If you make less than 400% of the federal poverty line and are at a job that doesn’t offer insurance or are part time - that’s then you qualify for an Obamacare plan.

The problem is most people don’t live in 15 minute cities and it’s impossible to turn the suburbs into 15 minute cities as most things are just physically too far apart.

If you live in a gigantic McMansion neighborhood that takes 5 minutes to get out of by car and then your job is an additional 20 miles away there is no bus or train solution - you’ll have to have a car.

Funny you should mention living in your car. I used to have a 40 mi commute from my suburban town, each way, to work. I lived slightly north of Baltimore and commuted to just outside of DC. I would spend an hour minimum each way driving. When traffic was bad easy 2 hours. I did this for 4 years and it was soul destroying, but it was an extremely lucrative job.

Then I found a job in my little suburb that pays about the same amount of money and it’s close enough I can ride my bike to, which I do sometimes when it’s not hot, by car it’s only about 5 minutes. The extra time I’ve gotten back has been amazing and looking back I would have taken 20% pay cut to not have to do that horrible commute.

That is not a solution for everyone as there aren’t enough jobs in the suburbs to support the population. They’re called bedroom communities for a reason.

I’m really not pro or anti car. I just think you have to be realistic. The realistic part is the suburbs are just too spaced out and too far from jobs to have a functioning mass transit system.

Why would anyone blame Obamacare and not their employer for not offering health insurance?

How about blaming our horrible system of employer sponsored health insurance?

If you’re part-time and making $15 an hour don’t you qualify for an Obamacare subsidy? That would limit the cost to 10% of your income.

10 or 20 years from now when you’re taking a nap or jerking off or eating fried chicken or playing Call of Duty while a self-driving car (you can call it an “automated transportation pod” if the word “car” triggers you) takes your extremely drunk self right to your front door you’ll think it’s fine.

You can’t have this both ways.

When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…

“That’s weather not climate!”

When there’s a wildfire somewhere…

“That’s global warming!”

We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.

If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.

The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.

The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.

Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.

Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.

Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.

Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.

They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.

Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.

Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.

On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.

The main subs or sublemmies or whatever they’re called on here have enough users that it’s a perfect alternative to Reddit.

Little niche subreddits, like my favorite gaybros and askgaybros, just a few dozen users and I’m going back to Reddit for that.

Are they supporting it so that they can gimp it?

We support the right to repair! Starting now all keycaps will be replaceable. Anything on the motherboard is off limits though or the display or the battery or the ports or the camera.

Why do I have to pretend to be sad when people I hate die?

Removed by mod

Do you really think anything would be different with an early HW Bush administration?

Does that mean “cured” or NED (or whatever you want to call not going to die from this particular cancer) or does it mean he’s responding to treatment and the tumors are shrinking?

The problem is that Lemmy never hit that critical threshold of users where I can just stop using Reddit.

Like one of my favorite subreddits - gaybros and askgaybros - zero activity on the fediverse, so I’m going back to Reddit for that.

Is there anything more disgusting than carpeted areas around a tub or toilet?

Like what the fuck were they thinking?

All of the other 70s and '80s trends - like the really dark wood paneling, ugly orange colors, that’s just aesthetics. Maybe we’ll go back to liking wood paneling at some point.

Carpet in a bathroom is not aesthetics or fashion It is fucking disgusting and unsanitary.

Good luck with your systemic approach.

Like I said in my original comment unless you’re secretly a left-wing billionaire that is going to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into building a competing left media ecosystem then you’re going to make zero progress with the systemic approach.

The only approach that will work is more people voting until the 20 to 30 million are irrelevant.

You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into.

I think a lot of Democrats/liberals have West Wing Syndrome where they think if they make a convincing argument in a speech or debate that the other side will then come to the light… They won’t. They’re either evil or stupid or a combination of both.

Interestingly the magats don’t have this problem. They don’t give a shit about convincing you of anything, they just want their side to win and our side to lose.

I am better then people that think the world is 6000 years old and we don’t have to worry about climate change because Jesus is coming back soon or people that think Biden is going to declare martial law and round up Christians and conservatives into FEMA death camps (although I’m starting to come around to this idea) or people that think Jew NWO lizard people are deploying gay chemicals via aircraft chemtrails to turn people gay to reduce the world’s population.

I don’t want to “study” or empathize with magats.

I want to belittle and (electorally) destroy them into irrelevance.

I grew up in a magat household. They’re magats because they’re fucking morons. I solved the mystery for you - no additional study is required.

I got in a debate once with my mom about the age of the Earth (of course she’s a young Earth creationist). I brought up the speed of light - we see things that are farther than 6000 light years, so the Earth has to be more than 6000 years old. Her rebuttal: “What if the sky is like an Etch-a-Sketch that God is holding up for us to see?” How do you reason with someone that believes something like that? Do you really think I brought up stellar parallax or spectroscopy that would change her mind?

My grandma, I bought her an iPad 10 years ago so she could get on Facebook and watch YouTube and stuff. Big mistake! Now I have to hear stuff about how Hillary Clinton has been arrested and convicted by a military tribunal and is wearing an ankle bracelet and will be put in prison after the 2018 election. Adrenochrome. Comet Ping Pong. Democrats want to chop off elementary school age boys penises. Bamboo ballets. Mike Lindell. Ballots dumps. Obama controls everything. Porn in schools. Democrats are trying to make us eat bugs.

Prior to the iPad I had probably heard her mention politics like less than a handful of times in my entire life.

She wouldn’t get the COVID vaccine… Even though she’s 83 obese, arthritic, congestive heart failure, diabetic, and has had two previous heart attacks. Then she got COVID and almost died, was in the hospital for more than month, now on oxygen at home… STILL WON’T GET VACCINATED.

These are not people that reason or think about anything. The only way to get them on our side would be a propaganda network to compete with Sinclair, Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Hannity, Neck, Levin, Shapiro, PragerU, Crowder, Savage, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Project Veritas, The Blaze, WND, Candace, Jordan Peterson, The Washington Times, etc… And then pump that down their YouTube and Facebook feeds. Unfortunately I don’t know any left wing billionaires that want to create competing institutions to these things.

Not to mention the right wing message of simple solutions, zero thinking, and your prejudices are actually a good thing is hard to compete with.