Is the US a dystopia?

Do the listings specifically say they’re playing Texas Chsinsaw Massacre on DVD, not the current 50th anniversary 4K re-release?

There Is No Climate Haven. We All Live in Florida Now.

negroni export biz about to blow up

also i figured central mass would be better for movies tbh. sending biz plan for scott's "reel movie xanadu." custom built negroni bar and storm shelter features

"Do the listings specifically say they’re playing Texas Chsinsaw Massacre on DVD, not the current 50th anniversary 4K re-release"

oh its probably 4k but still 35 mm or go home, no? i've never seen it on film. might even be tempted to see it at a trump theater on film.

they no longer have the ability to show film at this theater. the place is sad. ancient 30s place that has gone to hell.

reminds me of when i moved to philly in the 80s and you could still go to all the old huge art deco places to see movies and everything was basically a fire hazard. buckets all over the place to catch the water from the roof. center city had a bunch of them.

"Florida threatens to criminally charge TV stations airing abortion rights ad"

^ one of our local county judges here, who is very much anti-MAGA, did a breakdown of the absurdity of the statute the Florida DOH is trying to use in an attempt to charge the tv stations. from what I understand, the stations thankfully haven't pulled the ads, but DOH obviously has no intent to prosecute, they just wanted to get tv stations to pull the ads out of fear.

The apparatchik who issued the threat got fired.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/elections/2024/10/12/top-florida-health-department-attorney-resigns/

fired scapegoated

in this case scapegoated is fine with me, too

the actual fuck? surge pricing for groceries?

Families are struggling to put food on the table. I sent a letter to @Kroger about their decision to roll out surge pricing using facial recognition technology. Facial recognition technology is often discriminatory and shouldn't be used in grocery stores to price gouge residents. pic.twitter.com/KwvQB8dfwK

— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) October 15, 2024

What?!?

Wasn’t some fast food franchise “exploring” that option, then when news stories appeared, people freaked out and the franchise backpedaled?

Yeah, but I don't think they added the extra evil twist of using facial recognition technology to determine prices people would be "willing" to pay. this is supremely fucked up.

Good point

This is some dark shit

Kroger's has been doing it for years, just not for this specific purpose: https://www.goodmanallen.com/walgreens-and-kroger-sued-for-using-cameras-with-facial-recognition/

beyond fucked up.

Oh yes. Not only would water be more expensive when it was hot out, but it might be more expensive after work when more people are shopping or it might be more expensive for YOU if facial recog determines that you are personally or demographically likely to be able to pay more.

“There oughta be a law” became a cliche ages ago, but…

As much as I am against the carceral state in this country, there's an argument for locking up whatever executives pitched this under the fucking prison.

all billionaires should be frozen in Liquid Nitrogen and kicked repeatedly by martial arts experts

all billionaires should be frozen in Liquid Nitrogen and kicked repeatedly by martial arts experts

This interview between Hassan Minhaj and JB Pritzker (a billionaire) is interesting and worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Llmi16s30

i am very interested in never watching that.

JUSTICE WARRIORS a very good comic by Ben Clarkson + Matt Bors just released its second tpb; I bought both last week, have only read the first, but can report that it strongly (and hilariously) affirms the premise of the thread

As much as I am against the carceral state in this country, there's an argument for locking up whatever executives pitched this under the fucking prison

Just beat them to death with bags of avocados.

i am very interested in never watching that.

― scott seward

i on the other hand am totally watching it

his cousin is jennifer pritzker, who is i believe the world's only trans billionaire

wikipedia says she's only worth 2.2 billion dollars, as opposed to j.b.'s 3.5 billion

you may know her from every single transphobe coming up with the same elaborate conspiracy theories about her that right-wingers have about warren buffett

the other thing is that when you're talking about illinois politicians

i genuinely can't say this man is making illinois politics _worse_ haha

-

it is genuinely a thing i struggle with

because there are _gross_ financial inequities among trans people

it's one of the major stressors among trans people... you have these STEM transfems (mostly white, some asians in the mix as well) who make pretty good money

i'm not super emotionally or financially stable right now, but i did have a systemic advantage going into transition

and i don't really _know_ how precarious i actually am

my boomer mom has plenty of money and is doing fine and feels like she's poor. she's on a fixed income and in assisted living and is worried that she'll live long enough that the money will run out. and maybe she will.

i have more money than most of my friends and people just openly say to me "maybe you should get different friends" because the people i hang out with are constantly poor and desperate

fuck i don't know

i try hanging out with people who aren't poor and desperate and i still don't fit in because i'm still pretty fuckin' desperate

none of which has anything to do with pritzker ig

i mean having watched that podcast pritzker is

well the first thing is that he talks like a politician, which is to say, he doesn't answer the questions he's asked

he's not genuinely engaging with minhaj, everything turns into talking points, everything turns into a campaign speech

this is condescending and dumb and i hate it

-

second off, although pritzker compares himself to humphrey, the whole "happy warrior" thing he does remind me more of theodore roosevelt

a scion of privilege choosing to engage directly in an extremely corrupt political system

ultimately i'd say he failed, at least in terms of new york, which, god, i don't think that state has ever been not corrupt

i also, though, am not generally the sort of person to sort people into "good" and "bad" categories. i think the _idea_ of the billionaire, the _idea_ of anyone holding that much disproportionate power, is bad. and i am at the same time a pragmatist. that's kind of weird, i mean, i'm a communist, but i'm a communist for entirely practical reasons. i think on some level... i mean minhaj doesn't show every one of pritzker's billionaire relatives, and jennifer doesn't have as much money as the people he does show. but jennifer pritzker is a billionaire and i think it's pragmatic of minhaj to not bring her up. it makes things more complicated than they need to be, even if he _is_ talking about jb's billionaire relatives.

even if i had the ability, i wouldn't immediately expropriate, say, jeff bezos' wealth. that's the difficult thing, that kind of approach doesn't actually _work_ when it's tried. i'd go a lot farther than pritzker, but i do see someone as pritzker who... the likelihood isn't high that he'll have any long-term positive effect on illinois politics. i kinda think illinois politics are beyond redemption. but that's not to say he can't do long-term good. theodore roosevelt did long-term good, along with long-term harm. i think it's important to acknowledge both, the role he had in entrenching institutional racism as well as the role he had in trust-busting. so i can't call him "good" or "bad" but some of the things he did were good, in the long-term. new york city still will tell you nonstop about their drinking water and that they have the best pizza because of it. i don't know about the pizza. but they do have good tap water.

