order to lead a healthy life, but also because, if you're saving up for something big, this is the easiest place to cut a bit.

Now, what we do with our leisure time has changed a lot, but one thing that hasn't changed since the 50s is that we still watch TV, so I'm going to use the cost of an entry level TV set as a baseline for this category. Since 1950, the cost of an average TV set is down over 80% and it's down over 65% since 1985. In other words, especially after factoring in the rise in incomes, it's gotten a LOT cheaper for the average American to be able to entertain themselves.

WHAT THIS ACTUALLY MEANS

Look, a lot of the advice that we give to other people is based on what we did. It's the natural way to do things and it's perfectly reasonable in most cases. Unfortunately, the costs of both important and trivial things has changed so much in the last 40 to 70 years, that most of the advice that older people can give isn't actually relevant to the world that younger people live in today.

The fact is that the big necessities, housing and medical care, are way more expensive than they were when most of our older family members were young. Rent is up a little bit or a lot depending on where your baseline is, the cost of buying a house is way up no matter where your baseline is, and medical care is so expensive it's not even in the same league as what it used to be. These days we've also added a new necessity, college, and the cost of that necessity has skyrocketed as well.

The small necessities are doing okay, transportation and food are about the same price as they were in previous generations which means they make up a smaller percentage of our income. Unfortunately, any gains in this category have been completely sucked up by the increased cost of the big necessities and the fact that these smaller necessities make up a smaller amount of our income means there's less room to save by cutting back a little bit.

Finally, non-necessities are cheaper than they've ever been, a lot cheaper. Again, any gain in these has been sucked up by the increased cost of the big necessities and the fact that they consume a much smaller portion of our income means, as before, there's less room to save by cutting back.

THE BOTTOM LINE

People who bought the big necessities of life in the 1980s or who are basing their advice on their parent's experience of doing it in the 1950s were able to save up a lot of money fairly quickly by cutting back a little bit on the niceties of life for a relatively short time. Today, the niceties are a lot cheaper and the big necessities are a lot more expensive, which means that cutting back on niceties doesn't get you a lot of significant progress toward being able to afford the important things.

If your advice for young people to afford big things like houses or college educations is just to cut back on entertainment or to make cheaper meals, then your advice is badly out of date to the financial reality that most young people face today. Most of their money now goes to things they can't really cut back on and the things they need to save for have doubled in price, making saving up a nearly impossible mountain.

This is, in my experience, the biggest generational disconnect today. Older people do not understand why young people are having such a hard time affording important things and they see them with lots of unimportant things and think they're lazy or spendthrift while young people are increasingly losing respect for old people who say things that are completely out of touch with the reality that they live which only makes the older people even more convinced that there's something wrong with the kids who aren't showing proper respect to their elders.

If you're one of the younger people here, recognize what's going on. The older people aren't delusional, their information is out of date. Most of them genuinely do want to help you, they're just bad at it. If they're not someone close to you, just smile, nod, say "thank you", and move on. If they are someone close to you, let them in. They're working on outdated information, so give them accurate information. Sure the advice they give you based on the prices of the 1950s and 1980s is completely out of touch with reality, but that doesn't mean they won't have good advice if you update them with current costs and incomes. At least give them a chance and you might even get some help out of it.

If you're one of the older people here, recognize that what worked for you when you were young doesn't work now. The world has changed and not always for the better, before you give advice, make sure that you actually know what you're talking about. Your wisdom and experience can still make you a useful resource to young people, but only if you keep up with the times. Your advice on how to fix a 1967 Ford Mustang isn't that relevant to modern cars and your advice on how to buy a house in 1982 isn't going to help much today. I understand that the amount of change that's happened has been unsettling and even scary and you may even be worried that you don't have anything to contribute to the modern world, but if you show a little compassion and humility and listen to young people talk about the situation that they're in today, you'll likely find that you have lots of good advice to give, it just isn't the same advice you were going to give before.

[uboat53]

I think it's time to admit the obvious, the Anti-Defamation League has ceased to be a pro-Jewish and anti-antiSemitism organization and has instead become a full blown pro-Zionist organization.

