When judges die while democrats have power, they nominate milquetoast compromise judges while republicans just go full far-right crazy. Democrats don’t fight to block the crazy republican judges nor do they even fight to get their own judges in. A great example is when Obama nominated Merrick Garland, an already lame pick, as a “compromise”. The republicans insisted on waiting until the 2016 election concluded and the next president was sworn in and the democrats didn’t fight back at all. Then as some dumb form of symbolism, they make Merrick Garland the Attorney General during Biden’s term and Garland proceeds to not prosecute Trump for four years. That should tell you how great he would’ve been as a supreme court judge.

So even if democrats do get a judge in, it’s a compromised “centrist”. How do you think the court will end up when one side packs in far-right wackos and the other side puts in moderate right-wing losers? Seems pretty clear what the direction would be even if democrats won every election until the end of time.

So, again, practically meaningless distinction. Until democrats are willing to use the same tools they leave available to republicans, the democrats are ineffective.

If it was that easy to undo what biden did, then practically he did nothing.

About 90 million people listened to everyone and their (non-conservative) mother say how this might be the most important election

We get told this every election, but then democrats cooperate with republicans every step of the way. Most recently, democrats had an opportunity to force a government shutdown and use that as leverage against the republicans, but instead they instantly folded like they always do. I recognized this pattern when Obama promised hope and change but then mostly continued Bush’s policies when he got elected (e.g. corporate bail-outs, deportations, and warmongering). Democrats follow republicans as they journey further and further to the right.

I have not bought any eggs in about a year or so. The price of food keeps increasing and this is one of the more egregious examples. Sure there’s the bird flu outbreak, but I wouldn’t be surprised if prices are being increased far beyond the actual cost.

Awesome! Now all I need to do is to stop being lazy and actually make a new game. Challenge level: impossible.

Most, if not all, of these books talking about how to get rich are how the authors get rich in the first place. While there may be some good advice in them, the real way to get rich is to sell others on the idea that they could be rich if they buy your products/services.

That’s nice, but I’m more interested in prices coming back down. The manufacturers have been pumping up storage prices even though demand has gone down by artificially constricting supply.

Not if you charge at home. Too bad I can’t pump gas at home.

If you were to place the ruling elites on either the left or the right, which side would you think they’d be?

Exactly. I do this while walking away.

Part of it is the paranoia about what people perceive as trolls or shills, combined with thinking that their opinions are a matter of life and death. I’ve seen people here talk about the old internet and I think what helped back then were communities were generally smaller, more tight-knit, and there was a greater separation between the internet and “real life”. I can’t fault people for being paranoid when many governments and corporations have added the internet as a platform where messaging must be controlled.

There have been media works that point out that the internet, although allowing people to connect from all the way around the world, paradoxically isolates us. This is something we can at least partially mitigate by giving others the benefit of the doubt and not be so quick to dismiss and antagonize. While it is tough to respond kindly to someone who insults you, sometimes doing so can have a disarming effect on them.

My microwave from 1985 which came with the house.

A sane candidate like Bush, you know, the one who lied to get us into two wars. The guy who pushed for a border fence. The guy at the helm when the great recession hit. The guy who did nothing in the face of hurricane katrina. Yeah, very sane. If you paid attention to policy, you’d notice that Trump’s policies are merely a continuation of Bush’s.

I talked about the student loan issue because you asked how your lists were padded and fluffed up. You claim they’re such a small part of what Biden has done, yet this one issue has taken up at least five different lines of one of your little lists and I noticed this right away from a simple glance. The only one being disingenuous is you, who clearly has some agenda when you’ve made a community just to hold your padded lists. Would you like me to continue picking apart your lists?

My real issue is how you’re trying to present Biden and the democrats in general as saviors when really they’re part of the problem. People are still miserable and out-of-touch democrats claiming “no, no, everything is great now because the president is a blue guy” are not helping. How about we get some real solutions?

https://newrepublic.com/article/157607/democrats-keep-embracing-george-w-bush

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dojOO3VZ4Jc

As for your lists, all it takes is a glance to immediately see the padding and fluff. For example, there are multiple lines dedicated to student loan forgiveness which is hilarious, seeing as Biden was a key figure in creating the student loan crisis in the first place:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/02/joe-biden-student-loan-debt-2005-act-2020

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-student-loans/

So while he can brag about a few billions here and there freed up by enforcing rules that already existed, the student loan problem is now around $1.7 trillion and none of his policies address the loans that are currently being taken nor the loans being taken out in the future. In other words, he’s not solving the problem, not even ones he helped create himself. That’s really democrats in a nutshell: play along with republicans to create problems and then present themselves as “the thin blue line” that protects us by providing minor relief. One step forward and five steps back means you’re still going backward.

I’m old enough to remember when democrats pointed out how horrible george w bush was while he was president (and rightfully so), but have only sucked his dick since then. Sorry, I don’t trust democrats to save a goddamn thing. Your padded and fluffed up lists don’t change that. I’ll continue voting for democrats down the entire ballot every single election, but I’m not stupid enough to think it will change anything.

You’re either trolling or incredibly ignorant. Get educated, that’s all I’m going to say to you now.

I never said public corporations are private companies. You’re confused and don’t seem to have a point to make. Do you think publicly-traded companies are not capitalist?

Do you not understand what the point of a public offering is? It’s to offer up shares of your company to others in order to raise funds so you can expand more rapidly. You throwing in the word “collective” is a poor game of word association. Are you trying to argue that publicly-traded companies are communist? You should really hit the books and straighten out your terminology because you’re using it all wrong and you’re only misleading others who don’t know any better.

The example you gave doesn’t make sense. First off you confused public trading (company shares are available to the general public) with public ownership (owned by the government i.e. “the public” at large). Johnson and Johnson is publicly traded but the shares are held by private entities. If I buy a share of Johnson and Johnson’s stock, I privately own a piece of Johnson and Johnson.

As for drug patents (and patents in general), the idea is to secure timed exclusivity to sell in the market in exchange for public disclosure of method of invention. If we didn’t have patents, companies would instead treat drug formulations as trade secrets and so they’d hold onto that exclusivity as long as they can keep the formulation a secret or until another entity reinvents the same thing. There are issues with the patent process and especially with private companies benefiting from publicly-funded research while locking up exclusivity and jacking up prices, but those are still problems with capitalism, and they’re still better than just letting the free market completely monopolize the process.