Is the US a dystopia?

i was reading/watching some thing about the 10 million or more men who have just stopped doing anything. they don't work. they don't go anywhere. it was bleak. also i totally saw myself in that cohort if things had worked out differently for me.

― scott seward

my mom's youngest brother - early gen x - lost his job in 2008. he was a research scientist. he tried going back to law school. tried getting a job as an EMT. didn't work out. he kinda scraped by, lived in his basement studio listening to prog rock, sometimes playing prog rock. his wife kept working, kept working through the breast cancer. idk. maybe he did more for the family, more for their son, than he seemed to. seemed like she did a lot and he didn't do as much. anyway, he had a stroke and lost the ability to form memories, which made it even harder for my aunt, caretaking him full-time, until he died a couple years back.

my mom's second youngest brother was a real estate lawyer... when the '08 crash happened, he couldn't get work. he'd just bought a big new house for his big family. they were underwater, it got repo'd. got into doing sales. i don't know that he's really good at it. he gives off kind of a willy loman vibe. he had a stroke too, though it wasn't as damaging. last i heard of him he seemed to be doing ok, went in for the deaconate, which seemed to be giving his life meaning. trad cath, opus dei type. black sheep of the family in that regard. he became dead to me after he made a big deal about being a "never trumper" and then voted for trump anyway, because borchen. i have no idea what him or his family think of me and don't much care.

my mom's third and fourth youngest brothers are retired too. i think of them as more "late boomers". one was a doctor, one was a lawyer. the doctor, he's a pretty amazing guy. does a lot of good for the community in a lot of ways. problem is, the head of surgery... well, i won't get into details, but the head of surgery was doing some stuff that my uncle felt, with good reason, was... sacrificing the health of his patients for profit. and advocated on behalf of better patient care. anyway, my uncle's retired now. i guess that guy is still running the surgery department over there.

i got maybe one trans friend who works. a lot of us lost our jobs this year. i'm losing my job. i was perfectly good at this job seven years ago, but, well... i mean, i've talked about this job. i'm not sad to be leaving it, but where the fuck am i gonna work? i've stopped telling people i'm trans when i apply to places, which gets me interviews, but damn, it's rough to get a job doing anything. no, no, it's rough to get a job doing _nothing_, because nobody _does_ anything these days, really. i'd like to do something, but none of us have the power, none of us have the authority. my one friend who has a job... it'd be good work if the institutional support existed for her to do it well. one of my other friends, she got sacked unexpectedly recently. she was working at a non-profit supporting queer healthcare. they couldn't get the funding. she was telling me... she was a teacher for 20 years. the last straw for her was when the first brought kids back in school after COVID, the first fucking thing they did was standardized testing. first fucking thing.

my mom's youngest sister is an educator, tries to get books in for the curriculum. in ohio. there's only so much she can do, you know, in ohio. she's too young to retire, can't really afford to. she says mostly they're coming after the immigrants. i got a pretty distorted view of what the world looks like, probably, me being white, me being born here. i just know that a lot of people who were loud about supporting trans people in '19 aren't as loud these days. media that supports trans people gets quietly shelved, trans-affirming scenes get cut. it's too controversial. god, these days it seems a miracle that a show like _the owl house_ got made at all. i don't think a show like it would get on the air today.

i don't know where all this goes. i got unemployment for a while. i'm not gonna get kicked out of my home anytime soon, which makes me privileged. a lot of my friends are homeless. there's probably a future for us somewhere out there, but i can't really see it from here. i'm doing what i can to get by, to take care of myself. trying to get out there and socialize with other people. one's world gets smaller when things get hard the way they are. that's not good. i know the statistics. community is a matter of life and death - for everyone, no matter who.

i don't talk about it much because it's depressing. people don't want to listen. i don't want to talk about it. i got less to say. very little to say at all, really, these days.

My health insurance company has their own hospitals and pharmacies. It’s the one that ranked the “best” in that infographic where United was the worst. I have had this company since birth.

I think I have only had to get a prescription from Walgreens etc when I had dental surgery. It’s still absurd that dental is a separate thing…. because dental pain jfc the only times I have had opiods were for dental pain.