What do I mean by that? Well, it's pretty simple. A pro-Jewish organization that fights against anti-Semitism here in the US would immediately recognize a "sieg heil" salute, be horrified, call it out, and bring its weight to bear against such things. A pro-Zionist organization on the other hand… Elon Musk is allied with Donald Trump who has been unabashedly in favor of the aggressive moves of the Israeli right-wing government. Covering up for his blatant anti-Semitism keeps goodwill in an alliance that benefits Netanyahu and his allies.

Guess which one of these things the ADL did this week.

Needless to say, as an American Jew, I have no more faith in the ADL with its current leadership to actually protect my rights, freedoms, and person. It's time to either change it or get rid of it.

[uboat53]

As he takes office, it can feel like Trump’s movement has the cultural and political upper hand. Republicans won the popular vote in both the presidential and congressional races. Trump’s popularity has never been higher. Broligarchs, celebrities, and big business are lining up behind him. But another way of looking at it is that Trump’s popularity is probably at its peak — and modern presidents tend to start off their terms with high support before the public gets disillusioned. He did, after all, barely win the election. Republicans only control Congress by tiny majorities. And most of his high-profile policy proposals aren’t as popular as he claims. Most of the American public isn’t outright rejecting everything Trump is offering (at least, not yet). On at least three different issues, Trump’s position is significantly popular. But there’s a difference between what the public supports and the mandate Trump claims.

Source

[uboat53]

Hey look, the richest man in the world just gave a Nazi salute at the inauguration of a US president. Not feeling the need to keep things under wraps anymore, I see.

[uboat53]

This is an open letter to rural Americans, if that's you or someone you know, read on. Fair warning, though, this is the kind of no-nonsense straight talk that you pride yourself in and won't be easy for you to hear.

Look, I hear your complaints about gay and transgender people and I hear your concerns about kids identifying as strange things like nonbinary. I even hear your, admittedly strange and not well supported, complaints about kids identifying as animals.

I know what you're worried about, you're worried about things changing around you, and you're right to be. The last half century or more has been absolutely devastating to people like you and communities like yours. I don't even need to know where you live, just about every rural town and rural county has seen their population cut in half since the end of the Second World War and the economy has suffered for that.

Farming and ranching, the cornerstones of the rural economy, have gotten harder. You've been squeezed by your suppliers and your customers to the point where it's difficult to make ends meet, much less a profit. Kids don't see a future in your community and they leave for somewhere else which only makes it harder for the ones who decide to stay and people increasingly turn to drugs and suicide because they don't see any other way.

Thirty years ago there was a hospital in easy reach, then it closed and the nearest one is now hours away. That means that things that didn't used to be fatal now kill people in your community, things that didn't used to be damaging now maim them because they just can't get to the doctor fast enough. And even if they're not suffering heart attacks, being bitten by animals, or being injured on the job or out in the country, the stress is building up day by day. It gnaws at the back of your mind, making it hard to focus on the things you need to do, and the adrenaline is slowly eating your body alive.

Fifty years ago you could have sold your farm to a young farmer in your old age and retired, now you're stuck working until you die because there's no one to pass your legacy on to and, when you do die, your land will get swallowed up by a huge factory farm that won't bring jobs or contribute to your community. Change has been terrible for you and I don't think you're insane for wanting it to stop.

But here's the thing, you're focusing on the wrong change. It's not your fault either, the people you trusted have betrayed you. Hear me out, because this is going to hurt, but you need to hear it.

What do the politicians in your area tell you? They tell you that you're tough, independent, no-nonsense people, right? You're not one to complain when life get's hard, not like those pampered city folk? They say that they're one of you, don't they? That they're just farmers and ranchers and they know you like those outsiders never could, am I still right? I know because that's what the politicians where I grew up used to say. Still do actually.

You need to look at them, though. The average Congressman or State Representative is a millionaire and your guys are no exceptions. They're not poor farmers breaking their backs trying to make ends meet, they're the owners of big businesses milking federal and state subsidies while putting on the theater that they actually have to go dig fence posts and clear brush instead of the reality that they have people to do that kind of thing for them when they're not trying to impress you.

And when they go to the state house or the capital, they're not advocating for you. They're taking millions of dollars from your suppliers and your distributors and making sure that their interests are heard. And you may say "oh, well that's fine, representing the agriculture industry is representing me too," but is it really? Let me ask you this; the agriculture business in the US is worth $1.5 trillion according to the USDA, how much of that are farming and ranching communities actually seeing?

