Lawdoggo

I’m not criticizing anything except for the DNC’s strategy for the past eight years. Love your handle btw

Yeah, the presidential election is a circus and only a performer can be an effective candidate. Ever since 2016, the DNC just runs these duds who focus more on extending an olive branch to the GOP than championing solutions to anything voters actually care about, no matter how realistic. Whether the solutions can actually be achieved is irrelevant; what matters is that you’re willing to shoot for the moon on important issues and not weaken your position before you’ve even started negotiating. Without that, how can you possibly expect voters (particularly, typical low-information voters) to show up for you?

Honestly, Tim Walz would have been a better presidential candidate. At least he has a personality.

I mostly agree with ski11erboi’s response. I’m actually not overly concerned with market performance - I would be surprised if Trump’s handlers allowed him to do anything so destructive to their interests. But if you think the prices of gas and eggs are bad now, just wait until we have a mass deportation and tariffs on imported goods.

If there’s anything to be concerned about as you approach retirement, I’d put social security at the top of the list.

Yeah no kidding. I have ample means to weather the economic shitstorm that his voters just ushered in, and I look forward to seeing every pro-Trump bum in my life wallow in it. That probably makes me a bad person, and it certainly revokes any “working class solidarity” credibility I ever had, but these people will never learn to help themselves and I don’t care anymore.

Did they give a reason?

All cocks are dicks

The Culture section of that article is a wild ride. Like phrenology for feet.

Since when does grandma go to the dunes?

Blow it out your ass

I’m sure this gets repeated on Lemmy all the time, but I feel like the quality of Reddit posts, even in niche communities about guitar maintenance or whatever, has really gone downhill in the past 10 years or so.

This might come off as mean, but I’ve noticed a significant dumbing-down in terms of what people contribute to Reddit communities but also what people expect to be spoon-fed by those communities. And it’s all presented as this sort of democratization of hobbyist knowledge, where it’s every hobbyist’s duty to educate newcomers on all of the absolute basics and persuade them of why they should care about any of it.

Maybe this is just a side effect of Reddit recommending subreddits to non-subscribers and pushing to become a Facebook-type service for “regular” people - after all, that’s how they make the line go up.

I still prefer old-school forums, which tend to be more insular, less accessible, and expect you to arrive with a modicum of understanding or at least RTFM first. To be blunt, I miss the days when the internet was primarily for geeks.

I grew up upper-middle class and have largely the same philosophy. Always thought my friends’ parents were idiots for buying these gas guzzling Ford/Chevy monstrosities just to haul around 1-2 kids and a dog on occasion. Regular salaried people spending/financing more than half their annual income every few years on cars they don’t need just to keep up with the Joneses who don’t really care in the first place.

I don’t skimp on quality when I buy something, but I only buy what I actually need and if something serves its purpose, I hold onto it for as long as it works. My wife and I do very well now, but aside from living in a fairly nice neighborhood with great public schools and amenities, you wouldn’t think it from the cars we drive and the way we dress.

To your first paragraph, I would say it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. I do think your average conservative benefits from conservative rulemaking/enforcement in a “sundown town,” look-the-other-way-if-you’re-one-of-us sort of microcosm, but when you look at the effects of conservative policymaking on a macro-social and -economic level, it’s clear that middle-Americans are still getting a worse deal than they would under more progressive regimes.