There is the Labor party, the Democratic Socialists party, now you want to start another one? You need to consolidate people into a single one. Or, more effectively, we could takeover the Democratic Party given the challenges of having a third party in a winner take all system.

I always assumed “Bernie bros” were a way to dismiss Bernie supporters by the mainstream media… as if it’s just bros supporting Bernie because he was a male and Hillary was “her” and therefore true progressives were gonna vote “female.” It’s just made up divisive bs. Obviously, Bernie is and has always been more progressive than Hillary and his type of progressivism addresses the working class, in a way the mainstream Democratic Party does not

Bernie bros were right all along.

Women are better at being friends to each other. I’ve basically given up on trying to make friends with other men because they are terrible friends. At best, they make no effort at all at friendship and are completely passive, requiring you to call and make all the plans. At worst, they are hostile in various ways when you try to befriend them. It is very rare to meet another dude that makes effort to be a friend.

Edit: it’s soooo funny to see this comment being downvoted because it will only perpetuate your loneliness. You deserve it.

Yeah higher wages would be great, but it doesn’t happen because the media loves to rake the government over the coals for such things. But, you know whose salaries don’t get scrutinized? Lobbyists.

You want to pay people enough to be able to resist these influences. Doing the actual work of governing should pay better than lobbying.

We should even pay congresspeople more. They make $174,000/year. But, when you adjust for inflation, that’s a lot less than they used to make.

Yeah — pretty much this. Most people answering phones are interns. They’re given instructions to listen and be non-confrontational. They also won’t tell you what the congressperson’s view on the matter is. Ultimately, they have no power and just try to summarize what you said and put it in a computer program with your address so the office can mail you a letter from the Congressperson about the issue. These letters are generic to the topic you called about and generally try to say nothing controversial.

On rare occasions for really contentious issues, I saw them split the topic buckets into pro and con and send letters for each depending on whether you were for or against the thing you called about.

Mostly, I didn’t get the impression that Congress people pay much attention to phone calls. If the issue is contentious enough to divide the caller pool into pro/con, they might check a tally of the totals in each pool. But, for 99% of topics, they just send you a generic letter.

Also, a lot of these letters are full of bs. Congress people will often propose nice sounding bill names or cosponsor others that they can cite in these letters as evidence that they care. However, 99% of these bills go no where and often the congresspeople don’t even want them to. You’re upset about airplane noise over your city? “Well, I agree, that’s why I cosponsored the airplane noise reduction act.” Meanwhile, if that bill ever picked up steam the airline lobby would crush it and your congressperson would help them.

So, I don’t call my congressperson because I don’t really get the sense that it makes a difference. One thing I did see make a difference though was lobbyists. You see, they live right in Washington DC and rather than call, they schedule meetings with the actual paid staff or congressperson, not interns. They go right in their office and sit down and have a long chat. And, the staff have a big incentive to listen to them.

Most congressional staff are paid peanuts. They try to live off $25-45k/year in an expensive city and have 2 or 3 roommates. Some of them are often overqualified, holding law degrees and masters in their interest areas. So, once they get some experience and burn out of this life of poverty, guess who is happy to scoop them up? Yep, they go running right into the arms of those lobbyists and gladly take that $200k salary to go about fighting insulin price caps or defeating environmental regulations. It doesn’t even matter if they came into Washington, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready to take on these big corporate interests. By the time they’re 3-4 years in, realize they’re sick of eating ramen noodles, and the easiest way out is to call up some of those lobbyists and ask for a job, they do it. Oh you have a masters in agricultural policy with a specialization in organic farming? McDonald’s federal affairs office will hire you. I’ve seen it happen.

I’ll learn it if you pay me $1 million/year

There is a reason though. It’s because you probably want to put dates in order and when you ask a computer to sort things for you, it will automatically order things correctly when the date follows this format. If you put the month first, then the day, then the year, the default sorting behavior will order things incorrectly chronologically speaking.

It’s a good question OP. I think about this too.

Compare this 10 year sentence to the slap on the wrist these January 6 insurrectioners got and tell me that’s justice. Most were given light 3 months sentences.

Ringtail lemur there. Some fun facts: There are around 70 species of lemur. They only exist in Madagascar. The smallest primate on earth is a lemur known as the mouse lemur. At one time, lemurs as large as gorillas walked the earth, however they were hunted to extinction.

They did it once, they could do it again.

Why do people bother with bots? People often say “to farm karma.” But Karma is literally worthless.

Edit: ah yes, downvote the guy asking a question. Who are you miserable people?

Yeah actually, most H1Bs are making more than they could in their home countries and more than most Americans too. Big Tech salaries are upwards of $300k. There is a lot of incentive to stay.

Another point to consider is a very large percentage of H1Bs are Indian and a lot of them support Modi. They also support Trump by extension and believe that Trump only wants to crack down on “illegal” migrants, not them, despite the fact that Trump tried to curb the H1B program during his last term and Biden reversed it.

Your penis will shrink

You own property in the state, or consider it your primary residence, you have income from business or investments in the state.

It really varies state by state.

Certainly, at the presidential level, however I recall Congress having a bunch of “tea party” nut jobs elected that shut down the government over the passage of Obamacare.

I started paying attention in 2000, even though I didn’t really understand it and couldn’t vote, however my first voting election was 2004 and I remember being disappointed when John Kerry lost to Bush, who had already gotten us involved in two wars that would cost trillions of dollars.

My experience has been that Republican administrations tend to be rife with corruption, cut taxes for rich people and run up the deficit.

Eventually, people get sick of the moral decay and tanking economic prospects and put a democrat back in, who tries to undo all the damage, but is blocked most of the time by Republicans in Congress acting in bad faith.

Then, the right wing media environment drums up a load of fear about immigrants and actual lies about the economy to get everyone voting for a Republican again.

That’s the cycle, except the Republican media ecosystem gets more extreme over time, and so do the candidates.

1. Obama backed Hillary very forcefully in 2016 and discouraged all other Democrats from running. This largely worked. Only Bernie was willing to join the race. Biden was sidelined, even though he very much wanted to run in 2016 and was still young enough to do it. Unfortunately, this move meant the Democrats didn’t nominate a candidate that could’ve beat Trump because the options were limited and Obama had his thumb on the scale for Hillary.
2. In 2020, Bernie had widespread appeal and was winning primaries and gaining momentum. Obama phoned up several non-progressives and had them all drop out and give their delegates to Biden, who at this point was showing his age and obviously would’ve been too old for a second term.
3. In 2024, Biden’s age starts to show, but democrats ignore it. Instead, subvert the primary process and push in a “Party Boss Approved” candidate. Obama gives her his rubber stamp. Democrats again lose to Donald Trump.

Some states still require you to file even if you don’t live there, but have ties, and may tax your income.