If even 10% of that money was making it to rural communities it would revitalize the country. Can you imagine what $150 billion would do for all the rural towns and communities across this country? Agribusiness is doing fine, but you aren't. Stop to think about that for a minute.

The reason the politicians sell you the idea of tough independence is that they don't want you to notice how dependent you are on the outside world. That's not a bad thing, by the way, we live in a modern, interconnected world that can provide things our parents and grandparents couldn't have dreamed of. You've benefited from it too, from better technologies to increase yields and greater access to more customers all around the world.

What you haven't benefited from is the middle men. Remember when I talked about your suppliers and distributors squeezing you? Yeah, your suppliers don't actually make the things you buy and the distributors don't actually use the things you sell. These people stand between you and the people who actually do those things and take whatever money they can along the way.

And if there were lots of suppliers and lots of distributors that would be fine. You live far away from factories and cities, you need someone to bring things to you and take what you produce to your customers, and it's reasonable that those people make money too. But how many suppliers do you have? How many distributors? Like I said, I don't even need to know where you are to know that it's less than 5, probably less than 3, because it's like that everywhere.

Every business you buy from knows they have no competition, so they jack up their prices as high as they can while still making a sale and every business you sell to knows you have no other options so they offer you the lowest price they can, and both of them are pocketing the difference. When you wonder what happened to your communities and your downtowns, think about how everyone but you is making a decent amount of money off of agriculture in this country.

So yes, you're tough and you're independent, but you're still a part of the world economy. You still buy things that come from somewhere else and you sell things that go somewhere else and somewhere in the middle of that you need to make money. And the people you keep electing, the ones who tell you they're just like you and that you're tough and independent and no-nonsense, they're taking a ton of money from the people who actually are making it in order to make sure that nothing changes and nothing gets better.

At the end of the day, it's not gay people or trans people or atheists or immigrants or even furries that are destroying your communities and your livelihoods, it's the people who smile and tell you they're one of you. They're the ones making sure that your money goes to them instead of to the new field equipment that could help you expand your operation, they're the ones making sure that you don't make enough to rent another field and hopefully put in some extra crop next season, and they're the ones making sure that none of that money that comes from what you produce stays in your community where it could build wealth and income for the people who actually live there.

At this point you may be wondering whether I think you're a fool or an idiot. After all, I just described you getting taken for a ride by the people you trusted for most of your life. It sounds like I'm just another city person who thinks that anyone without a PhD is a moron who needs to be told what to do every minute of every day so they don't drown in the shower because they're that stupid.

But here's the thing, I don't think you're a fool or an idiot, far from it. I think you're proud.

You're proud of who you are and where you come from and there's a lot of good in that, but there's a reason the good book lists pride as one of the seven deadly sins.

Long ago you and your distributors and suppliers used to work hand in hand to produce more food and get it in the hands of hungry people. You got to know each other and trust each other, working together to make this country one of the most agriculturally productive on Earth. But sometime during the Cold War, things changed. The local distributors and suppliers you used to work with got bought out by big corporations. They kept the local faces they knew you trusted, but they had no real interest in you or your community and they used that trust to pull the rug out from under you.

It's decades later now and the results are undeniable. Whole towns depopulated, main streets crumbling, young people moving away, and necessary services like hospitals unable to make enough to stay open, but you still refuse to look the truth in the face because doing so would mean admitting that you've been had, and you're too proud for that. So instead you vote for politicians who pretend to be like you and tell you comforting slogans while selling you out and you blame people who had nothing to do with it, all because you're too proud.

Because the people destroying your community don't have purple hair or piercings. They don't want to use the wrong bathroom or lust after their own sex or deny God. Heck, they don't even wear fursuits and use litter boxes instead of toilets. The people destroying your community wear ties and suits. They keep their hair neat and trimmed and they don't decorate their bodies with tattoos or piercings. When they do actually come to your community, they trade the suit and tie for working clothes, but they're so clean it's clear they've never been used. They look like they fit in, but they don't, they may have owned a farm, but they've never actually had to work one before. They were born into wealth, not labor, and they're the ones paying millions to the people you elect.

They've told you for years that they're one of you, just more workers in the field of agriculture that you work in too, but they're not remotely the same. They're the ones that sit in offices and crunch numbers, they hire people like you and illegal immigrants for the real work. They've been doing this for as long as most people can remember, telling you that they're part of your community while sucking it dry.

