No, no, no. You don’t understand. That’s how you make friends. You kill anyone who disagrees with you and implicitly threaten everyone else with extreme violence. Isn’t that how everyone makes friends?

What if I use the term ‘tankie’ unironically to refer to people to the right of me?

That’s the thing, though, in western literary culture an archetypal journey story is the Odyssey. The Odyssey is just so old and was so important in Hellenic culture (which became the basis for most of Western culture) that all journey stories after The Odyssey were heavily influenced by it in one way or another.

A few reasons:

1. States are not currency sovereigns in that they do not create and control their own currency. All the money the state uses come from revenues they collect in taxes, fees, sales, etc. This is not the case for a national government, which creates all the money it needs for whatever it wants to spend money on. This gives the national government a lot more spending power than any state could possibly have, regardless of the state’s GDP.

More importantly, though,

2. All states except Vermont have statutory or (state) constitutional requirements to have a balanced budget every year. This means they cannot run a budget surplus or deficit. Any surplus has to be spent or returned to taxpayers and any deficit needs to be resolved that year. This makes it incredibly difficult to run large programs like a M4A over time. When the state runs into a budget shortfall, the M4A system would be the first on the chopping block.

3. Insurance companies fight HARD against anything that hurts their business. This is specifically why Obamacare (the ACA) didn’t include a public option despite Obama campaigning hard for a public option in the 2008 election. Insurance companies got their stooges in the Democratic Party to kill the public option when the ACA debates were going through Congress. They do the same in states when states try to do something about the healthcare industry. And if insurance companies publicly talk about a proposed bill causing them to raise rates or pull out of a market, that’s a huge political stick to swing.

The Odyssey is copied in form all the time. It’s not always referenced as directly, but virtually any adventure story made from a western perspective includes some elements of The Odyssey in a similar manner to how virtually all Eastern adventure stories include some elements of Journey to the West.

I’m not talking about rich people. I’m talking about people whose only investment assets are their mortgage and their 401k.

I was at the Washington Monument in DC today. It was huge. I’ve been to a lot of protests in DC and this was among the largest. The vibe wasn’t anywhere close to as naively optimistic as the 2017 Women’s March or the various Marches for Science. It wasn’t as confrontational as the 2020 uprising or the 2017 Airport protests against the Muslim Ban. I think the closest vibe I can think of were the 2003 Iraq Invasion protests.

I really hope this is just a beginning and actions get larger and more aggressive.

If you genuinely belive most people have a year’s worth of money saved up they can just live off of if needed then you’re incredibly out of touch.

Whichever you put more alcohol into.

Typically, the only difference between a frozen margarita and one on the rocks is that the frozen has been blended. But they still have the same amount of tequila and triple sec (usually 1 shot of tequila and 2/3 shot of triple sec).

Belgium

Of course, when I went it was part of an school exchange trip when I was 17. I was almost always with a large group of American teenagers with only a few teachers as chaperones. It’s 100% understandable why people wouldn’t want to be particularly friendly to us.

Two things:

1. People see because they see the markets going down and want to get out before it hits bottom.

2. The bigger issue, though, is that a hell of a lot of people will lose their jobs and have no money. Remember the Great Recession? When the job market is that shitty and you lose your job, there aren’t other ones available. No job means no income. You can apply for unemployment insurance, but that only covers a fraction of the income from your last job. So people can’t afford to pay their bills. When you can’t afford utilities, rent, gas, etc, but you have a 401k sitting there, it becomes the only option to pull money out of that. It’s a super shitty decision to have to make, but when it’s a question of losing your home or sacrificing your retirement, short-term material needs win out.

You were correct in your initial assumption. The show The West Wing only focused on a core of close advisors, but you often got reference or hints at others that were just never featured much on screen.

Traditionally, a President has a very large staff. They have panels of experts on all kinds of different things (The President’s Council of Economic Advisors, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, etc, etc). A quick (and not at all thorough) web search shows that the Executive Office of the President of the United States typically employs ~2,000 people.

The current administration is run by neophytes and morons who have little-to-no experience in government and don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re running the government like the mob, where they value loyalty and ideological purity over experience and expertise. So they only give important jobs (like making their tariff list) to very loyal people who will do whatever the President wants. As such, the people doing the work have no clue what the fuck they’re doing, so they look for shortcuts. That’s why we keep seeing things like programs being cancelled which include the word “biodiversity” as a result of them just ctrl+f “diversity” and hitting delete. That’s also why they turned to ChatGPT to figure out their tariffs, because they have no clue how else to do it, and have nobody with intelligence and experience to ask.

The egg is the only possible correct answer to this.

Modern chickens didn’t exist until something like 10,000 years ago. The egg was a key development in allowing animals to live on land, and first came about somewhere around 300 million years ago.

But if you want to narrow it down to just chicken eggs, then you have it right. The immediate predecessor to the first thing that can be called a ‘chicken’ laid a chicken egg from which hatched a chicken.

The egg absolutely came first.

Never?

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy vinegar.

I have a better idea. Why don’t we just leave them the fuck alone?

Raised his national profile. If he keeps up political theater like this for the next 3 year’s he’ll have a good shot at the Democratic nomination.

Don’t threaten us with a good time…

I’m not turning a blind eye to anything. I’m just not making up conspiracies where there’s clearly none. There isn’t some hyper intelligent grandmaster planning everything out 15 moves in advance. This isn’t Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom running the show. It’s a bunch of morons whose understanding of economics ended with mercantilism asking ChatGPT how to run an economy.

It makes complete sense if you are looking at it from the perspective of an oligarch. They are just trying to tank the economy to hoover up even more assets. They’re banking on an eventual recovery, after which they’ll be even richer and more powerful than they are now.

As with most things in life, assuming some grander Machiavellian scheme is usually wrong. People don’t think and plan like that outside of movies and TV. Most people, especially the very rich and powerful, only plan for the short term.

There is no 3-4 steps down the road. They’re just trying to repeat exactly what they did during/after the COVID recession. And the Great Recession. And the '01 dot-com recession, etc, etc, etc.