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You probably know fewer than 20 people who live in poverty yet think you know everyone who’s poor?

I’m surrounded by the dumb fucks in a deep red state in the country; nearly everyone I’ve ever interacted with my entire life lives in poverty. The fact that you have a RETIREMENT FUND AT ALL puts you well above that line.

You know what you can’t have when you’re in poverty? Retirement funds. Because it’s considered equity and you’re not allowed to have any in order to get government assistance. The only things exempt from that are your homesteaded house, and 2 cars (and only if both adults in the house are working!)

It’s not very shortsighted, it’s quite long-sighted. Everything has been shit since the 2008 crash. Absolutely dog-shit garbage. Wages haven’t changed, everyone’s already in the hole.

I’d have loved a few more years of floating it, but the writing has been on the wall for some time now. It’s going to suck for everyone, I’m sure - but the market never corrected in 2008. It was going to happen some time or another - I’m just happy Republicans are going to be on the hook for it.

It’s going to take 10 years to come back from this - but I suspect in doing so, we’ll be in a better place in the long term. Last people who did this weren’t re-elected for damn near 20 years. We’ve all said this was the last gasp of a dying political party. It’s gonna suck, sure – but I’m hopeful for the future and the rebound it will cause.

On top of it all, I’ve been using it as leverage to fuck with every Trump voter I see in my shop.

Honestly, we’ve needed this crash since back when Obama was president, and we got a bunch of propped up corporations. They socialized the losses, so to speak.

Nobody I know in poverty is affected by stocks, so fuck them all.

Venezuela has tons of billionaires I bet. It’s not about the number, it’s about the inequality at the tippy top.

We didn’t shift cultural perception at all. We may have enacted laws, but the people aren’t any more or less receptive than they have been. That will take generations. Only thing that happened is that people hid it. Take a good long look at US politics and tell me that gay people and black people are any more accepted than they were…as half the population looks to tear down the institutions which allowed their equality to happen…

You haven’t changed people. Your society hasn’t changed what people are. They’ve only changed what you see from the outside. It’s only people like you, who have never had to live in the dregs of society who have this rosey ideal of the world.

Culture comes and goes. Shifts and ebbs and flows. Humanity may take longer to evolve, but that also means that what has evolved is much more stable, and much more rock solid than ‘civility’ could ever budge. We have higher-order thinking brains, and lower-order feeling brains. The lower-order feeling brain is the one that drives sex, food, hunger, and survival. That tribalistic instinct comes from that lower-order brain, and no amount of education will ever eliminate how it functions. The only way to do that would be eugenics, and the world has decided that is a “bad thing”.

Our major advantage as a species is that we evolve faster culturally than most species can genetically.

Can we? Is this a statement of fact, or is this just wishful thinking on your part? Because I know quite a bit about history and, time and time again this doesn’t seem to be true whatsoever. We are tribalistic by nature, and we’ve never been able to permanently break this fact.

It’s not appealing to tribalism, it’s understanding of the factual nature of ourselves. You have to know the worst of humanity, because you’re never going to rid yourself of it. Many things will knock us down as people to our most basic of instincts, and these basic rules still govern our actions.

I happen to live in the real world, not some idealistic utopia of what the world “could be”.

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PVC fell out of use in the 2000s, most buildings use PEX now; but I don’t know how that compares.

Yep, even metal-canned sodas have a plastic liner on the inside of them.

Holy hell, nice find!

You can get 'em for <$500 if you look the right places. And it follows the rule of never skimping on anything between you and the earth. Shoes, Tires, etc.

Most gaming chairs are an easy 200+. At that price range, an office chair is GOING to outperform it in terms of comfort.

Gaming chairs on the other hand, throw on some pads with different colored stitching, and are incredibly low quality.

I managed to get my whole family some really good office chairs because a local business chucked them all in a local dumpster. Most of them just needed to have the foot-rests removed to be completely perfect. I looked them up, and they are all $600+ chairs brand new. Dumpster diving has always been fun :)

“Gaming Chairs” are for idiot consumers. Office chairs are where it’s at. Office chairs are designed to be sat in for 8+ hours a day.