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The problem is the flock of Trump-wannabes.

Trump not only poured gasoline and lit the match, but he proved that outrage politics work. He proved that it’s ok to be blatantly dishonest, immoral, and corrupt, and there were no consequences. He proved you can ignore the Constitution and legal restrictions.

And others in his party have copied that approach, and also found it working (admittedly to a smaller extent). I don’t see this approach going away

Think of it as creating a new non-MAGA Republican Party, including a few right wing Democrats.

Democrat party continues as before, minus a handful of Jim Manchins

In general, even up here in woke-ville, punishments have gotten a lot more strict for kids. There’s a lot more involvement of police, courts, jail. As a parent it causes me a lot of anxiety - whatever happened to school being a “sandbox” where a kid can make mistakes without adult consequences, without ruining their lives? Did that ever exist?

I’m certainly one of those who hope this place will remain better than Reddit, but Reddit had a lot of good qualities for a lot of years.

Perhaps instead of generally hating on Reddit, we be more specific about the negative characteristic we don’t want. Are you specifically comolaining about fake content?

The problem is that while I recognize this is fake, it’s a satisfying circle jerk (or is that what you are specifically complaining about?), and is one of the possible answers to “why did they vote like that?”

It’s on my list to do something about mine as well. The vendor sells automated modules at a ridiculous price so I don’t want to do that. However I have the reaching poke so it hasn’t been a priority. It’s been quite a few years now so I’m starting to wonder if replacing the blinds will come up in priority before I get to automating them

I’ve got an extra tall living room, and without a 15’ ladder there’s no way I can actuate the pull down shades

Not what you’re looking for but maybe you should have as a backup plan….. I’ve got a pole that works in my similar situation. It telescopes to 12’, has a handle to simplify turning to adjust the blinds, and a hook at the end to grab hold for raising and lowering.

And it’s automated too. I can use a voice assistant to send a command to raise or lower …. As long as one of my kids is in the room. /s

That doesn’t make it any more sensible the benefit of two car payments is that cars last long enough so you can stagger them and never need to make two payments

What the …..

Expecting my state to be one of the highest - as a high cost of living state, we can afford it more than most - but it’s among the lowest? I find it crazy that the highest states are the same as the ones who can least afford it.

They apparently don’t realize that. I have no idea what’s in the mind of people voting so against their own interests, but

• if they’re low information, she speaks up to communicate more
• if they’re gullible, she speaks up to get them to realize
• if people have a general despair, she speaks up to connect that to the perpetrator.
• if people have no attention span, she speaks up to keep it in the spotlight
• if people think “both sides the same”, she speaks up to say we’re different

At this moment I guarantee you that way too many people still think we’re reducing ” waste, fraud and abuse”, that Trump understands business, way too many people believe 150 year old dead immigrants are ruining our Medicaid. In the next congressional election, only a little more of a year from now, I guarantee you that far too many voters will have forgotten this issue existed or who created it, believe that this time Republicans support family values and being fiscally responsible.

I’m firmly in the camp of “if you build it, they will come”. Intercity rail in the northeast corridor has been a huge success, generating profits to fund the rest of the system. It’s somewhat self-reinforcing: most of Amtrak is impractical, inconvenient, useless so of course no one will use it. But NEC, especially Acela, proves that people will use intercity rail if it’s actually useful. They will prefer it.

Continued investment, continued expansion, will make it available to more people to become a primary means of transport.

We start with places it will best work where people want it, then connect and expand, take advantage of the network affect. But it’s all politics. Politicians need to make it happen. We don’t actually need more money but the wisdom to rebalance the excess car transportation investments

We’ve all come to expect instant results and that’s really not going to happen here. Most of that scatter was built up with huge expansion of cars after wwii, it was built up over 80 years. Building last decades, that’s generally a good thing. But taking these two factors together, rebuilding our population centers should be expected to take a very long time. That doesn’t mean we give up: it means we make the investments and changes now. We plant the trees now, with the expectation that our grandchildren will sit in the shade.

One of the ways my city has been reinventing itself is with transit oriented development. Build the train first but develop a master plan around stops to develop people oriented population centers. That takes years to build out plus is one stop at a time. A big change last year was to require every community served by transit to establish special zoning near transit to encourage denser population growth. If this works, we’ll be completely different in a century or so

It’s never futile. Sure, Trump will never listen, never care about anyone whose not himself, never face justice (crap, now you’re depressing me), but what about Al the minion who do his bidding. I mean, they’re evil too, but going deeper ….

This all can’t happen without supporters. Maybe it’s voters who are low information or easily manipulated finally seeing the truth. Maybe it’s federal employees feeling the support to do the right thing. Maybe it’s law enforcement growing shame at how they’ve been used. Maybe it’s judicial branch standing up from being marginalized and corporatized, fighting back against legalized bribery and corroded ethics at the highest court.

The billionaires big bill was passed in the senate on a tie breaker. It would have take only one more senator to be swayed. Big elections coming up in a little over a year- your peers might elect someone who will actually serve them. Various states and cities, corps and law firms are standing up for what’s right: maybe you can get one more