It’s funny that even the feds are abusing ai Trump. My favorite is this video where he and Biden argue about FE7 Nino.

I get what you’re saying and I agree, the people who direct industry are by far the most responsible for SUV usage.

I wasn’t arguing against that, I was arguing against the notion that SUVs and pickups (the humongous modern ones) are reasonable things for urban and suburban people to drive.

And though the guy spent a lot of time mocking the stereotypical macho man, his policy proposals were focused on regulating industry to move production back towards smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles & making existing light trucks safer and more practical. He didn’t propose for everyone to “just stop buying SUVs” as a solution. The cogent historical overview he gave for how current SUV production came to be suggests he has a solid understanding of economics from a systemic perspective.

I don’t want to sound like I’m his pr manager because I’m not and I don’t care what your opinion of him is. I’m just taken aback by how you received someone who was making salient points, albeit in a less-than-communist way. And yes I know the devil is in the details and actual laws will need to implement these ideas with much more specificity and rigor, but this was a YouTube video, not a board meeting.

Why 69 hours specifically? Did they choose it for the funni number?

SUVs are the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions since 2010. We don’t have the time to pick and choose which polluters to target, we need to be targeting all of them. And SUVs are a growing problem that we need to address before they become even more of an issue.

And because I’m confident that you didn’t watch much of this video, THESE are the vehicles that he and I take issue with:

This picture compares an SUV to a station wagon, a cheaper, smaller, safer vehicle with more space. What use value does an SUV have that station wagons don’t? Besides running over pedestrians.

Also, if you’re concerned about pickup trucks then it’s in your interest to regulate them too. Because they have gotten larger and more expensive with much smaller beds, the thing people ostensibly buy them for.

I’ve said enough already and I don’t want to continue this conversation anymore. If you don’t see the issue with people driving tank-sized cars for everyday travel then there’s nothing I can tell you to convince you otherwise.

I wasn’t referring to you as arrogant in my previous comment, I was talking about asshole SUV drivers. Sorry for being unclear.

I still don’t understand what you’re talking about though. The only policy proposals I see in this video are to 1) reduce/eliminate the import tax on light trucks 2) reclassify which vehicles count as light trucks 3) tighten regulations on the emissions of these vehicles 4) increase the visibility of the front-end of these vehicles 5) make these vehicles conform to the same safety standards as regular cars 6) restrict the use of these vehicles within cities.

I’m sincerely baffled by what you’re taking away from this. Rural America isn’t within the scope of this video or this channel and that was made clear by the very first sentence. You’re making it sound like he wants to purge all large vehicles from the country right this instant but that’s not what he’s saying. At all. 😵‍💫

I find your criticisms strange because this video began by explicitly framing the issue of SUV ownership around building walkable cities. So I’m honestly not sure what your point is. Large vehicles have use cases in rural areas? Yeah man, I agree.

I think you should work on your listening skills because you’re arguing against no one. Here’s a quote from the video that illustrates my point:

“And if you do live in a rural area, you might need to drive a light truck and obviously that’s fine and I don’t care. But we’re talking about suburbia here and come on. You know as well as I do that the vast, vast, vaaast majority of drivers in these light trucks are carrying exactly 2 things: their briefcase and their fat ass. And most people don’t use a briefcase anymore.” (quote starts at 14:22)

I agree that the guy is putting a lot of emphasis on attacking SUV drivers and spends comparatively little time taking about how capitalism brought us here… but you do know those types of drivers exist, right? I mean the arrogant, selfish, boastful people that use their vehicle as a status symbol and couldn’t care less about whatever harm they’re causing. Not every SUV or truck driver is like this, but they’re definitely out there, it’s not a strawman.

Anyway, are you seriously advocating for SUVs as a safety precaution? You know what’s safer than SUVs? Vehicles that are less massive and less rigid. And yeah driving in the snow is easier with 4x4 but most of the USA isn’t snowy and the parts that are are only like that for a few months. And keep in mind that northern Europe gets just as much snow as the US, but they don’t have the same SUV usage as America does.

Also no one is saying that we should get rid of personal vehicles that can haul loads. Farmers and tradesmen need them, no contest, but the type of trucks that this guy takes issue with aren’t the type of trucks that workers want. They’re big and expensive with small beds and poor fuel economy, a far cry from the trucks that were commonly produced a few decades ago and hardly representative of what manual laborers need.

And what gave you the impression that he wants to stop all SUV usage right this second? Of course it’s going to take time to move away from them and alternatives need to be put in place to facilitate the transition away from not just SUVs, but driving in general. You and me and him are all in agreement on this.

I feel like because you dislike this guy, you’re taking contrarian positions just to dunk on him. Cool your jets, dude.

I feel like modern entertainment is pushing the limit of acceptable criticisms of capitalism within capitalism. Which is to say it isn’t very critical at all. I’m pretty sure we’ll never see anything revolutionary on the big screen ever.

Let’s play a game I like to call “How would this American event be written about if it happened somewhere else?”