My uncle was a doctor who may have been one of the overproscribers … it wasn’t a getting bribes from pharmaceutical companies in his case, he just was really sympathetic to patients in pain, and wanted to help. Idk … he never talked about it and he has severe dementia now so we’ll never know lol

the family-owned former pharmacy that’s about a mile away from me is now just an ice cream shop, in the vein of old-timey soda fountain shops. they’ll never have a pharmacy license again after moving 700,000 (!) hydrocodone pills, most out the back door

it’s absolutely insane how many opioids were moving through the system for years

when you read about walgreens setting up their own distribution because they couldn't sell oxy fast enough back then...oof. talk about a menace to society.

i spent two hours on the phone with insurance trying to understand how they processed some claims for my son and got basically nowhere... in the end they were basically like 'oh yeah we messed something up we have to redo the whole thing'. they were very nice but also impossible to hear 1/2 the time because the customer service person appeared to have the entir emouthpiece of her phone in her throat.

when that Trump picture was supposedly the “hardest image of the year” we couldn’t even conceive of this pic.twitter.com/iktmtKk3C6

— Skyler Higley (@skyler_higley) December 19, 2024

fucking Adams, what is this Batman shit

funny haha news hit about cops in South Carolina chasing and tasing the Grinch made me feel very dystopia-queasy. Gosh that's hilarious chasing a guy and electrocuting him!

must-read article about our tech/app dystopia, posted by frogbs in the "backwards steps" thread

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

local indie pharmacy

Indie pharmacies had the edgy new meds. Not like that mass-market focus-tested crap put out by CVS, maaaan.

The major pharms are just all about the money, maaaan.

That Luigi photo has some real Rorschach going to jail energy

sorry to hear how rough things are for you rn rushomancy.

scott, just want to push back on your narrative above. people have given up not because they don’t care, but because they don’t see any other options— blaming individuals for an issue related to monopoly control of industries and rapacious capitalism puts the onus on the wrong side, imho

yep. CVS is actually my provider for prescriptions. the other day i went to the local pharmacy because my script was on backorder at CVS and they could not tell me when it would arrive. so the local pharmacy filled my script. the next time i needed a refill i went straight to the local pharmacy but was told CVS won't cover it. gotta try to get it from CVS first.

the CVS pharmacist do not want to talk to you or help in anyway. they are rightfully frightened of engaging with customers.

Now we can't even party anymore

Party City is closing down all of its stores, ending nearly 40 years in business, CNN has learned.

CEO Barry Litwin told corporate employees Friday in a meeting viewed by CNN that Party City is “winding down” operations immediately and that today will be their last day of employment. Staff were told they will not receive severance pay, and they were told their benefits would end as the company goes out of business.

As a concept, it's just a bunch of stores full of cheap crap that I wouldn't buy if they paid me to cart it home with me. Fucking awful for the employees, though.

Merry Christmas

Staff were told they will not receive severance pay

jeez, even Scrooge sent Bob Cratchit a christmas turkey

The relationship between billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and billionaire Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk is warming up, a Friday morning exchange on Musk’s social media app X suggested.

Two days after the tech titans dined together with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Bezos broadcast his agreement with Musk’s opinion that it is necessary to cut regulation and government payrolls.

“Shifting people from the government sector, which is low productivity, to the private sector, which is high productivity, results in greatly increased prosperity,” Musk tweeted Friday morning. “Deregulation helps tremendously too.”

A few hours later Bezos replied, “Both of these are correct and the first is widely under appreciated.”

Bezos also owns The Washington Post.

It was only a month ago that Bezos accused Musk of spreading false information about him on X. On Nov. 20, Musk tweeted that he had heard Bezos was “telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock.” Bezos fired back: “Nope. 100% not true.”

Musk, whose donations to Trump’s campaign made him the biggest political donor in U.S. history, is set to co-chair a committee aimed at deregulating the government with Vivek Ramaswamy called DOGE.

Bezos, meanwhile, has expressed optimism about Trump’s second term despite previous conflict with the president. Last week he gave $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund via Amazon, matching donations from other tech leaders including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

In October, Bezos spiked a Washington Post endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, sparking allegations that he was using his ownership of the paper to curry favor with Trump, charges that he denied in an op-ed published in The Post later that month.

Bezos and Musk have multiple business interests in direct competition, including their private space exploration companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, as well as Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper. While Musk has the lead in both arenas, Bezos said in a recent New York Times interview that he trusts that Musk won’t abuse his close relationship with the president.

“I take at face value what has been said, which is he’s not going to use his political power to advantage his companies or disadvantage his competitors,” Bezos said.

Glad these two are getting along

Heartwarming

“Shifting people from the government sector, which is low productivity, to the private sector, which is high productivity, results in greatly increased prosperity”

This is the kind of propaganda that becomes pure nonsense when you analyze it in depth, but neither Musk nor Bezos cares to think it through with any rigor because it's their own prosperity they are talking about.

Supervillain billionaires with rocket ships, I feel like reading comics as a kid gave me a good foundation for all of this. Now we just wait for the league of avengers to put things right.

honestly, while not subscribing to accelerationism’s mishmash of ideologies and tenets, i am starting to actually believe that there will be some major, world-changing revolutions in my lifetime. the contradictions and inequities are becoming so stark and so maddening that it seems a little inevitable.

I used to think that but (1) there won't be any revolutions; and (2) if there are, the revolutionaries will be gunned down by police/military/private security forces before they even touch the door of a single mansion.

