@alignedchaos @mister_monster Republican House blocked what now?
You mean Senator Mitch "whaddya do if another justice needed to be appointed to fill a vacancy in an election year with Trump in office? {giggle to himself} I'd fill it" McConnell somehow used the Democratic held House in '20 to fill RBG's seat with the help of Republican minority?
@SoylentBlake @maniajack direct democracy isn't anywhere close to a panacea and doesn't address the neoliberal mindvirus that you identify as the root cause. Individuals voting on legislation won't be much better than the representative "democracy" we have now, with most of the adult population determining their vote on tribalism not any effort to take a deep dive understanding in the content of the legislation. We'd end up at Idiocracy before fascism but that's a mob of dictators instead of one
@kier @kingludd there's a cultural harm that you're not a real man/'Murican/Christian/conservative/etc if you aren't living a life of the non-cosmopolitan by riding a bike or interested in anything else other than car-dependency and all the ancillary things that come with that, since that starts to bleed into the suburbs and even urban areas. There's white-collar workers doing their morning commute in full-size pickups telling themselves that mass transit is for dirty poor people not therm
@Tak @Pipoca both the US and the UK have fptp single member districts for national legislature, so the expectation would be that in the UK parliament they'd only have Labour and Tories, no 3rd parties representing regional issues, just wings of the duopoply serving that purpose. But the difference isn't derived in that both have FPTP, but that the US has a media environment that propagates binary choices, BBC still strives for viewership but not the extent that US MSM does via oversimplification
@sentient_loom @cabron_offsets Sanders has been put into a trance of feeling "heard" by Biden while being neutered in any chance of delivering real material benefit to the people. His career as being a truth-speaker from outside the elite, he's shot his shot to do some real good and will probably retire next year.
@CrimeDad the low homelessness is due to the highest rate of public housing outside of self-identified socialist countries. The first several decades public housing was primarily for relocated squatters and shanty inhabitants, but since the 1980s they've promoted it for middle class and upper middle class improving the public housing stock.
@CrimeDad @Coreidan I don't believe this, but I will give it a go in trying to steelman this argument.
If landlords and real estate developers see a sector specific decrease in returns then they would decrease the capital in the sector and thus decrease the housing units made available for rent.
This theory ignores the real world where developers opted-out of low-income housing in favor of luxury real estate that either remains vacant or unoccupied while the owner uses it as value storage
@erogenouswarzone similar to product placement, it's not done by production companies because piracy is occurring, it's down regardless of the state of piracy to maximize profits. Labor scarcity goes away when wages reflect the demand and profit maximization is disregarded; movies disregarding profit maximization would then not have product placement and it's not a function of piracy, that's just the scapegoat for things to take place of the profit maximization. Profit motive≠profit maximization
@erogenouswarzone piracy isn't the reason why there's product placement was my point, since it occurred from the start of Public Relations and the practice of earned media and payola. Eliminating piracy wouldn't affect product placement, and claiming so sounds like those ignoramuses who say if minimum wage is increased that jobs would be automated away - min wage has remained the same for over a decade and jobs are being automated anyway, jobs will be eliminated regardless of min wage laws
@dingus @Bipta
Are gen z likely to be uniformly iPhone users?
That's like the most conformist thing that I have ever heard. The study results are that 21%(F) 25%(M) find having an android phone is a green flag in their partner, while 7%(F) 6%(M) have it as a red flag, so it's not that bad as far android/iPhone is concerned.