This really comes down to technocrats vs the people. The technocrats want to double down on neoliberalism because many economists and other experts are telling them it's the only way. The field of economics, especially in the US is mostly just a cult of free market evangelists. Technocrats like Klein believe in listening to experts, which I would normally strongly agree with, but I just can't listen to experts who advise that we double down on the same god damn policies that have left so many millions of Americans feeling left behind, desperate, and hopeless. It's insanity.

What's wild to me is that these games were all developed to run on Windows, not SteamOS or any other Linux distro. This is with the games requiring a compatibility layer to run. Imagine what they could do if the games were made to run on SteamOS.

The Palestinians are in the unfortunate position of living in a territory that a more powerful group of people want for themselves. A tale as old as time.

Happened to me a little over ten years ago. I had my wife drive me to the emergency room in the middle of the night because I thought I might be having a heart attack, but it was just a panic attack. Nothing a little lorazepam couldn't fix. It's been mostly downhill from there.

I didn't mean to imply that I think what I'm suggesting is possible in the current system. I should have made that more clear. That's my fault. I understand that what I'm talking about would require significant systemic changes. To you, that might essentially make it impossible, but I don't think that's necessarily true. People made the existing system, there's no reason why people couldn't make a different system.

False equivalency.

It's a good thing not everyone is as arrogantly resistant to new possibilities as you, otherwise human progress might cease entirely.

"The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."

• Murray Bookchin

When you print money, it devalues all the existing money because there’s more of it but the extra value it generates hasn’t materialised yet.

Money doesn't have value. Money is just a medium of exchange. It can be anything, a pebble, a shell, a small piece of metal, a piece of paper, or, most commonly today, digits in a computer. Things are what have value. Consumer products and services, raw materials, etc. Money is just a stand-in for those things. Simply increasing the amount of digits in the computer isn't going to suddenly increase prices. What would affect prices is if you transferred a bunch of that newly created money into everyone's checking accounts, all at once. That would lead to inflation, because, as I already said, if you put money into people's hands (or checking accounts) they're going to spend it. This would increase the number of dollars pursuing goods and services, but the amount of goods and services wouldn't increase right away, so there would be more money relative to the same number of things, and prices would go up. So, just don't transfer all of the newly created money into people's checking accounts.

Like I said, put some of it into an account that can only be used to pay bond holders. You know, the people the US Federal government owes all their money to. That money would trickle out of the Treasury department as the Treasury made payments to bond holders, it wouldn't just be some big, sudden cash infusion into the broader economy. The same is true of using the money for Federal infrastructure projects.

I'm not suggesting the Federal government should default on its debt. Not at all. They should pay back bond holders, at interest. All except one: the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve doesn't need to be paid back because they're the ones who create the money, and they can manage the creation of the money so that it doesn't lead to too high of inflation.

All of this is just so stupid, it's so unnecessary. There's no reason growth must be correlated with increased debt. The Federal government doesn't need to borrow money for anything, they create their own money. They don't need to go to people and say, "hey, lend me some of your dollars so I can pay for the army, or roads and bridges," they can just make more dollars. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer, they make the money. You wouldn't need to borrow money from your friend if you had a legal money printer at home that could print an infinite number of dollars.

But I know, inflation. Yes, if the Federal government made a bunch of money and went around dropping it out of hot air balloons, inflation would go up. When people get money in their hands they tend to want to spend it, this causes increased demand, supply can't necessarily keep up with the sudden increase in demand and you get inflation. There's a pretty easy solution to this problem: don't print a bunch of money and just hand it out to people. Print it, and use it to fund infrastructure projects or public services. Put some of it in an account that can only be used to make payments to bond holders. I know the infrastructure projects would mean money being put into the hands of the people who work on those projects, but I doubt that would increase the overall inflation rate very much, and if it did you could always just pull back on the infrastructure spending when inflation was high and ramp it back up when the inflation rate goes lower.

I think this all comes down to career politicians seeing political office not as a public service but as a way of achieving personal status. It's not about what's good for the country it's about what's good for their own ambitions. Biden was president, that had been his ultimate goal for his entire career. Hard thing to give up.

It doesn't. I think these people are well meaning, but I'm not sure they've given much thought to the effectiveness of these kinds of demonstrations, in regards to actually affecting policy. I'm not sure they even care. I think stuff like this might be more about expressing their outrage than actually making any meaningful changes.

The difference is that one costs a minimum of $30k, while the other can be had for less than $1k.

That's true, yet I still think many people will opt to spend the additional money for a car. They're covered and climate controlled, and they offer more passenger and cargo capacity. In the Netherlands, which you mentioned as an example of a country with high e-bike adoption, there are still millions of cars. I'm sure there are fewer cars than there otherwise would have been, but cars are still very much in the transportation mix. Not a bad thing, necessarily. I definitely think it has reduced car dependency - cars are no longer as much of a necessity - but cars are not eliminated.

I used to do something like what you're describing. I would drive my car to a light rail station then take the train into the city to work. I suppose what you're talking about is just replacing the car with an e-bike. That's fine, but I don't see a huge difference in this scenario between an e-bike and an electric car, especially since I wasn't just driving to the light rail station, I was also driving to the grocery store and to restaurants and to the houses of friends and family, etc.

Now, if I had lived in the city nearer to my work, and to stores, and restaurants, and shops, etc, an e-bike would have made a lot more sense.

Trump does not know or care about ethics.

Many millions of Americans spend at least an hour commuting to and from work every day. I don't think they're going to want to do that on an e-bike.

As long as a majority of Americans live in suburban areas, car dependency will continue.

But most of it isn't shit.

Well, I disagree. I think most of it is shit.

God, I hate this country.

You're not getting it. If you like a girl, but there's a part of her that you don't like, you can't just break up with that part of her, you break up with all of her. ALL of her. You get what I'm saying?

You say you love America, but there's this big part of America you hate. So you don't love ALL of America, do you?

But you also ignored the part of my comment where I rightfully pointed out that racism in America is not limited to only the South. Again, if Trump had won only the South, he wouldn't be president. You also ignored the part of my comment where I, again, rightfully pointed out that racism is not America's only problem.

I love all of it except the South.

Do you say to a significant other I love 2/3 of you? It's an odd compartmentalization, to slice off a large part of something, set that part aside, look at what remains and say I love this thing. I'm talking about America, all of America. The good and the bad, taken together.

You might say that taken together, the good outweighs the bad. In your mind, the bad is contained, concentrated in one specific region, but that's just not true. If you think racism only exists in the South, you're foolish. Did Trump only get votes in the South? If Trump had only won the South, he wouldn't be president right now.

There's also a lot more wrong with this country than racism. That is not our only problem. Even in the areas that might not be as racist, there's plenty of greed, selfishness, an attitude of "I've got mine, screw everyone else."