So, what, if we’re all going to be assholes, some of us should at least be rich? Ok, well, chances are it ain’t gonna be you or me who are the rich assholes, so what’s the point? For everyone to be miserable, but a few people get to be rich and miserable?

No.

You’re better off. Rich kids grow up to be assholes.

Edit:

Everybody thinks becoming rich will solve all of their problems. But even if it does solve some of your problems, it’ll just create new ones. Money is not a panacea that fixes everything. I mean, you look at the richest people and they’re not just assholes, their fucking psychopaths. That’s what you want? You wanna be a fucking psychopath? Oh, but, I know, it won’t be you. You won’t fall into the same trap as them. You’ll be one of the good ones. Money won’t corrupt you like it has them. Bullshit.

And what about everyone else? Not everyone can get rich. There are only so many resources on the planet and the more you have the less everyone else can have. It’s a zero sum arrangement. But, who cares about them, I got mine. Right? Congratulations, you’re well on your way to being a rich psychopath.

That could be, but the sub-heading makes me question that.

Brenda Shaffer, whoever she is, is clearly an idiot.

You can charge an EV from a regular household 120V outlet. Sure, it will charge slower than molasses but that’s enough for a lot of people. You might only get 30 miles of range from charging overnight, but if you’re driving less than 30 miles everyday, that’s enough. I know I drive less than 30 miles a day, most of the time. But for those days where you’re driving more than 30 miles, yeah you’re going to need to know where there’re some fast chargers near you, but there’s more of those being built all the time.

And there are some good deals on used EVs, too. And the batteries they have now last long enough that there’s really no worry about having to replace the battery on a used EV.

Wait, this is real?! Holy shit, he’s gone off the deep end.

Better than them e-lectric vehicles. If my car ain’t big, loud, inefficient, polluting and running on ancient fossil goo that’s totally nonrenewable and expensive to pump out of the ground and refine, I ain’t interested!

The allies? Like the US, who didn’t declare war on Germany until after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, two years after Germany invaded Poland? Like the Soviet Union, who signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, a pact that wasn’t terminated until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941? Those allies?

It needs to be explicitly stated because there are still people who don’t understand that violent regime change is wrong.

Unless that one person is god emperor of the country, no.

No, I wouldn’t like it. No country should bomb another to force regime change. I don’t care how shitty the leader being replaced is. I want Trump gone, but not like that. I know this is a joke, but I feel like this needs to be explicitly stated.

Such a rich and vibrant culture.

It’s not a world government.

Exactly. The UN is NOT a world government and we need to stop expecting it to act as one. That was never the intention of the UN.

That being said, a lot of people talk about the necessity for the “rule of law,” but there cannot be the rule of law without some kind of government with the authority to enact and ENFORCE laws. If nations are not willing to sign on to something like that, we cannot have the rule of law. Instead we will have the rule of whichever country has the largest, most powerful military and/or economic influence. I know a lot of Americans are fine with that arrangement because that position is currently occupied by the US, and has been for more than half a century, but the US might not always occupy that role. I wonder how those Americans would feel about this arrangement if China, for instance, were the world’s hegemon instead of the US?

As a species things do just keep getting better for us, except in periods of systemic transition.

I think that’s been generally true since the first agricultural revolution led to the emergence of civilization, 10,000 or so years ago. But, progress has not been linear, it’s been exponential, with most of the progress occurring in just the last few hundred years, since the industrial revolution. In that regard, the progress that we’ve experienced over the last few hundred years has been anomalous.

The way of life that we take for granted today is very different from how most of humanity has lived through the vast majority of history (and that was itself very different from how our species had lived through the vast majority of our existence, with humans living in small hunter-gatherer tribes for most of our time as a species).

Modern life has existed for only the blink of an eye, on evolutionary time scales. Yet, in that time we have used up an incredible amount of natural resources, and we have made significant, irreversible changes to the Earth’s biosphere and climate.

It took our species nearly all of the 10,000 years of civilization’s existence to go from a few million people on the planet to a billion, but it only took a little over two centuries to do from one billion people to over eight billion. That kind of exponential growth simply cannot be sustained indefinitely on a planet with finite resources. Even at maximum possible resource use efficiency, and even with the maximum possible environmental impact mitigation efforts, the Earth still wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth forever. We would reach some hard, physical limit to growth, eventually.

I feel like our whole lives here in the US we’ve been told to expect things to just generally keep getting better, seemingly forever. Like, that’s the narrative of “progress.” The economy just keeps growing, the nation just keeps getting richer, technology just keeps getting better, living standards just keep getting better, so forth and so on. But, that was probably never realistic, or even feasible. I mean, no civilization progresses forever. Essentially every civilization that’s ever existed has followed a pattern of ascension followed by decline. Many of the most notable civilizations ascended very quickly and dramatically, and then collapsed just as quickly and dramatically. Why should we expect to be any different? What makes us think we won’t follow the same pattern as basically every other civilization in history?

I’m drinking my dinner plans right now. But I drive by a Culver’s all the time. I’ll definitely stop in someday soon and give it a try.

Yeah.

I’ve never been to Culver’s. Is it any good?

Young men, maybe. I’m in my 40s and there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor. That would destroy my back.