Huh? Quick search shows that Oliver Tree is 30 years old, so birth year ~1994 or so. The jazz design came out in 1992 and was widely available through the early 2000s, by solo cup after they purchased it from sweetheart cup in 2004… I really don’t see how he shouldn’t know where the design came from, but regardless it’s become a pop culture/nostalgia symbol because it’s just a good, widely recognizable design. What else does he need to know?

Also, why the focus on rich and middle class? Is the vast majority of america not “lower”/working class? Edit: it seems like the entire conclusion of the study is based on the influence that money has in politics.

One thing that does have an influence? Money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a “statistically non-significant impact,” economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.

Of course if you focus only on people with money then you will come up with a conflicting result… so yeah. I also feel like I am missing something here.

No, I’m fairly certain you would not use an apostrophe there. That’s what trips me up though because, at least in my mind, ‘it’ takes the place of the possessive noun in that clause and therefore it should have an apostrophe. but god forbid the spelling remain consistent between the two 🙄

Nah its/it’s actually trips me up a lot because ‘its’ is an exception to the possessive apostrophe rule. What really gets me is seeing someone use a possessive apostrophe on a plural s. That is inexcusable.

We are actively being held back by companies catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator.

Is that a threat?

Idk maybe I was never informed on how the fundamentals I learned in college applied to an entire electrical grid and the implications I would need to understand if I were to hypothetically own a home some day. Would have been nice if you started out by explaining this instead of insulting my intelligence but maybe that’s just not how we operate here. Edit: The only surges I had heard of happening thus far were from power returning after an outage, and I’ve never experienced one afaik.

Yep. Happens a few times yearly for me here in the midwest, in every place I’ve ever lived, usually after a storm knocks out a power line or a transformer blows. It’s generally not for longer than a day or two but a direct lightning strike did knock it out once for like a week. Given, my state ranks pretty low for electrical grid reliability.

Our power companies, being privatized, have very little incentive to invest in their infrastructure until it’s already on its last legs and they can’t avoid it anymore. So they invest in politicians that let them put it off for as long as possible instead :)

What was it they said about capitalism breeding innovation?

lol. My bachelor of science in electrical engineering begs to differ but go off I guess.

Close. Cousin of dyslexia.

Oh I get it. You’re trolling. Nice.

Jesus Christ dude.

First of all, I’m american, I’m a woman, and just look at our highway system. Black neighborhoods were bulldozed and paved over with highway interchanges. Cities were destroyed and continue to suffer from their existence. St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Chicago, etc., etc., didn’t happen because suburbs ‘won’ in the free market of infrastructure or something.

Remember 8 mile, that road you don’t go past in Detroit? Hmm yeah I wonder how that happened if bridges/crosswalks are such a good replacement for infrastructure that doesn’t require those things in the first place. Infrastructure can facilitate national movement but it can also stand locally as an impenetrable wall. Put as many expensive “gateways” up as you want, it’s still a fucking wall. There’s a reason rivers are used as division lines between cities, states, and countries.

Do you really think there’s going to be a perfect route through ALL of that land and that avoiding population centers wouldn’t negate its usefulness?

Edit: also “underutilized” is an insane term to use for land. Just because humans aren’t utilizing it, doesn’t mean that land is devoid of use by other life. There is an entire ecosystem across this country that shouldn’t be disturbed if we can help it, much less a river be built through it. I mean come on, we have a mass extinction event going on right now, all the way down to the fucking insects that splatter on our windshields.

Luckily this entire swath of land is completely void of human and animal life and nobody will be emminent-domained out of their homes and livelihoods with little to no reward for doing so, and bridges are notoriously so much more permeable than plain flat land. I’m such a silly goose to not have thought of those things when I wrote that very serious comment about this very serious hypothetical 🥸

Yeah I don’t really care to play with strangers and none of my friends have ever asked to play so I also stick to single player games when I do play.

I could get on board with a moat around Texas and Florida

Nevermind any communities you’d separate or destroy by dropping a big ol’ river through the middle of them

I mean this is a pretty good visual representation of what they did when they built all the highways, just more spread out and the negative implications being mostly pushed off onto whoever didn’t have enough political capital to resist them, i.e. minorities.

That’s definitely what I’ve observed. The constant whining gets pretty grating, wish they would finally just form their own instances and defederate from whoever the hell they want. Instead they sit around in the largest most entry-level instance and badmouth and whine at the mods to cut off any instance where the majority view is to the left of and critical of the status quo.

That’s not how I read it… it’s not really democracy if the guy being voted for is lying to the voters without repercussion (thus obstructing the voters’ right to make an informed decision) so they can get into office and do things they know the voters wouldn’t have voted for. That’s anti-democratic in itself. This meme isn’t saying democracy bad, it’s saying that what we have now isn’t a democracy.

This word has lost all meaning at this point.