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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Probably the 90’s in the US. For context I’m an '80s kid.

    The dust from deregulation had mostly settled, healthcare hadn’t skyrocketed, education and homes were still mostly affordable. Union busting and offshoring had settled down a little. Bankruptcies crushing retirements, too. You thought that the traditional paths of career, maybe getting married, and buying a house were still on the table. Politics were pretty stable and it was probably the last time you could make the argument that “both sides” were kinda the same. We were kinda coasting after the close of the Cold War…sure there were some skirmishes, but nothing huge. The were the “good old days” where shit was just going OK for the most part (please don’t pedantically point out what was wrong with society, no period is perfect, it’s just that the '90s had a few less bumps in the road). The internet was becoming a more widespread thing, technology was advancing rapidly. You could still save the Earth with a little recycling, Climate Change wasn’t obviously having effects as veiwed by the average person.

    Followed by the '00s where we got hammered really fast with dot-com bust, 9/11, recession after recession, decades of war, politics shifting hard right, rapidly rising costs thanks to speculation and corporate mergers…it’s been pretty unsettled for quite a while and for those entering the workforce now it’s rough.

    Yeah…the '90s. Things were still looking up until TSHTF in '00s and after.



  • There were several missteps by vaccine proponents that undermined their case. There was also a lot of hyperbole from vaccine hesitant people that made them look hysterical.

    Really. What missteps were made? The hysteria from hesitant anti-vaxxers and political fear mongerers were real, I would call “hesitant” people the ones who realize vaccines are a likely necessity but didn’t understand how the COVID vaccines worked and were probably influenced by lies from the ant-vax crowd.

    What middle ground could possibly be made here regarding “truth”? Vaccine risks are known and fairly well established. The risks of early COVID strains were known. The only people straddling a fence in the middle are those who lack the knowledge of the risks or have objectively real medical problem with vaccines, not some made-up junk about mercury or something.

    Vaccines are neither a 100% safe panacea, nor are they injectable death.

    OMG this is binary JAQing off. Nobody suggests either of these and it’s ridiculous to even posit this phrase.







  • All the countries with space programs have people in some form of dire strait. Starving, homeless, lack of medical care… Are you saying achievements like this aren’t allowed to take place at all until every problem is taken care of? I can assure you that at no point in civilization has there been times where someone wasn’t in a bad spot while society moved forward. Yeah, India has some big problems, and huge wealth disparity is a problem that many places face alongside India, but you can’t shut down progress because all the other problems can’t be solved.




  • The problem is you’d have to tear up a shitton of infrastructure to do it because built-up areas have no room to extend road widths safely to accommodate bike lanes. The driver behind that problem (pun intended) is the car culture and lack of public transportation. They can’t get rid of car lanes to hand them over to walking/biking dedicated areas because there’s too many cars and people that rely upon them to get around. There would never be enough people that would vote for or support such a project. Rural areas DGAF and are too poor to build bicycle infrastructure.

    It’s not that we can’T be bothered, it’s the usual problem of Americans not wanting to pay for anything that they don’t use themselves or that might inconvenience them even though it’s good to get cars off the roads and keep people safe.