The best one could hope for is that such violence and fascism required to maintain this system of inequality will make life unpalatable for the uber-rich, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think they are fine with it and will happily hose down the blood if it allows them to keep all that wealth.

“Shifting people from the government sector, which is low productivity, to the private sector, which is high productivity,

To me this reads as "Let's fire all these black federal workers."

this system of inequality will make life unpalatable for the uber-rich

Once you've started to ride the tiger, there's no safe way to dismount.

such violence and fascism required to maintain this system of inequality will make life unpalatable for the uber-rich

I forget whether it was here or elsewhere, but I saw that the Popbitch email (a thing I had forgotten existed) ran a joke about CEOs hiring security and that the perks of the job included a gun and close proximity to the CEO in question.

I heard some Russian opposition figure on NPR or somewhere, and he reminded the world that in Russia, nothing happens for years and years, but when it does come - the fall of the Tsar, the end of the Soviet Union - it usually happens really fast, like in three days

It's a quote that get misattributed to Lenin quite a bit
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lenin-decades-quote/

Based on posts by ilxors who work for big private sector companies… they don’t seem very high productivity tbh… though i do appreciate the contributions to ilx!

having worked in a similar role in both the public and private sector (admittedly in Australia)

working for a private for-profit - the waste was unbelievable! we absolutely pissed money away constantly, had ridiculous perks and very meagre expectations re actual work

in a similar role for a governmental org - everybody is making do with a tiny amount of resources, often across multiple roles - and making it work because they are motivated by drivers other than personal financial reward

My father was part of the SoCal late 70s evangelical born-again Reagan Republican thing and when I was growing up he told me he'd disown me if I ever joined the military or worked for the federal government, because the government was so inefficient and wasteful. He eventually started a company and it was later bought by a larger corporation who he went to go work for and he took it all back. He said he'd never seen inefficiency like he had with the private sector.

I kind of thought the "government is inefficient" overtones of the Tea Party/Paul Ryan era had died away with the rise of the Trump GOP but to paraphrase Oscar Isaac, somehow it's returned.

every dollar spent by the federal government that goes into the US economy has a greater than 1 multiplier in how much it contributes to the economy, typically much more than the publicly-held private sector. the issue is that publicly-held companies try to make that ratio go up, but to enrich shareholders and private equity rather than contributions to the nation at large, regardless of how the company’s core business is affected

the issue that’s been ongoing for decades is the tightrope that publicly-held companies that service government contracts walk isn’t sustainable. the stock market capitalism lie is that investors drive efficiency, but it’s extraction of value, and that value isn’t just dollars, it’s effectiveness and quality of output

I used to think that but (1) there won't be any revolutions; and (2) if there are, the revolutionaries will be gunned down by police/military/private security forces before they even touch the door of a single mansion.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

if the police/military/security forces are able to do that without reprisals, _they're_ the ones who run the country, not people like bezos and musk

eventually, the people they pay to protect them will figure out that they can just, like, kill the people who are paying them and take the money and power for themselves

which i wouldn't really call a good thing, but then, i don't think revolutions are a good thing in general

best i can say that there are certain circumstances where i might consider them _less bad_ than a continuation of the existing order

for instance, in the case of a state that's actively trying to eradicate marginalized demographic groups, _particularly_ demographic groups i happen to be a member of

the problem being that marginalized demographic groups tend to be the ones who suffer most in situations of revolutionary disruptions of the established order

can't win for losing, i guess

every dollar spent by the federal government that goes into the US economy has a greater than 1 multiplier in how much it contributes to the economy, typically much more than the publicly-held private sector. the issue is that publicly-held companies try to make that ratio go up, but to enrich shareholders and private equity rather than contributions to the nation at large, regardless of how the company’s core business

Not sure if this belongs here but found this incredibly dystopic https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/business/media/blake-lively-justin-baldoni-it-ends-with-us.html

This one too https://wcbm.com/national-headline/missing-gop-congresswoman-not-seen-for-six-months-finally-found-living-at-dementia-care-home/

Just coning here to post that. Shocking.

I was in the Coop yesterday. In front of me was a Just Eat delivery guy picking up a bag that solely contained a couple of 20 packs of cigarettes. Then I notice in the local Onestop retail staff are having to make up Just Eat orders for lazy fuckers, as well as deal with the queue at the till. This is not good.

I try to think that perhaps the customers are ill or disabled or are caregivers for people who are and going to the store is a challenge… this is me being charitable fwiw

I feel rather ill until I get my 20 packs of cigs

Spent the weekend flying out to Ohio to be with my family. I hadn't traveled since 2018. It was interesting, interesting to see parts of the American dystopia I don't usually see.