I’m just starting to read this, but YIKES

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/10/23/how-conspiracy-fueled-militia-got-foothold-this-hurricane-battered-town/

Not quite sure where to put this. This thread seems as good as any. Not quite as existentially depressing as a lot of what gets posted here, but representative of the socially and morally corrupt 21st century USA.

Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/magazine/cheerleading-jeff-webb.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Uk4.BKrI.CHVJUFfY2m-r&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=cnt

In the past 40 years, the number of catastrophic injuries sustained by cheerleaders is greater than those sustained by female athletes playing all other high school and college sports combined.

Jesus..

PART V: U.S. SANCTIONS HAVE SURGED. WASHINGTON INSIDERS ARE MAKING MILLIONS OFF THEIR RISE.

You may have heard of "the military industrial complex."

Meet the booming "sanctions industrial complex"

A dive into how an avalanche of corporate & foreign cash has penetrated US… https://t.co/T70sGUsZ5C

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) October 24, 2024

reading the sanctions article now, thanks for the cheerleading link, Lavator— my jaw dropped a few times while reading it.

John Rogers, the showrunner for the show LEVERAGE (con artists taking on crooked corporations on behalf of their victims - mid 2000s basic cable greatness) posted about that article, because there was a LEVERAGE episode about cheerleader scams.

This episode was maybe one of the angriest the LEVERAGE writers room got. I had to let them take a walk. Somebody may have punched a wall. Inched out the adoption scam episode for rage levels.

“We’re willing to let cheerleading have the highest traumatic injury frequency of all sports because the cost of thicker safety pads would interfere with our insane profits” is a real low point.

Of all the episodes, I’ve had the most number of “yeah, my daughter/sister/friend got hurt just like the show” comments on this one.

Oh, and credit where credit is due — this episode was brought into the room and written by Jeremy Bernstein, who also wrote the line in Cross My Heart Job “I didn’t kill you, God killed you. I just made sure it took.” A line so savage I just stared into space with glee after reading it.

On a side note, this is why I love having a staff and don’t understand showrunners who treat them as an inconvenience. I love being surprised! Jer told me he wanted to do the cheerleading ep and I very dubiously told him “You’re gonna have to sell the room on that one.” And boom. Shattered the room.

!

My eldest does color guard (flags, rifles, sabers). It's less acrobatic and less kinetic than cheerleading, but more dangerous than, say, ballet (which is not without its own injury potential).

Anyway color guard calls itself "The Sport of the Arts."

Free link— this sure sounds like convict leasing
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/business/economy/prison-labor-alabama-hyundai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.VE4.pEd1.mzHMaJiGPLd1&smid=url-share

Imagine dying like this https://t.co/ffpYkVSFxw

— undecided voter (@lib_crusher) October 26, 2024

I've been saying for a while that employers will be using prison labor for nursing homes and group homes eventually.

Literal inmates running the asylum.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2024/road-rage-aggressive-driving-increase/?itid=hp-mv-top-stories_top-table-main_p001_f009

“DeSoto, who runs a traffic safety nonprofit that partners with San Antonio’s city and county courts, has been teaching his aggressive driving class for 26 years, and in that time, he has come to believe several things. One is that what goes on in the country will play out on its roadways. Another is that anger on the roads is getting worse. Across the country, the number of people injured or killed in road rage incidents involving a gun has doubled since 2018, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group. There is no uniform definition of aggressive driving across law enforcement agencies and no national database to track it, but DeSoto has been keeping his own tally, including cases in Texas involving guns, knives, ice picks, 2-by-4s, tire tools, PVC pipe, plumbing pipe, bats, hammers, shovels, hatchets, ball bearings, marbles, frozen water bottles, bricks, stones and, in at least one instance, a spear.”

no crow bars or golf clubs no credibility

Is this guy teaching people to drive aggressively or teaching them to not drive aggressively? A course teaching the latter is typically called a defensive driving course? This is calling your CPR class "Let People Die" training.

The aggressive driving course focuses on drivers learning how to manage their anger and anxiety on the road.

iirc the US State Department teaches an “aggressive driving” course to help foreign service officers at the wheel get out of trouble, it’s informally referred to as “crash bang training”

https://www.criplomats.com/?p=5223

https://inthesetimes.com/article/waffle-house-hurricanes-workers-union

https://gizmodo.com/san-francisco-startup-sees-huge-demand-for-sleeping-pods-that-cost-700-a-month-2000520007

Shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley have glamorized these types of living situations.

Did it though? Did it?

ain't nothin new about a flophouse

I feel like we may need a whole new thread for the coming dystopia now Project 2025 is taking over.

e.g. : for-profit prison company shares are soaring in preparation of the massive detention centers they're expecting to build. Hooray! https://fortune.com/2024/11/07/president-donald-trump-election-immigration-border-detention-ice-geo-group-corecivic/

Don't see anything strikingly new there.