“Capitalism” has it in the name. It’s all about money and it doesn’t matter how you got it, only that you have it now, and the core of the system is the naive belief that those with the most money are also the best people.

They offer a fix behind a bunch of barriers? Is it not in settings with an obvious on/off toggle for the thing?

I’m in Canada. We’re not doing great but we at least didn’t let the Conservatives win last time when everything pointed to that happening. We barely did it, and we still only got centrists out of the deal, and “we” still includes all the fools who voted Conservative, but PP didn’t even win his own riding, let alone the country. A big part of the problem is that one of the US’s major exports is its conservative, capitalist ideology and it spreads like a cancer from there. Many of out right-wing politicians are just copying the southern neighbours and we have right-wingers who cannot even seem to understand that we’re a separate country. That said, we also have a lot of people here who’ve committed to avoiding buying from the US wherever possible and that’s pretty awesome.

A LOT of money from the US goes toward funding right-wing extremism across the world. It’s hard to fight back against it, and it would be a lot easier if they’d stop falling for the most obvious, disgusting lies and conmen.

The 50% idiots are still US citizens. I don’t know why people act like we’re all just supposed to act like millions of people, and millions more who are “undecided voters” just don’t count. I know there are good people in the US, really I do, but as a country you can’t just act like the people you don’t like aren’t such a major part of the fabric of the place. Besides, the propaganda isn’t even that clever and half the time is just an excuse for people to say what they’re already thinking out loud.

Ya’ll need to accept that this is who you are if you’re ever going to grow out of it. And you need to understand that I don’t give shit about the good people there if the main export of my neighbour is pain and suffering.

Canadians are disappointing me right now, and I’m not going to act like they aren’t Canadians. I’m from Ontario, and we couldn’t even rustle up 50% voter turnout to get rid of an obvious criminal at the helm of the province. That’s not me but is us.

It’s been decades. I don’t have all the answers for what to do right now but they had so many opportunities to steer away from this. It’s the Bob’s Burger Tina car crash situation and it would be embarrassing if those people could actually pay attention to what’s going on.

They plugged their ears and ignored all the signs and now they have to figure out how to get out of the hole they dug.

It’s been that way for a very long time. Look at the wealth gap during the recession, look at the lifestyle gap there, and you can see just how much power and influence corporations have. It’s a country built on private business exploiting the working class in whatever new and innovative way is the trend for the season.

Businesses own the country and they always have. It’s worse now, by a lot, but it’s not different.

They pumped themselves up(“mark my words”) on an obvious observation of the present as if they made some clever prediction of the future. This is a thing trope when it comes to US politics; people are always saying “just wait it’s gunna get worse!” and then very few ever do anything with their supposed powers of clairvoyance.

If that’s being a warrior then buddy you’re in trouble.

Why wait? They already do basically that with prison farms.

Ya’ll really love to wait until the bad things have already happened to still do nothing about it, huh?

“This is not American”

How many FUCKING TIMES do we have to tell you mouth-breathing morons that this kind of shit is PRECISELY what the US has always been about? “Who could seen this com”- ALL OF US SAW IT COMING, and we’ve been begging you to pay attention for decades upon decades!

A stupid country full of stupid people who couldn’t pass an open-book text if there was a gun to their head. Ya’ll suck rocks.

Trump is not a powerful wizard, all his power comes from people who give it to them. Those people have a choice, and this is it.

For most people Apple products are absolutely consumer friendly, what are you talking about? They’re amazingly simple to setup and go, the ecosystem actually works well, and they’re far more reliable than anything Microsoft could dream of putting out. They also don’t go obsolete within in a year, that’s total nonsense, and in fact they have generally had better support than their main competitors as far as I’ve seen. People I know have kept their Apple machines for a very long time without much issue. I myself had my first MacBook for ~11 years, from 2010 to 2021.

For people who to tinker with software there’s still a lot you can do on them but back in the Windows vs. Mac days some ill-informed people decided that because Apple products work well they must be hard to code on, despite the Unix based nature of them. Currently, many people I know in software are issued MacBooks and say they work very well while the Windows machine I got for something as simple as AutoCAD was constantly having issues.

