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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Oddly if you look into a lot of them, there were a lot of “small business owners” that aren’t beholden to a company or people connected to someone else’s wealth, or illegal under the table wealth, or other shady things. It has been a while since I looked into it, but it was a combination of personal fiscal stupid decisions, access to rich with money to burn. The tl;dr was basically: they didn’t care what they did to themselves because they thought The Orange Oompa McBurger Loompa was going to anoint them all soldiers of his magic rich person court.

    When you have a fatalist/selfish/sure-thing psychology working “outside” the system, you really don’t care if your kids have medication, and you don’t lose your health insurance because you’re taking Ivermectin from the neighborhood vet that sells it under the table.


  • I feel like it has to be a very “American” solution, annoyingly. Like, reconfigure your W4 to the minimum amount of withholding without getting in legal trouble. Pay the bare minimum on student loans and miss payments for a few months if you don’t mind the credit ding. Buy nothing except your bare minimum to survive/provide for your family. Create an action hedge fund where everyone tosses in $20 that is crowd-sourced to start shorting stocks that affect the oligarchs the most and its entire mission is to fuck up the stock market. Stop using mainstream social medias so the oligarchs have a harder time mass-surveilling, stop paying for monthly entertainment services, find the cheapest cell phone plan you can find, use your old phone a bit longer and don’t buy a new one. Avoid buying any new “consumer goods” that aren’t completely necessary. Find ways to carpool and reduce the amount of fuel you’re using. Cancel Amazon Prime. Cancel subscriptions to sub-par media like Washington Post and NY Times.

    Oh, and that money saved? Save it, save it all, kill outstanding debts, they hate it when debts are paid off. Pay off the student loan, the mortgage, the credit card. Or just save a pile of fuck you money so when things do get darker, you at least have enough money to float for a few months without a job.

    Basically, collectively reduce our “economic footprint” with some fun horse bet manipulation of their precious stock market while saving up for a nationwide strike. You’re still shopping at your local stores and supporting local workers. Day to day doesn’t change too much, you just have a little less. However that works out for each individual.

    Unfortunately, this approach takes coordination on a large level, but it would also collectively impact citizens’ direct lives the least to avoid the, “lost my job and my insurance went away with it and I now need $3000 a month for medications,” problem, while affecting the oligarchs’ precious stocks from multiple attack vectors.




  • So, time to stop paying federal students loans and income taxes, eh?

    Edit: student loans would be more difficult because loan default but the W4 can be adjusted so no income is deducted for Federal taxes. One would just have to be sure to put that money aside in a savings account to pay next year with no current impact in this tax year. Looks like there would have to be some quarterly payments or one would otherwise incur penalties. So it’d be a bit tricky to pull off cleanly. Maybe someone better at tax code could figure out a way to just do this quarterly.




  • Yeah, I agree-ish, and they weren’t accounted for in that metric above either. I grapple with processing the thought because I had to vehemently discuss at great length to some voting in that direction that “you can’t help others (countries) until you help yourself (USA)” as they grappled with the, “I don’t want to actively vote for genocide.” They also didn’t realize due to being younger that “oh, honey” moment when America has been complicit in the killing of so many humans, and this election was an inflection point of literal doom. (To be fair, the Democratic party should have treated it with the same respect, and didn’t.) Not to downplay the killing of humans, but just…and now, this.

    These non-voters were using what they consider their power to vote (or not), which is what we all should respect as a power we have (or had anyway) and try to do good in their own way, they just didn’t realize that this was literally them choosing to fuck themselves, their friends, their families, their country, their planet.

    Maybe I’m being too compassionate to our other citizens in general, I even really hope TurboHitler worshipers have the oh-shit realization about how they were swindled and they get welcomed back into the fold (after we all unite and smite this Nazi shit back to the Hell from whence it came) because, “hey, yeah, you were pretty dumb, but you learned something, right?”

    I’d still take internal American drama and hardship over WWIII. America was leaning Fascist from the late 1920s to the early 1940s until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. It took a world war to fix that. I really don’t want another world war.

    Apologies for the non-brevity.