People listing people like Trump or Mitch McConnell might want to check their privilege. Actual mass murderers like Putin still walk free.

Had a coworker who used MMDDYY with no dashes. Unless you knew it was very hard to figure out, since it could also just be a number that happened to be 6 digits, too. At least YYYY-MM-DD looks like a date generally.

It wasn’t the giving money, it was the fast tracking in terms of regulations. Many people in Trump’s position would not have done that and would have waited the expected 18 months instead of the 11 that it actually took. Some in the industry were concerned as it was happening. Plenty of other countries dragged their feet in the approval process more than the US did.

Trump wasn’t single handedly responsible for the approvals. Far from it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t know much of the details. But it still seems he was pushing for it where other people wouldn’t have. I’m not sure Biden would have. Trump likes to play fast and loose where Biden is a bit stuffier.

Basically I think my vote matters even if it doesn’t matter, so I vote for people I actually want. Lol. If there was a race where I had a strong preference between the two main party candidates and I thought my vote would have an impact, I’d ditch the third party for that race.

If your bit was sarcasm, then that makes more sense. Trump was not particularly good on Covid, but we would have had a big problem regardless of who was president at the time.

With Trump him sitting in meetings still doesn’t mean he’s heard of it. Lol.

Anyway, I’m just saying Heritage is the mastermind, not Trump.

Every country got Covid, basically. You know that, right?

I’ll be honest, unless you were in a special circumstance, that sounds like a you problem not a Trump problem. I didn’t and wouldn’t vote for him, but for most people he did not affect their day to day that much. 2020 was the peak of actual influence on daily life, but I don’t think that had as much to do with Trump as people imply, either. The whole world got Covid. The US had a bit more deaths per capita than the rest of the developed world (less than UK) but it also has a less healthy population in general.

I think we all sort of trained each other to fixate on the president and be anxious if they’re not on our team.

Every vote matters. That’s why I vote third party. Lol

If you’re in a state that goes consistently one way or the other, it’s probably true that it doesn’t matter. For president, at least.

I often vote third party, and I feel very comfortable doing that because my state is very consistent.

They’re assuming (probably correctly) that a lot of people under 28 won’t vote, and that (probably less correctly) they’d vote Democrat if they did vote. So if Trump wins and they pass a random 28 year old on the street, they’re thinking there’s a good chance that person is partially responsible for Trump’s win.

So retail workers can’t vote because they work weekends? You’re gonna screw someone over regardless of what day you pick.

In my state we have a minimum of two weeks of early voting including some weekend hours. I’d support some increases, but it’s actually not that hard to vote if you just try.

There are several different groups supporting him for different reasons. The biggest, I’d argue, is the slightly right very populist. They’re not into fascism per se, they just want a wrecking ball like Trump to go in and break apart the elite institutions they blame for all the problems and see no other way of influencing. There certainly are supporters who are encroaching on fascism territory. Then there’s long time Republicans who have flipped on a bunch of issues to try to get support from these people Trump activated.

At least he did Operation Warpspeed. Funny that some of his supporters turned on him for that.

In fairness, it’s not Trump’s plan, either, it’s Heritage’s. They’re doing it for Trump, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Trump has never even heard of it. Lol

Don’t be silly. There were lots of waves of migrants before European settlers of America. They’d be more than the 2nd wave. 😉

Everyone went from feudal backwater to something else in that era. The US was poorer than Argentina per capita. That’s not really saying that much. It’s also not saying that much because of course if you have a strong central authority you can divert resources from more valuable production toward national pride vanity projects like a space travel. What really matters is how productive your economy is, how much it can produce for its society, and on that front the US defeated the Soviet Union soundly.

I have nothing against a space program, I just don’t see that as a very strong indicator of the success of a society.

Sure, different ones have different levels of dictorshipness. To be clear, democratic and authoritarian are not opposites at all. Chattel slavery in the US was extremely authoritarian and awful, yet it was democratic. Abolition was a minority viewpoint until around the time of the Civil War.

That’s the cartoon version of capitalism just like how “socialism is when the government does something” is the cartoon version of socialism. Capitalism just means that the means of production in a society are owned and controlled by private owners instead of by workers or the government as a proxy for workers. It says nothing about whether people are compelled to be greedy or anti-sharing or something.

Sometimes corporations get bigger, sometimes they get toppled by new competitors. A lot of them that we think of as unstoppable are barely hanging on by a thread. Twitter/X and Facebook are examples that come to mind. People don’t realize how much power they as consumers have.