Their consumer unfriendly tactics aren’t directly to connected to the capability of the machines. They 100% do some bad shit on that front, but it’s not enough to push most regular customers away. If you can’t figure out the difference between yourself and a regular customer then this isn’t a conversation you clearly have all the information for. Most of what you’re saying is just the usual parroted garbage that muddies the conversation and frankly makes it harder to deal with the companies actual failings because it just shows a grotesque inability to understand why people like their products.

I will be very clear: This overt move beyond the usual corpo nightmare has soured me a lot on their products, which sucks because they are objectively very good. I also don’t entirely know what to do about it as making a switch to Google products is just as bad a move. I’ve heard of a couple alternatives, we’ll see what the landscape will look like in a couple years when I need a phone and several years after that when a new laptop is required.

More comfortable US citizens love to say that they’re not somewhere “truly awful” just yet because it means that they don’t have to do anything, or that it’s not there turn to do anything. Trump’s got no one really standing in his way and over three years to do whatever he wants so all this is as good as done and still the country does so little.

They gotta grow up and do something.

This is capitalism. In that system the money is the important part and so how you get it mostly doesn’t matter. Corruption is part of it, and they use the money to make sure the laws that would punish them don’t exist.

Means to me that he cares about what he’s doing even if he’s not winning. Texans should see him as someone who cares enough to stay engaged with them.

In Canada, our Conservative party leader lost his riding of twenty years. Instead of staying to even pretend he cares he immediately packed up and moved to Alberta where a young conservative MP in a stronghold voluntarily(doubt) stepped down so he could run in a by-election in a place he has no attachment to just so he can stay the leader of the party.

Beto actually seems to care about his area and he seems more focused on making Texas better than just having power somewhere with an easy win and I got mad respect for that.

The older one or the weird newer one that looked like the affordable sedan of supercars?

Except she doesn’t say that she still feels unwelcome.

This is a weird comment and you’re weird for writing it. Lady just suggested people volunteer so they get integrated and you took offense to that while lashing out like she’s the insecure one? Ok, buddy, sure thing lol.

I don’t think it will be better off in the short term, and have been fairly clear about that. I also said that I am fully aware how entangled everything is and that we need to work to get away from the US even though it will be difficult. It appears you are far too fucking stupid to read what has been written so explicitly and that’s just not the basis for a conversation so bye, dumbass.

That’s great for you, but a) the person at the top of this thread says “the direction North America takes” and, as Canadian, excuse me, and b) I have seen others even on this platform say things like how Canada has to go save the US from itself via military intervention. Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened.

Absolutely the US has made it so that as it fails catastrophically it has a lot of tools to try to take everyone else down with it and yes, I understand that means we can’t just ignore the problem, but what was once hope that we could work together to help them has turned into finding ways to untangle ourselves from them and work with more serious countries. It’s gone from “let’s treat this wound” to “there’s necrosis and we need to amputate”. The US has shown the world over and over again that it hates everyone else, that it thinks itself superior and that it has no interest in being civil about any of it. It is a dangerous and self-serving country that can barely handle the basic fundamentals of democracy and human rights and is currently going backwards at an alarming rate.

If they want to isolate themselves from everyone else, and that seems to be the goal, then let ‘em. Even though it will be hard, the rest of the world can pick up the slack. The US doesn’t deserve or need to be in charge and I don’t care how uncomfortable that makes you.

Yea, great idea, except that if you think degrees lead to general intelligence you’ve gotta get out more. I know way too many people with specialized degrees who really only know that one thing and half the time they aren’t even good at that. In the US, and many other places, education is something that is restricted and there are many barriers to it which just bring us back to a rich vs poor situation.

It turns out that earning a degree is actually quite simple and more a test of your ability to navigate the schooling process than your ability to learn and apply that information. I went to college and I’ve seen some absolutely braindead people graduate, and I’ve worked with university grads who are smart and also with university grads who are a step or two away from eating glue in the printer room. I’ve met people who never went to any post-secondary education who have a great handle on things but either their career doesn’t require “higher education” or they weren’t able to afford to even think about it.

Example: There are medical doctors and nurses who are against vaccines. A small amount, so few that it’s obvious that they’re completely wrong, but they still exist. There are engineers who can barely keep themselves together, and developers who can’t stop not understanding how the world works. Donald Trump went to a prestigious university and he’s about as stupid as they come, alongside pretty much every Republican.