I guess you could put it like this:

How do we improve traffic?

Raise gas prices, dramatically.

Coming soon:

"Pay for your $400 tank of gas in 8 easy payments of $60 over the next 16 weeeekkkkss!!!

Choose sharkpay today!"

I mean yeah, neo/techno-feudalism is the timeline we've collectively chosen here in the US.

But that still runs into the problem of capitalism collapsing significantly when it destroys its own demand via destroying its consumer base.

And it still means that a whole lot of people are basically just going to go literally insane, as the fabled promised bullshit of 'work hard and follow the rules and you'll be a billionaire too!' is more and more obviously exposed as a fantastic lie.

The cognitive dissonance will get worse and worse.

Some will actually conclude that everything they know is wrong... many others will not be able to do this, or manage that realization well, and they will become psychotic.

There is another wrinkle to what you're describing though.

Office space could have started to get transformed into residential space since covid made it obvious remote work is a viable paradigm, and thus commerical office space itself is significantly overvalued.

But they didn't let that happen. Partly because managers and C Suite are narcissistic sociopaths who need to live a life where they get to neg their employees in person.

Partly because if you revalue downtown office space property values, well, a whole lot of rich people become significantly less rich.

So what I am trying to say is... they wont let those property values dive, to the greatest extent possible, and they can literally just do cartel style price fixing to do this.

So it'll be they'll all just keep acting like their inner downtown core properties are absurdly valuable, and you'll be offered an indentured servitude contract where your downtown accommodations are fixed and rising, but your pay is variable and performance dependant.

No one who agrees to anything like that will ever get promoted to any substantially important position (barring an occasional selected token exception that proves the rule)... though they'll create an entire internal and external 'company culture' that incredibly strongly implies that they will, reinforced with app kinds of propoganda, media, social media, etc.

... things like this will just keep occuring and get worse untill the proles basically kill these kinds of people. Otherwise, they'll just keep churning through the proles.

The city is the plantation now.

I would LOVE a motorcycle, but the reality is that if anything hits you, even a tiny car, you're going to get smeared. Best case scenario, you just destroy one leg if you fall over.

I have literally had dreams about riding a motorcycle, but I just can't balance the risk on that one. If the rider makes a small mistake, dead. If there is a foreign object in the road that you hit and go flying, dead. If a deer pops out in front of you, dead. If some crazy person in a tiny car gets mad at you, dead. If some crazy person in a big truck gets mad at you, dead.

There are so many ways to be dead and so little between you and a lot of big immovable objects. Our little meaty bodies are not meant to sustain the forces that happen in a motorcycle crash. Yeah, you should wear a good helmet and all the riding gear, but at most, it will just serve to contain the meat paste that your body will be transformed into if you get hit hard.

So depressing. It looks like so much fun.

San Diego is about to increase fares and reduce service. They seem to think they have a captive audience in the poors, the disabled, the old.

Yet there are so many deaths on motorcycles. This week alone there has been at least one death a day where I live. I used to want to buy a bike. Nope.

Won't be as great for road death stats though.

My 60 year old dad straight up said "idk why people get so worked up, the president won't affect your life that much anyway". Even people who hate trump still have families, children, a life that while bad, is still worth holding onto for them. Better to keep their head down and try to scrape by with their loved ones than go off to die in a revolution. And who would lead them?

People like to talk about grand ideas of revolution and overthrowing government, but then reality sets in while trying to actually work out the nuts and bolts of it.

Sadly you are probably right. The only decent ones speaking up are AOC and Bernie, and they have been yelling into the void for many years now.

But the large majority has nothing to hide, is white and is not affected until it's too late. First they come for the....

I still see a small chance to reverse this, if only the rest of the world wouldn't continue sucking up to this criminal government.

The article is about the US.

But since you mention him, Orbán was plenty bad, afaik he acted largely within the law. Like the gerrymandering in the US that disenfranchises minority voters. And as I said, Trump acts outside the law in addition to all the fucked up stuff they're doing by the book.

Ukraine did a thing iirc that lead to them being a massive resistance to Russia.