Here’s my take: Biden regime’s secret police murders woman that didn’t pay up. Internal investigation finds they did nothing wrong.

And then people are gonna call you crazy when you call a spade a spade. Kinda cringe that this article is using the language of gender identity to talk about imperialism tho

Omg Kiribati finally got added to the group!

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study last May showing that the average initial hospital charge for mass shooting survivors between 2012 and 2019 was nearly $65,000 per person.

Yeah I can’t afford that either. If I’m in a mass shooting, I hope I die instead.

Why do managers have different overtime laws in the first place?

Westerners when they hear fake stories about organ harvesting in China: 🔫😡

Westerners when they hear real stories about organ harvesting in Canada: 🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗

TL;DR: It was staged for publicity, but the men are all real iron workers

Derek Thompson:

At a time of maximal desperation in the U.S. housing market, giant investment banks, such as BlackRock, are buying up some of the few houses left on the market, boxing families out of the American dream. They’re turning these homes into rental units that they will, in some cases, leave to decay.

Also Derek Thompson:

But this outrage is misdirected.

This dude’s talking about new construction as a solution like we don’t already have more homes than people. In his solution, what’s stopping all the new housing from becoming unaffordable again?

I thought compensation in the case of damage/loss was the whole point of these things. What’s stopping the bank from just stealing everything they’re “keeping safe”?

Please drink a verification can to continue.

One of Canada’s biggest supermarkets is literally named “empire” you can’t make this shit up

Hey rationalwiki editor can you make a page about me, specifically? I wanna be wiki famous 🥺🙏

Some of these look like Norman Rockwell paintings. I like them a lot!

That rabbit is me irl during vaccinations.

Considering their “Bomb the Hague Act”, I think the US would sooner start world war 3

And it’s an exhaustive article too. Highly recommend

I definitely am lol

It’s interesting how this person decided to put “totalitarian communism” in the title instead of just “communism”. Were they just trying to make a scary title? Because I’m confident that they didn’t mean to imply that communism isn’t totalitarian by default.

“Taking a mother, separating a mother from her daughter and Girl Scouts she was watching over — and to do it under the pretext of protecting any disclosure of litigation information — is absolutely absurd. The fact they’re using facial recognition to do this is frightening. It’s un-American to do this.”

Does that graph include households with adult children? Who would be living alone if they could afford it. Because the situation is probably even more stark than that in reality. (I don’t wanna trudge through census data)

Their endgame is definitely convincing people that public schools are dysfunctional and should be completely replaced with private schools.

I’ve never seen fences like that. I guess I’m too poor to be around anything important.

Yeah he showed it in his interview with Bay Area

omg JT face reveal (on his official channel)

Is it bad that I think that isn’t much? It’s like 0.01 seconds worth of Bezos’s income. Not that this excuses it, of course

I’ve never played tomb raider so I wanna see. (btw Cyrillic is an alphabet not a language)

Nothing. Unions consist of the people in it and if those people are content with scraps then that’s all they’re getting.

But there’s no sense in being a doomer about this because that doesn’t accomplish anything. The future isn’t guaranteed either way so we should do our part to steer it in the communist direction.

Well once there are enough unions, we’ll be able to join them together to coordinate workers across various businesses. And once that happens, unions will transform from local bargaining associations to a means of organizing the working class en masse. Of course this will take time, but Rome wasn’t built in a day either.

And pooling together funds from the workplaces that are already worker owned sounds great. Politics is expensive af

Unions are battered right now but it doesn’t have to be like that forever. There’s been a huge resurgence in unionization since the pandemic started especially with big businesses like Starbucks and Amazon. I think we’ll really start to see some serious change the more we organize ourselves. Quantitative change leads to qualitative change, as they say.

So the primary contradiction of capitalism is that the working class cooperates together across all businesses, industries, and countries, but the fruit of their labor is owned not by the working class as a whole, but by whomever owns the means of production. Expanding ownership of the MoP to all the workers of a business is an improvement, but it doesn’t change the relationship of that business between other businesses. That is, workers are still competing against each other to maximize profits for themselves and are still forced to participate in all the self-destructive tendencies of capitalist markets.

A state controlled by the working class is necessary to end worker exploitation and there’s no 2 ways about it. We need the power to change laws, reallocate surplus value, and organize economic growth in ways that benefit workers. What China has been doing with their common prosperity campaign is what needs to happen everywhere - reappropriating profits from corporate giants and putting them towards social development.

Muahaha now I know that you’re subscribed to the Education Hub community! 😈

There’s a common delusion in our society that depraved government agencies who are known to have done evil things in the past have simply stopped doing evil things for some reason. This belief is backed by zero evidence, and is contradicted by mountains of evidence to the contrary. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for literally no other reason.

Our government agencies are only depraved because the wrong party is in office! Vote for the other one to drain the swamp!!! Which one, you ask? The good one!!1!1!!

The bourgeoisie really are trying as hard as they can to recreate the Irish Land War.