If you're going to save your community and your way of life, you're going to need to overcome your pride. Look into the faces of your children, walk around your community, talk with God; do whatever you need to, but you need to realize that right now your pride is the biggest obstacle to saving everything you value. Pride in your home and community is one of the greatest things on Earth, but right now what your home and community need isn't your pride, it's your humility. You're going to need to dig deep and find that within yourself. Find the part of yourself that would give anything, even your life, to protect your family, and prepare for something that, for some of you, might be even harder.

Now, once you're in the right frame of mind, take a hard look at the questions I asked you earlier. You know the ones, the ones about how many distributors there are that you can actually sell to and how many suppliers you can actually buy from. You knew the answers to those, didn't you? Now I want you to look at the actions of the people you vote for. Not their words, their actions. Have they ever voted for anything that would give you more leverage to demand higher prices? Have they ever voted for anything that would give you more options and lower the price of the things you buy? I'm betting the answer is "no".

They'll tell you that they don't want to interfere in the free market, and fair enough, but look at what they do vote for. How many of those things give money to the big companies you buy from and sell to? How many times have they looked the other way at those companies hiring illegal immigrants while they tell you how much they're doing about the problem? Again, I don't need to know where in the country you live, I know the answers to those questions because they're all the same.

The truth is that they've been using your pride against you, the people you elect and the companies you do business with. Like a magician who keeps you watching his right hand while his left keeps pulling rabbits, they've kept you angry at a parade of things all while they pick your pocket year after year after year and, if you let them keep doing it, soon there won't be anything left.

So what can you do? Well, you remember those city folk? The ones with purple hair, piercings, tattoos, and transgender surgeries? The ones who celebrate gay people and reject God? The ones who don't know a hard days' work like you do? They're starting to feel what you've been feeling. The big companies they work for and buy from have started sucking their communities dry too and they've been noticing. You're never going to agree with them on values, but you're in the same fight now. The threat is growing and either both of your communities are going to survive or neither one is.

Remember what I said about putting aside your pride? This is going to be the hardest part of it, you're going to need to practice your humility. You're going to need to look past what your politicians say about immigrants and gay people and start looking at what they're promising to do for your business. Not more subsidies for farms, more handouts, real action to level the playing field so that you can sell your crops and livestock and buy your equipment at a fair price, and they're going to need to work with the people from that other community to do it because your community alone doesn't have the power to break up the big businesses that are dominating everything now.

The truth is that big companies haven't just gotten powerful by working the economy, they've gotten powerful by taking over the government and tilting the field in their favor. So many of the people you vote for are in their pocket that it's going to be hard for you to find someone who's not and, when you do find them, it's going to be hard for them to get their message out to people because the guy who does what the big companies want is going to have a lot more money to swamp your radio and TV stations with ads and to buy every billboard in the county.

But if you want to stop the slow death of your community, you're going to need to do something, because what you're doing now isn't working. It's going to take the hard work that you know how to do and the type of community spirit that you've built, but it's also going to take a lot more humility than you've had to show in your life. If you can do it, there's a chance you can reverse the decline and rebuild your community. If you can't, then the way of life that you know and love may become as much a part of the past as the flintlock and the tricorner hat; a symbol of the intrepid spirit that built this country that fell behind the times and only exists now in museums.

[uboat53]

Trump is unleashing a barrage of executive orders, but is anyone else noticing the weakness behind this? It's shock and awe to hide his Achilles Heel.

Look, executive orders can bring about major change and make lots of people's lives miserable, but they're not lasting. In four more years there will be another president and that president can undo anything and everything Trump has done. Law is lasting, law is what continues into the future.

Notice that Trump isn't really proposing any laws? Even his border and tax proposals, the only ones he's proposed and the only ones that have any kind of broad support among Republicans, are in total disarray. Maybe a cleverer president could shepherd them through, but not Trump.

He's using executive orders, as flashy and outlandish as possible, to make himself feel strong and distract from the fact that he's likely to have one most fundamentally weak presidencies in American history.

[uboat53]

And this is exactly why they hate fact checking.

[uboat53]

Reminder for when he “saves” it. He was the one who wanted this, and now he gets to be the hero and win favour with young constituents. Don’t give him the credit for fixing his own problem.

