echodot

I know that this is what a lot of Americans think socialism is but it's worth pointing out that socialism is not communism.

Communists want to take over with force and violence and overwhelming thought policing. Inevitably this pisses people off and ultimately doesn't work. See literally every communist regime ever.

Socialists simply want to implement progressive policies and are generally happy to do that within the confines of current law (assuming the current law isn't oppressive).

The US becoming socialist would simply be via a series of increasingly progressive policies over a period of several electoral cycles. It wouldn't be violence in the streets.

What really works is when unions start being powerful enough to dictate governmental policy. That's when things really improve. Of course the millionaires and billionaires will complain about interference, because it's only good when they do it.

It costs you 700 now and it costs them an unknown amount in the future. They just don't like it because they suspect it'll be quite a lot more than the 700 that you're paying to join. They're right too.

But union dues are annoying in the moment, because when it happens all you see is a reduction in your pay and initially no change in working conditions. That's why they have posters like that up, because even though intellectually people understand that being in a union will long-term result in better pay, in the short term it does effectively result in a temporary pay cut, which can be hard if you're already not really very well paid.

If you're joining an established union sometimes they will be smart and not charge members until they've renegotiated their salaries. But that only happens if you're joining a already formed union.

That's a really high quality photo for 2003. Most photographs from that time were early digital cameras and tended to max out about 720p resolution. It also doesn't look like a scanned photograph because there's no grain.

That's the tactic my goth girlfriend employees. It has its downsides.

What if you're not a 15-year-old girl and therefore don't have TikTok and Instagram are they going to arrest you? What a truly stupid country.

So does the US just want to totally kill its tourist industry because that seems to be the objective.

Yeah that's the issue really. A lot of Americans seem to think that I'd the Republicans loose the next election / they do badly at the primarys (assuming there is one, I have my doubts) everything will go back to normal. It won't.

I suppose a 3rd party might rise to power due to public distrust of the big two.

I get the idea of wanting physical representations of media and not relying on streaming services but cassette tapes were terrible.

You always have to fiddle on with the magnetic tape because something would always happen to it. It would get twisted up or unspooled or something.

At least with vinyl you never have to put up with the player randomly breaking the medium.

The only good thing about cassette tapes was that recording onto them was trivial, whereas with CDs you needed relatively expensive hardware and it was slow.

I just have a parrot that's been trained on pop songs.

I'm not really up on the latest research into nuclear powered continental drift but I'm fairly certain that Australia is on course to collide with Indonesia in about 100 million years. So they're going the wrong direction.

You'll need to turn left and go around Africa, if you see Brazil you've gone too far.

I don't know about you but I don't think I've ever worn anything with an US flag on it. Or one that says "I ❤️ NY"