The bottle filler is activated by proximity. I think that’s totally doable for the other part, too.

Yeah, well, losing two console generations in a row will do that.

Actually, I say “rat,” but the article immediately above this one in my feed is a scientific study about how rats are in fact quite altruistic.

I don’t begrudge anyone trying to get out of poverty. This is another failure of the system. Mangione struck against that system, and a different arm of the system struck back.

If the worker had been paid reasonably, if wages had not stagnated for the last three decades, if the ruling class didn’t demand infinite profit out of a finite system, neither event would’ve happened.

The real rat here is McDonald’s, making the reward money enticing by paying too poorly.

That doesn’t mean we need to help them with their propaganda.

Being targeted by the FBI as a way to show action being taken.

Or weird nerds doing the Smithers thing.

Yes. And also there’s no way to reasonably do that anytime soon; our infrastructure just can’t turn on that dime. Electric cars are the bridge, particularly when charged via renewables.

frankly I think that focusing on helping the bottom end of the economic ladder is more productive than just talking about how it should be illegal to have more than a given amount of wealth.

Agreed. Generally easier to sell to the public, too.

That said, there’s also a bunch of stuff that wealth hoarding and extreme capitalism will still cause problems with, which isn’t directly tied to people living in extreme poverty. Climate change is just one example. Infrastructure is another. There are collective challenges that we can’t meet because of wealth disparity.

Maybe we just need to assign billionaires goals to achieve. “Hey, Elno, reduce world hunger sustainably over the next four years by 15% or we take all your money. Jeffy boy, you’re on housing; get us to zero homelessness before 2030, or we’re nationalizing Amazon. Oil execs, you get to tackle greenhouse gas emissions (I mean, you made the problem, you get to solve it). We’re replacing half of the gas stations in the US with fast charging stations, and we’ll sell off 1,000 a year to private owners; get us to net zero emissions and you get to have whichever of them the Federal Government still owns by that point. Whichever one of you chuckleheads gets done first gets all the other guys’ beach houses. And go!”

Ha…ha?

Which is why I said “supposed to,” not “in actuality.”

Let the idiots have their racist homophobic dictatorship if that’s what they want.

I’m sure it would never cause any lasting problems, sharing a substantial land border with an actively malicious enemy nation. /s

Besides, allowing them to leave because they wanted to continue actions antithetical to our values would be tacitly condoning them. “You can keep on trafficking humans, we just don’t want any part of it” is a pretty cold-blooded response.

No, letting them go was never a valid option. We just needed to actually finish reconstruction. You can thank John Wilkes Booth for eliminating that.

The people didn’t hold President Yoon accountable. Parliament did.

How do you think representative government is supposed to work?

Frankly, the American Civil War isn’t really even completely settled yet.