[uboat53]

playing with people’s incomes for a political stunt

[uboat53]

It would be great if the success of the "500 cigarettes" memes gets people interested in The Orville and gets the show renewed for season 4 and beyond.

Anyway you should watch The Orville, it's a great show. It's not just a Star Trek parody. It's a genuine homage with great storylines in addition to having more humor.

[uboat53]

I mean, Ezra's defining trait in Rebels is finding mentors and learning from a wide range of people while Thrawn's defining trait in the books (and, to a lesser extent, in Rebels) is finding talented people and mentoring them. It's genuinely absurd to me sometimes that they chose not to have these two specific characters not cooperate when stranded with virtually no hope of returning.

always funny when people on here have the "ezra would NEVER cooperate with thrawn!!!" discourse because every - and i mean every - argument misses the point that one of the most common narrative tropes in star wars stories is "unlikely allies". a lot of the ~meat~ of star wars is people from opposing sides finding ways to recruit each other for their respective causes. saying that it "wouldn't make sense" is ignoring like, a good chunk of the most interesting and intriguing stories told in this franchise.

[uboat53]

Some friends of mine came up with a description for a guy at one of their workplaces who claimed to be a cynic and believed just about every conspiracy theory. We always said he'd believe anything as long as it didn't come from a reputable source.

These people aren't actually cynical, they're actually gullible marks for any huckster.

I think that one of the things that scares me the most is how gullible the average person seems when presented with transparently false ideas. Even people who consider themselves cynics!

[uboat53]

I mean, I generally consider myself a utilitarian and the idea that it wouldn't account for the value of stability is totally foreign to me.

Maybe there's been a shift, but the John Stuart Mills version of utilitarianism basically posits that any experience has value that can be determined by a person who has experienced it. In comparing the relative value of two experiences, a person who has experienced both is fully qualified to say than a person who has only experienced one.

In other words, nothing in there would devalue something intangible like stability; the philosophy is explicity designed to value things like that.

I feel like the anon is misusing the word "utilitarian" because they seem to think that is a system that only values things based on some kind of cold, economic value which sounds a lot more like modern capitalism than actual utilitarianism.

I think it's a utilitarian rather than libertarian being presented there, not that people are stupid for wanting a stable livelihood, but that they're stupid for not embracing technological or systemic change that will make things Better. With the corollary that if they don't think things have gotten Better for them, it's only because they're too stupid to realize it.

This is why I'm not a utilitarian. *Individual people* tend to value stability very, very much, whereas the market... Basically in some sense doesn't value it at all, or at the very least it assigns stability a low value.

Instability is in some sense an indication of market efficiency, right? That factory in China can make the same stuff at half the cost of the factory you work in, so, you know, clear out your locker, pal.

This is part of the alienation of work; your factory job is of value to you solely as a paycheck, and any sense that it would or should continue into the future as part of a community kind of makes you, well, kind of a sucker.

It isn't part of building something good, it is purely a mercenary relationship that also occupies most of your time.

[uboat53]

I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

[uboat53]

The vast majority of studies from all over the world, from people living under every possible political environment, funded from every imaginable source including no funds at all (unpaid, out of pocket, independent) or even at odds with one another in every way other way agree that man-made pollution drives undesirable climate change.

A tiny minority of studies claim otherwise and are all openly funded by oil companies. Absolutely anybody with the slightest modicum of sense regardless of their personal politics should be able to look at this fact and immediately know which stance is an unbiased conclusion from observable data and which one is actually paid for by someone with an agenda. How can anyone possible be so FUCKING braindead goddamned stupid to think the existence of (anthropogenic) climate change is the one that's a big global propaganda hoax. Literally the most powerful trillionaire entities on earth want climate change to not be true and even with all their money and might they could only afford to pay for a pathetic little handful of bullshit papers.

Every part of this should be conclusive proof to every single person in the world that the majority scientific consensus on this is the truthful side. It's no fucking contest.

[uboat53]

Hey so I still see people utterly baffled by how religious fundies (still a majority in America and moreso its senate) react on certain issues so uhhh is it actually not common knowledge what the antichrist is all about? You guys know his defining characteristic is ending war, right? That he’s foretold to unite the world under his leadership by preaching global peace and solving basically every single problem in the world? So you know when you try to talk to these people about equality and togetherness they literally believe that’s what makes you an agent of the devil right???