America desperately needs a third, fourth or more political parties rather than deciding between which half of the one party state.

I just had a talk with a friend of mine in southern Ontario who lives in a farming rural area. He likes cars and often does searches for used vehicles in his area. In a 200km area around Brantford, there are over 200 used Teslas on sale down there over the past month or two because people are dumping them because they don’t like the brand.

The cost is not so much in losing the product but in deciding when and how much to invest in increased security. The more shoplifting happens, then the owner has to start investing in more security cameras, security guards and legal costs of dealing with law enforcement and courts. Then no matter what products or items you try to discriminate against, the owners and corporations just raise the prices of everything to cover their costs.

You can’t base their company value on the stock market … you base it on how much power and influence they have over government.

And judging by the amount of stupidly arranged love affair they are having with the government … they should be very highly valued.

Don’t waste your energy on people who won’t listen.

Look for people, places and groups that support your own beliefs.

If you can’t find those people at work, then just be nice to them but not too close. Them in your free time, use your energy to support those people and groups you believe in.

Don’t waste your time on those who won’t listen.

Beautiful … bookmarked and saved … my personal best so far is 1023 m

So many important issues affecting America right now … and the country and its government is fixated and pouring so much energy, manpower, knowledge, education, experience and capability into … renaming something on a map that no really gives a shit about.

I guess we’ll have to keep experimenting to determine which parts need the reinforcing in order to achieve our goal of two second levitation

Beautiful, I was waiting for an engineer to do the calculations … so in layman’s terms, clench your urethra, push your bladder as hard as unhumanly as possible and hope to everything that is holy that your entire urinary tract doesn’t explode before your urine leaves your body.

I also find that I’m using Youtube less and less and just watch full professionally made programs, documentaries or shows. I’m getting to the point of wondering why I watch a bunch of mindless junk while being interrupted by even more mindless junk advertising for hours on end.

It’s weird because I feel like I’m taking back my time to watch all the shows and stuff I wanted to watch in the 90s over cable TV but never had access. If I cut all the stupid time I use to watch junk on Youtube, now I have time to watch all that stuff I wanted to watch a long time ago.

I don’t use ad blockers … I’ve gone back to my old cable TV habits from the 90s … use the mute button and take a toilet break, get a drink from the kitchen, check your social media feed, knit a sweater, talk to your spouse … then unmute and keep watching.

The bonus is that if you happen to miss the restart, you can rewind back to what you missed … we never had that in the 90s. Sure PVR existed but not everyone had one.

Do we allow private enterprise total control over social media who then use their control to flood society with their propaganda use their power to blackmail, control, bully or worse.

OR

Do we allow government agencies total control over social media who then use their control to flood society with their propaganda use their power to blackmail, control, bully or worse.

At least with the publicly controlled government option, we would all have some measure of control or regulation. It would take a lot more organization and complication for bad actors to manipulate the message because they first have to take control of government.

Leaving control of social media in private hands means we’ve already given up control because bad actors can just buy whatever message they want and push it to everyone. Their message and manipulation guides everyone to the government they want. Bad actors win because they have control of social media and can win control of government.

The game is already set. We want to argue that the government shouldn’t have control of these things because we don’t/won’t/can’t trust government … but we are more than willing to put our trust in private for profit corporations.

One way around this is to nationalize social media companies. Use public funding to run the service instead of private companies and run the service in the same way as licensing a vehicle to drive on the highway.

Social media has essentially become a public necessity that everyone wants and needs, it should be run and regulated like the public water system. It should be run, controlled, regulated and monitored by a system like the postal service where it isn’t designed to make money but instead concentrate all is activity into just providing a critical independent service to everyone.

This isn’t new and noteworthy … because we humans don’t understand human history and fail miserably to understand or remember past failings in every generation.

It’s very disturbing because it’s creeping acceptance by massaging the message over time.

First a billionaire makes the salute

Then you get everyone to debate it

Then everyone associates it less and less to nazism

Then it’s just a gesture billionaires do

Then it’s just a gesture

Then it becomes more common

Then it becomes normal

But he is given a conditional pass because he is part Irish as well as a Catholic

The universe is now in danger

True there are different types of poor and different types of people that see life as completely normal in any circumstances. We are all very adaptable creatures in whatever situation you place us in.

I grew up poor and I didn’t know it for about the first 10/15 years of my life. We had enough food but it was just that … enough … we never had extras, no snacks, no guilty pleasures. I have good teeth because I didn’t have the opportunity to eat a lot of junk food when I was younger which then led me to not really want it when I got older.

A lot of people around me were the same or similar … it was just the way things were and we were more or less just happy and content with it all. It was normal so there was nothing too upsetting about it. Unfortunately, not all families were as capable as ours. In a community full of people in the same boat, about half couldn’t do it and they fell into extreme poverty, addictions, bad health and just generally miserable lives. Then in my life, I started venturing out into the world and saw how wealthy everyone else was and I wanted to do the same but as a brown skinned Native person, the entire game was rigged against me … I couldn’t get schooling, I couldn’t find work, I wasn’t wanted, I wasn’t needed and I was just different. I had to work really hard to get anything. People also claim that my school could have been paid for but it only works when you work the system and are connected to everyone and everything in that system … I wasn’t and I had to fight my own leadership, my own community and the non-Native government about everything in order to get anything done. I barely scraped by and found work on my own, made a bit of money and barely made it to become an adult. Of all the family and friends I grew up that were like me … I think only about a quarter of us made it to something, a handful got post secondary and became lawyers and doctors or something important and the majority of the rest just ended up at home in varying levels of poverty from just getting by to literally living on the streets with small children. All in a situation where it is believed that we Native people get free money and have the world handed to us.

Money may not buy happiness but it sure helps and no matter how you frame it, poverty makes everything harder to do.

I keep having this and similar conversations with my wife and my friends and family …

The majority of the world has always been in a bad mood because 90% of planet has always been poor, struggling, doesn’t have enough, live in poverty, are hungry and are generally not happy.

The only difference is that us in the rich west have been recently affected and are facing a near future where our comfort and freedoms are going to be affected. We are starting to feel what the rest of the world has been feeling for a long, long time.

I say all this from the perspective of an Indigenous Canadian because I grew up poor and in a circumstance where me and my family were always made to feel less than the rest of the Canada.