People don’t really comprehend what being wealthy is like. We imagine the high-rollers table in Vegas, or sailing a yacht in some Caribbean paradise.

Usually it just means being able to fix your car when it needs repairs. It means taking a vacation and splurging on dinner out without going into a lot of debt. It means hiring landscapers and house cleaners to do the upkeep that two-income families don’t have time to do. It means having kids without going completely bankrupt.

It’s actually kind of sad that these things are not possible anymore if you aren’t rich.

Kamala is polling worse than Biden. Is she really your best option?

Tell me your plan. How is she going to turn it around between now and November? What can Kamala do that Biden can’t? How is she going to avoid the appearance that the Democrats don’t care what their primary voters think?

Kamala is already in the race. What could she do at the top of the ticket that she can’t do now?

And if it’s not Harris, then who? Give me a name, and then answer all of those questions for that person.

What a horrible day to be literate.

I would vote for anyone opposite Trump.

I don’t believe that a plurality of voters would vote for anyone opposite Trump. I’m not narcissistic enough to think everyone thinks like me. I recognize that most voters don’t follow politics, don’t engage with the news, and don’t really care much about learning who the candidates are.

The most important factor for all elections everywhere is name recognition. People want to feel like they know what they’re doing, even if they have made zero effort to engage in the process.

It is far too late for anyone other than Biden to introduce themselves to America.

Trump doesn’t need to convince people to vote for him. His acolytes will show up to vote. Trump just needs to convince everyone who won’t vote for him that it’s pointless to go to the polls. One neat little gift the DNC could give to Trump would be to say to all Democrats that their primaries don’t matter and there’s no reason to vote. Annointing a new candidate now, after people have cast their votes, would be a giant fuck you to every voter who has been screaming for better candidates over the last 6 years. Nothing will kill enthusiasm for voting quicker than passing the buck to someone new.

And let’s say they do pick someone else. They haven’t been vetted or tested. They haven’t campaigned in any states. They haven’t built the infrastructure or donor network or legal team. What if the new candidate has a scandal? Does the party hand the baton to yet another candidate? Should we leave the ballots blank? Do like a MLB trade, where we all vote for “A candidate to be named at a later date.”

Like it or not, we are stuck with Biden for this one. February 1st, we can all start talking about if he should step down, who should be Harris’ VP, whether the Dems have someone that can win in 2028, etc.

I’m curious, though, who is your candidate? You get to hand pick the name on the ballot across from Trump, who is it? Whitmer or Newsom? Buttigieg or Shapiro? If they are so great, why aren’t you calling to replace Harris on the ticket? I mean, that’s the stronger play, right? If you wanted Harris, you could just argue that a vote for Biden is a vote for Harris, because he’s really old and can resign as soon as he is sworn in. That’s the best of both strategies.

But it’s not Harris. So why not replace her on the ballot with your dream candidate? It solves the primary problem, since people were casting votes for Biden, and he’s still on the ballot. Plus, then the new person can introduce themselves to America, and Harris can retire to write her book.

Extremely sad. But that’s still the standard, which is why I’m still voting for Biden. Maybe after the election, and Trump and his cronies are actually behind bars, we can worry about 2026 and electing some actual progressive leaders. But the puppet masters behind Trump, the Project 2025 dipshits, they’re not going to go away quietly. Fascists never do.

I’m so tired of people trying to get famous by dunking on Biden.

Is he old? Yes. Out of touch? Yes. Does he misspeak? Frequently. Is he publicly supporting Israel while Netanyahu engages in human rights atrocities and crimes against humanity? Also yes. Is Biden a centrist oligarch who represents a status quo continuation of the devout capitalist policies that are rapidly destroying the world? Sure.

But he’s still better than Trump. And he’s the best chance we have at defeating Trump. America can survive a second Biden presidency. We will have a lot of work to do, but it will be worth doing. The USA will not survive another Trump presidency. It will be the end of the experiment, and the beginning of a whole new nightmare.

So Biden must win.

To that end, I have a modest proposal for the armchair pundits on Xitter, all the comics and authors and panelists hoping to make it to the next cable news roundtable as a contributor. When Biden does the next stupid thing, makes the next gaffe, fucks up again (Jesus fuck, did he say he’s a minority woman?), whatever, whenever you come up with that perfect burn, the clever observation that is going to go viral and get eyes on your name, feel free to share it. Biden is not King, regardless of what the SCOTUS* would have us believe, so he is not immune to criticism. But when you post it, include the addendum “But I’m still voting for him, because Trump would be worse.” Make it part of your signature, or shorten it to BISVFH to conserve characters.

Doing this will help all the rest of us reading your comments, so we don’t feel the need to explain to you why you should still vote for Biden. It will also help us more quickly identify the foreign agents and online trolls who exist to stir up discord and assist Trump.

Biden sucks. He really does. But I’m still voting for him, because Trump would be worse.

Remember when they stripped Lance of his win, and they were going to award it to the next place finisher who didn’t also cheat, but they didn’t have one?

