I saw an .ml user argue that North Korea and South Korea were basically equivalent.

Much of the world outside the US

Because there are kids and spouses and often parents and other family at home, can’t shoot a video with all that noise.

No, I mean that for the brunt of humans evolving to be genetically roughly what we are today, it is unlikely many people were living much past their prime. I am talking about roughly 100,000 years ago up to around 10,000 years ago when humans developed from a largely hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Yes, that is when we evolved

Your ancestors had melanin production to fit their sun exposure and seldom lived past 40

They have been MASSIVELY trying to stop people from voting, what the fuck are you talking about you absolute nincompoop? They keep purging voters and trying to implement new ID requirements and closing polling places and encouraging people to “poll watch” (voter intimidation).

The rationale behind the most recent articles of impeachment were unprecedented and kind of nonsense.

We are going to have to agree to disagree on the modern common definitions of things then. If socialism means only be definition a transitionary stage to communism then there is no meaning in people saying they are a socialist vs a communist, but clearly many people identify as socialist but not communist.

Okay, I can’t tell if you’re trolling at this point so unless you convince me otherwise I’m disengaging here. Say what you think I am saying and what you think is incorrect about it and I will say if you are wrong about what I am saying, wrong about your point, or right and I am wrong, either in how I communicated, or in what I am currently believing to be true.

Yes… I was in favor of a lot of it… I was trying to educate people that there is more to the issue of free bus fare. Because I’m a transit worker who used to think free bus fare was a no brainer, but now believe it is unworkable without FIRST significantly improving other issues.

Agreed, the problem comes when the issue gets pushed from the shelter system onto the transit system.

I feel like you didn’t actually read what I wrote. I ABSOLUTELY WANT THEM TO BE HOUSED AND CARED FOR. I am in no way villainizing them, this situation is not their fault. The reason we have a giant crisis of homelessness and drug use is not because we “let them”. The system needs to be fixed so that population can be helped and the numbers falling into that are cut. In the meantime though, we are doing nothing and it doesn’t work!

Point blank, the inability to deny people entry to transit and to use transit as a mobile shelter is having catastrophic impacts on overall transit use. This is the equivalent of saying the school system is broken because people keep showing up at schools and screaming at people, assaulting people, soiling themselves and the facilities and the staff have no ability to separate them or remove them from the school, so the rest of the students get home schooled or private schooled and effectively don’t have access to public school. (Oh yeah, and tons of teachers and staff quit)

They need HELP and a transit system as a shelter and drug safe use space is just about the least efficient way I can imagine to help them and makes it less safe and accessible to everyone else.

Never been let alone worked in Staten Island, couldn’t tell you if there’s more to the story there or not. Sounds great though, hope it stays great. (I do think islands have a decent ability to be insulated from some amount of societal problems that tend to accumulate in city centers, I know the staten island ferry is free but it still may provide some barrier)

I wildly disagree with the premise that the principle difference between european style socialism and the socialism practiced in china or NK or the USSR is whether the state or private ownership has the steering wheel. The difference is how dispersed and shared the power structure is between groups with differing ideas. Concentration of power inevitably leads to corruption and further concentration of power and unfettered private ownership is an incredibly efficient way for power to concentrate. Capitalism is a very powerful tool to create an oligarchy and if private ownership is allowed it will at least WANT to create an oligarchy given enough time. However, a one party system also WANTS to create an oligarchy, even if the one party ostensibly represents the people. The modern socialist movement contains many, many people who have little to no interest or belief in seeing pure communism happen.

Couldn’t agree more, a system where the number of homeless drug addicts and marginalized people is so low that we literally don’t need to worry about it sounds much better. But in the meantime the people who aren’t using the bus as a shelter have a civil right to access to safe and effective transit as well that they are currently not getting and transit is dying because of it. I have no illusions on the ways in which society has failed these people, they are largely foster kids who aged out of the system and people who were only a little on the margins but functional until rent went up AGAIN and they literally couldn’t afford to have a place to live anymore and spiraled from there. Free transit won’t fix that though, the interim period where free transit doesn’t function is very real and valid.

Also, seriously though, Luxembourg conservatively has less than a twentieth the poverty rate as the US.

Kinda? Socialism was initially described as a transitionary stage of Communism in the same way as totalitarian violent revolution was described as a transitionary stage of Communism. This view also contained the belief that Capitalism is simply a transitionary stage of Fascism. A mixed market economy then with Socialism and Capitalism then describes an economy that is in a superposition of transitioning to both Communism and Fascism. In reality the transitionary times if you call them that are just as validly real times that people live in and regimes change and come and go and we must strive to fight for justice, equity and self determination while preventing too much power from falling into the hands of too few now and try to find the best system for now rather than acting as though everything is an inevitable slope to one extreme destination and that nothing else matters.

Hi I’m a socialist transit worker and I thought free bus fare was a no brainer until I worked in transit, it’s an awful idea. Transit cannot function effectively as transit when it is being forced to operate as a mobile shelter and bottle and wagon transit system. Fund shelters and ease the burden shouldered by transit.

(By all means make transit incredibly inexpensively accessible to anyone who needs it)

I apparently wasn’t clear enough here, I’m sure there are places where free transit works great because people are so well cared for and general safety is so high that it’s not an issue. That sounds wonderful, I want that here. However, I have learned the hard way that transit needs to continue being accessible to the majority even when there are people who have slipped fully into the margins who present hazards to transit customers. (Customers meaning people who need transit to travel)

That’s incredibly unfair to polenta.