Here's the bit that confuses me most. Lincoln said that thing about government "for the people, by the people, and of the people, and people talk like all those things are the same but the aren't, really. Maybe there's some people the government is for, by there's a lot more of us it's against, but it's still, like _of_ the people. I think it's been observed here that a lot of the Republicans' talk about "downsizing government", "draining the swamp", whatever language they use - it's not just corporatist, it's pretty nakedly white supremacist. When I think of the people who personify "the government" in my head, overall a _lot_ more of them are Black than you find in corporate America.

Looking around me this weekend, I found that to still be pretty true, even in situations where "the government" translates to "surveillance/security state". TSA agents, military personnel. They don't make the rules, they're just responsible for enforcing them.

And they're treated like shit. They've been treated like shit for so long, in so many ways, and it keeps getting worse and worse. Is going through airline security great? No, no it's not, and it's not something I have a choice in. Instead I look at the people who work these jobs. They're brutal, underpaid, demoralizing jobs. I'd have a hard time working a job like that. I think it's mostly because I'm autistic as hell but maybe there's some privilege and entitlement in there. I don't know for sure.

So I go through and the full-body security scan beeps and some TSA agent is supposed to examine my crotch. I mean it's awkward. Is there a reason for the security scan to go off? I don't know. I don't know how these things work or _if_ these things work. I'm a trans woman, but I don't have a penis or testicles. I have a vulva, but I don't have a vaginal canal. Most people aren't even aware that the genital configuration I have is anatomically possible. Does the machine know? Is the machine doing some scan where it can tell that I don't have a vaginal canal?

So I guess I'm overexplaining when I try to explain to the TSA agent that I have a vulva but not a vaginal canal. I just want to avoid any unpleasant surprises. Nobody really has any idea that I'm trans. I have an "X" on my driver's license but it's not like they give the people in this "Papers, Please" situation time to register that stuff. IDK, was it socially inappropriate to use the words "vulva" and "vaginal canal"? The poor lady seems really embarrassed and it's not like we're in an environment that gives her a lot of time to process what I can only assume to be _utterly_ unexpected information. How many times a day is this lady supposed to fondle someone's vulva on behalf of the United States Government? How much is she being paid to do this? It can't possibly be enough. And on top of that now I'm telling her about my vaginal canal for some reason.

They got some other agents examining my bag. My brother gave me a candle and a tin of pumpkin butter for Christmas and these two guys are trying to figure out if it's a security risk. Since the entire thing is theater, the guidelines of course make no sense whatsoever. They probably haven't been working there for a long time and they're supposed to spend their whole day trying to decide on very short notice how to interpret these rules that change constantly while being confronted with customers, a considerable number of whom are entitled racist white people. Shit, I could be one of those entitled racist white people. They got no way of knowing that. Mostly I feel bad for making their life harder. I don't know the rules. I hadn't really thought in advance that candles and pumpkin butter might cause trouble. If I'd thought about it I would've just had it mailed. These guys are just trying to do their job. Apparently if something is "spreadable" it's OK to let on board, but if it's "pourable" it's not. Later I tell my ex-girlfriend this and she says "C4 is spreadable." I've never thought about whether C4 is spreadable. I don't think it matters. In a just world, TSA agents would all be represented by Actors Equity and paid union scale.

The thing that's weird for me is that when the President-Elect says all of the things he's going to do, these are the people who are supposed to do it. If he declares me an Enemy of the State, the people in military uniform, the people in TSA uniforms, they're "the State". They're the reality he's out of touch with. Am I "in touch" with that reality? Not as much as I'd like to be. It's been six years. I'm looking at these folks and idly wondering: If the President-Elect commanded them to kill me, would they? It seems like the kind of thing he might do.

"I hadn't traveled since 2018"

that's a big deal. that you did that. good job.

I'm glad cigarette delivery didn't exist when I was binge drinking regularly.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-homelessness-rose-by-record-18-latest-annual-data-2024-12-27/

"I hadn't traveled since 2018"

that's a big deal. that you did that. good job.

― scott seward

awww, thanks so much scott!

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-homelessness-rose-by-record-18-latest-annual-data-2024-12-27/

― papal hotwife (milo z)

only 23 out of 10,000? wow. sometimes i forget how much of a statistical outlier my social circles are. i'm not sure if i was homeless or not. a surprising amount of it comes down to how you classify things. i don't think of myself as ever having been homeless, but i also tend to think of myself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, so...

i lived in a truck from 2013- 2016, some of it off-grid and 20 miles from the nearest town. when i would apply for food stamps or other assistance, i would explain that i wasn’t really homeless, and the person would always listen to me and say, “with all due respect, that counts as homeless.”

People living in motels are also officially counted as homeless.

We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.

“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a 29-year-old in California wrote. https://t.co/qullOr6Dhm pic.twitter.com/GGDxTN5kpC

— ProPublica (@propublica) December 29, 2024

Yup, just here to post this.