It’s not about the food, it’s about the assumption.

If you have watermelon, friend chicken, and grape soda, and you offer it to people, you’re not a racist.

If you assume a black person would prefer watermelon, fried chicken, and grape soda, because that’s what black people like, that’s a form of racism.

If you avoid offering watermelon to your black friend, you’re being racist. Not because of the watermelon, but because when I said “your black friend” you thought of that one friend who is black that occupies the space in your memory as “your black friend.” It was a clever trick to catch you being racist, you racist.

But seriously, good food is delicious, and you should enjoy what you like. Share what you like with people, and find out what they like. Don’t make assumptions about anyone.

I’m a guy, but if I had an answer for that, I wouldn’t be here answering this question.

Our best understanding of neurology is like a blank map. As we grow and learn, we discover places on the map. We discover where the feelings on our fingers grow, and how to imitated the noises we hear. We discover the balance and coordination to walk and run and flip. Each place on the map is connected like pathways through a forest. The more we run along the path, the wider and more permanent it becomes.

The true power of the human mind is the ability of language. We have a superpower, to create an infinite number of sounds and shapes that arbitrarily describe an unlimited set of concepts. There are things we never dreamed of that our grandchildren will name, and it is this capacity to observe, remember, and describe things that has given rise to every great human accomplishment.

You learned the word “airport” as a place on your map. You never needed to connect it to the etymological history of the word, so you never needed to walk those paths. They were always there, which is why it seems obvious to you now, and also why a lot of people have the initial inclination to say “duh, of course.” That’s an expected response.

But we should all appreciate and marvel at the enormity of civilized history that has us here, scribing words on glass and light and copper, sending them instantaneously around the world, to discuss how the place where our flying machines engage in cooperative commerce and transport, how that concept is so mundane that you never even bothered to glance at the constituent words as separate concepts.

This is an amazing world, and we are all marvelous creatures. We are the absolute quintessence of stardust, and our progeny will look back on us as quaint.

Man, these are good drugs.

I wouldn’t say “most.” I just think the loudest voices are the assholes, and that applies to every group across all ideologies. That’s not unique to vegans, but so much industry is built on suffering and has deficated time and effort to painting all vegans with the same brush. And it’s not just animal suffering. Every capitalist knows, and fears, that if consumers begin caring about animal rights, human rights are a natural extension.

Three things:

First, people eat meat because it tastes good and is widely available. You can’t make it not taste good, but we can insist on better regulatory requirements that might make meat more expensive or less ubiquitous. Every person seeks validation for the behaviors they choose every day. That’s human nature, and that’s why it’s easy to false equivalences like avocados are worse than beef. People want to believe it because it’s easier than changing. We’re not going to save the planet by changing everybody. People need to be forced to change by law or by circumstance.

Second, this is terrible journalism. The author probably wanted to be a novelist, but nobody wanted to publish a young adult series about a girl who discovers she can talk to farm animals and is whisked away to a private school for animal talkers.

News articles, even editorials, don’t require suspense. You don’t build tension by slowly revealing information. This article is five paragraphs in before they get to anything resembling a point, and it’s several more paragraphs of slowly revealing the findings of the study like a detective walking through the crime scene, discovering new clues along the way.

Third, the author is exactly the sort of smarmy, “told-ya-so” douchebag that carnists assume of all vegans. “… have you considered that vegans are annoying?” Yes. You are very annoying, and it undercuts the points you’re trying to make.

We should be looking at the results of this study and trying to determine how to overcome the daily hurdles people face and disinformation campaigns of the meat industry. Calling people stupid for being fallible in ways all humans are is just mean-spirited and counterproductive.

I feel like Gotham already covered a lot of that ground.

TIL thanks! Which VPN would you suggest?

And he didn’t hurt anyone else. A lot of people who fuck around with fireworks hurt innocent bystanders.

I feel bad for his widow.

It’s a vpn. There are many, that’s just one example.

I don’t trust anyone, but I haven’t heard bat things about PIA. That was just the first one I looked up. Did something happen that we shouldn’t trust them? I know Nord is now suspect.

Private Internet Access, it’s a VPN that handles streaming and torrenting well.

Of course we should. Teaching should be a highly compensated profession, and taxes should pay for every penny. Education pays dividends for society as a whole.

But teachers are not entitled to the production of their students. They should not expect students to be indebted or repay the education.

I’m the sort of procrastinator who avoids tasks because I will obsess over them until I am consumed by them. I have a trip in three weeks, and I want to start packing right now so that there’s time to shop for anything we might need but don’t realize we don’t have, but I also know that I’ll be doing laundry the night before we are set to leave because I always forget that one thing.

My wife will pack a few days in advance, and will pack the clothes she has clean. Maybe there will be one load of laundry to wash the one thing she knows she wants to bring but she knows it is dirty and knows exactly where it is. She will do that load of laundry three days before we leave. She’s like some kind of sorcerer.