If I thought anyone was going to read it, I would feel less bad about writing them.

They’ve blended urban infrastructure with a bunch of green space, and that’s certainly nice. Would be even better if that cloverleaf highway was a rail line instead.

But if the worst thing you can say about Chinese urbanism is “It could use a few more trains”… eh.

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Okay, but is it really Bright Red? What if there’s an enormous fifth column of hidden leftists who are actually making things worse? Please consider that I don’t actually like half the people in my government. And anyone I don’t like is a Secret Socialist. While anyone I do like is red in tooth and claw fighting a Rambo-esque insurgency against armies of invisible tankies who want America to fail.

Um, aktuly, the Billionaires are all Chinese and Muslim Terrorist. And they are the ones coming over the border, via Trende De Agua, with the help of AOC and Hillary Killington, who both got rich smuggling children for Jeffery Epstein. So we have to fight back by passing out AR-15s to the beautiful Christian patroits along the Texas-Mexico border and telling them to fire when you see the whites of their eyes, just like the Founding Fathers told us to.

Because, under Real Capitalism, none of this would be happening. The problem is all the Socialist Fake Capitalism that’s been imposed on us by the College Marxists and the Woke Cathedral of Hollywood Sickos. We need a New American Revolution to wash away the wicked. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.

Also, I should note, I’m typing this from a McMansion in the Texas hill country while sitting on a cool $50M in SpaceX IPOs. So when we say “Things are bad right now” what I hear is “My neighbors are unseasonably tan and I’m not allowed to sexually assault the house workers with impunity” not “I’m suffering even a modicum of physical discomfort or personal danger.”

I might go one further and suggest this is why the “Just tax the billionaires” line never actually delivers the goods. It’s a classic Belling-The-Cat problem, because its very easy to say “Tax the Billionaires” but its very difficult to move forward with a policy that does the actual thing, without billionaires pooling their resources to prevent you from accessing any of the levers of power.

You need a certain collectivist worldview to even attempt the problem of regulating and sanctioning a bourgeois class. And when you’re brainwashed by some combination of out-of-context Adam Smith quotes and reskinned Milton Friedman / Ayn Rand videos, good fucking luck.

Fun fact: you can actually read the justifications for why socialist countries managed by proletariat governments have implemented limited market systems in their economies in China, Vietnam, Cuba, USSR, even Korea. Their thoughts are public!

If you know where to look and you trust the source material and you’ve got the patience to work through the finer details, sure.

But that’s the sort of learning you typically need to tackle in grade school if you want it to stick. Open minds and lots of free time are necessary to get this kind of rigorous political education. By the time you’ve had your head crammed full of cable news fearmongering and employer-sponsored propaganda, you’ll be allergic to the very idea of taking a book like Fanshen or The Bolivian Diary at face value.

All outsourced overseas.

Both farther left

:-/

Harris campaigned side by side with Liz Cheney, repeating all the same talking points that paved the way for our wars in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

I’ve seen absolutely nothing from the Biden interregnum that would lead me to believe a Harris government wouldn’t have slaughtered countless people for threadbare reasons.

And liberals would be defending it, while conservatives complained about incompetency.

You must vote for and support the candidate who’ll kill only 700,000 people.

Unless, of course, they decide they need to kill 800k. Or 1M. Or 5M. Or 10M.

But hey, the other guys were going to kill more, we swear.

If you see a snake coiling up and preparing to strike, do you wait until it bites you to stop it?

Generally speaking, snakes only attack when they feel threatened.

But humans attack purely for the joy of killing.

If I see a snake coiled up to attack, I back away and we both live another day. I don’t reach in to stab it, get bit in response, and die from the poison a few hours later.

The poors can still get in if they are willing to become indebted wage slaves with a 6 figure debit for the next 20-30 years.

They can’t. Those schools are all scams. That’s the real ugliness. Private universities charging six figures also have some of the worst placement rates and poorest post-collegate incomes.

Just, don’t expect to get in to a social connection generator for nepo babies

Right. Because the degree is a social gatekeeper first and foremost.

What has changed is the amount of student loan money available and how it needs to be paid back.

