That there is no tried and true fix for. The US is an old Democracy with a massive cultural complex around not changing anything a founding father sneezed on. There’s some weird exploits in the 9th and 10th Amendments that could potentially cause a massive melt down if a sitting government decided to ever try and use them but it is just theoretical and anti-originalist so it’s unlikely.

I look at the US government being in a death spiral as a separate but related problem. If your air conditioning isn’t working and your engine is busted, the air conditioner isn’t really your first priority.

Basically pass something through government channels to wrest the service from the hands of individualized businesses wearing the skins of hospitals and the business complex of health insurance… Like every other nation who has a social system did at some point in the past.

It’s kind of easy to forget but like sanitation, fire service, post, police services, hospitals, secular school systems … Those were all exclusively the domain of for profit businesses once. Just because something currently lines someone’s private pockets doesn’t mean that makes it untouchable. It has all been done before. Just wiping out the third party insurance companies alone and socializing the insurance would probably do wonders.

I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.

As a non-binary trans person I gotta say that lines up. A lot of women are not well equipped to intuit men’s emotions as they are set behind a veneer of distance and a lot of men often aren’t able to apply appropriate empathy to women because they don’t afford them the same level of respect and attention as people who have that same veneer. So women get coded to men as over emotional and men often feel angry and isolated because women aren’t trying particularly hard to empathize and there is a lot of times when their feelings are dismissed as not as important. Then everything becomes extra strained when anxieties about heterosexual extra partner sexual liasons means one gets separated from a general population into strictly people whom your partner feels you may safe being around.

I am very lucky. I exist in an excellent personal community. The cis folk I am friends with are all friends across any concept of gender and there’s other trans folk in my cohort which create additional inroads to understanding different experiences. We also don’t specifically gender anything, nobody is ever teased for not living up to gendered expectations and discussions are frank and open. I only experience this anxious distance between the genders in groups of co-workers or at family functions.

Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren’t generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

It’s just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren’t somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we’re well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch… But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies… chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something “only you are smart enough to believe” - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.

You are unlikely to if you aren’t in Canada. It seems like Indigenous folk down in the States don’t have quite as much success spreading widespread awareness. I produced some stuff and had to explain to a bunch of Americans what a land acknowledgement was. For the past 5 years where I am they are performed before any meeting or performance. Up here 2S gets top billing at the beginning of the LGBTQIA initnialism to give deference to gender categories that were suppressed by European supremacist colonization.

At the same time Stonehenge has some delicate evidence of ancient painted designs that requires special imaging equipment to detect that may have been wiped out bu this. There’s a reason why they tend to keep people at a distance from the thing.

I dun want teh tame em whippersnapper, I want to hurry em on to the cardiac infarction they deserve consarn it!!! They gots brittle hearts see…

Yup. Bonkers.

It’s bonkers that you have to actively sign up for it. Canada had conscription on the books as an available tool but like… you never actively signed on or were penalized for not doing that paperwork. In 2021 they ended all mandatory military service and two months ago they removed conscription entirely. Not that it’s possible for conscription to not come back as technically it’s not actively banned, but if it did it would have to be written and implemented as law entirely from scratch and be re subject to the full process of new constitutional challenge and could now be subject to gender discriminations to strictly men as required by current civil rights .

There’s something about coercing someone to sign their name to paper to register for conscription that feels wrong to me that just accepting a call to conscription doesn’t. Like they want to reduce your resistance to it by making it “voluntary”.

So like… Foe-Fiction?

I believe this is the famed Catch 22. The only proven way out is escaping to Sweden.

M

Democrats are bad at marketing because a lot of them come from the school of political jousting. It’s easy to lose touch with what the regular person believes politics is rather than the reality of the system where you can’t make solid promises because things can go very wrong and playing the game means setting up long term strategy where best case scenario you have to suck short term losses. They are mostly invested in long term preservation of the system so over promising and under delivering is a held fear. In vulgar terms it is shitting where ideologically eat.

Republicans however basically promise the moon the sun and the stars and then when it doesn’t happen they just rile up their base with anti-federal sentiments to make them rabid. There’s no brakes on the anger machine which means there isn’t a cohesive long term strategy. It’s whatever does the job right here and now so they can as a group benefit off the short term gains. It’s why so many of them are individually crashing and burning. No exit strategy - just commitment to scalp what you can out of the system and ditch before you get consequences. They know they can basically say anything and get what they want.

It’s a major FUBAR situation and Democrats are only now learning how to publicly perform a sense of political urgency.

How often do you sit cross legged on the floor? A lot of stretching routines are basic maintenance but getting to actual comfort is a different thing entirely. Getting up regularly and relaxing into floor sitting while watching tv has done me wonders personally. The first while is rough though.

Don’t get an SUV or Raised truck. They might be comfortable but they are dangerous to other vehicles on the road.

It might be more about what vehicles share the road. SUVs and pickups tend to cause the majority of fatalities in crashes because their bumper height basically being non compatible with cars and vans and their larger blindspots… That design might not play particularly well with the Keis in crash situations.

But that being said SUVs and raised pickups are menaces to road safety across the board and we should be looking at phasing them out.

I mean it could be using the percentages of another number. Like if there’s 20 ingredients and you drop one it’s a 5% reduction or if you added other non natural ingredients that would cause the percentage to drop… But whether it’s less or fewer would depend on information we don’t readily have because we don’t know if it’s ingredients by volume or of it’s a reformulation of ingredients… and may be at the crux of this grammatical problem depending on what you assume is going on?

It depends on context. If you are dealing with a percentage of overall types of ingredients by volume without changing the variety of ingredients you would probably use “less”. Like if you reduced the mix of milk related ingredients. You would use “fewer” to indicate that the number of individual ingredients had changed. Like if they got rid of two of the ingredients of an original ten.

This could be a category error?

Yup. They are lovable dum dums…

And by lovable I mean they will like exactly one person and wish death on everyone else. Just because you can have one as a pet and it will be your bestest friend doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Owls do not understand vacations or sick days.

Just because they do not take shit from humans and are violent avian insurrectionists that absolutely will ruin your day doesn’t mean they are unworthy of love.