Student loan money availability is only being made available because students are seen as a good financial investment. And that’s because college education yields higher salaries in the private sector.

Since student loan money is very easy to get, the prices of everything at a university have skyrocketed.

Private university tuition has far outpaced public university tuition, particularly in areas of the country where demand for public education is eclipsed by open seats at public universities. Students afforded low-cost public education don’t take on student debt, regardless of its availability.

Since student loan debt needs to be paid, only education tracks that lead to landing a job matter

That plays into a myth about education tracks as related to “landing a job”, when pretty much any basic degree plan - from English Lit to Comp Sci - gives you a better job prospect and higher future salary expectations than no-degree. Even bearing in mind the cost of servicing the debt, you’re better off completing a degree plan (or vocational program) than going directly into the workforce with merely a diploma.

Where people get fucked is in taking on debt, failing to complete the degree. At that point, they’re in the worst of both worlds. Or taking on private university debts that far outstrip what a public university would charge. The really nasty for-profit colleges love to lard you up with six figures of debt and plow the profits back into a blizzard of marketing.

But that has far less to do with available student debt (for-profits are more than happy to take the backend risk on loans and simply hound you with collectors) and more to do with predatory private for-profit schools specifically and weed-out courses in public universities generally.

I’m being told we need to Vote Blue No Matter Who.

You’ve found a bunch of clickbait headlines built on anecdotes.

But absent a marginal performance dip in the wake of COVID, overall US rates have been relatively flat for the first quarter of the 21st century.

What you’re witnessing is a media converge on a given topic, not a social crisis. Once the media hype dies down, you’ll forget about it.

The costs aren’t really what’s changed. It’s who bares the costs. Teaching a student today isn’t materially more expensive than it was 30 years ago. We’ve just shifted the demand for school revenues from state budgets to family pocketbooks as the number of students entering college has swelled.

The “kids aren’t literate anymore” line really runs afoul of the abysmal state of standardized testing. Case in point:

The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?

This is what we’re using to evaluate literacy in the modern day. Tests designed to confuse students and flunk classrooms, in order to justify education privatization.

I’m always deeply skeptical of this insistence that college offers “little benefit”. But I’ll happily concede that it functions as a bureaucratic hurdle, designed to favor the historically wealthy and socially entrenched over the impoverished and recently arrived.

“Pick up and leave” is such a popular advice / prediction / threat that I assumed more people were doing it.

Y’all wouldn’t just be spouting off nonsense to score rhetorical points on the internet, right?

Which is hilarious because there’s absolutely no equivalency here. China is not running warships through the Florida Keys or in the Long Island Sound. The US is running warships off the coast of China and has Marines stationed 4 miles off the coast inside a territory that the UN recognizes as a province of the state of China. The US are clearly in the wrong here. This both-sides position is ridiculous

I can’t help map the history of Taiwan against the history of Cuba, when it comes to the topic of “imperialism”.

On the one hand, you have an island that was actually and repeatedly invaded by Western governments, conquered and liberated and conquered again. Bombed, embargoed, sabotaged, sanctioned, its leaders subjected to hundreds of assassination attempts. The explicit stated goal of the imperial neighbor is “regime change”. The implicit unstated goal is subjugation leading to a full-on ethnic cleansing, to clear the way for a new generation of colonial settlers to occupy vacant real estate.

On the other, you have an island that is heavily incorporated into its neighbor’s economic ecosystem. People freely travel to and from the mainland. Citizenship is muddy by design, because the Eastern government wants to encourage islanders to recognize themselves as full citizens of the neighboring state. And Taiwanese businesses are happy to take advantage of this arrangement, exploiting their special status to function as a bridge between mainland businesses (under sanction by Western governments) and Western customers (hungry for cheap, high quality Chinese goods).

Cuba is impoverished as a matter of US foreign policy.

Taiwan is enriched as a matter of Chinese foreign and domestic policies.

One of these countries has been in the headlines for decades, with hysterical predictions of an imminent military occupation. And it isn’t Cuba.

And people question why we say that the USA is the most propagandized people on the planet.