Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]

  • 10 Posts
  • 238 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • Because most Americans are dumb and most American boomers are even dumber. “Bringing back manufacturing” is not a thing they have ever dedicated a modicum of thought to. If they have it’s probably “factory work manly, service work gay” or whatever. There is no thought about industrial policy or even an assesment of the current industrial landscape.

    For instance where I live there are basically nonstop free or even paid courses to train and place people in industrial trades so that they can work in manufacturing or construction. These jobs cannot find enough employees. i honestly don’t know why more people don’t do it. My only guess is that these jobs are quite brutal and require a ton of OT compared to making 60k a year in an office/wfh working ten hours a week.

    The boomers up here still say “bring back manufacturing though” as if it means anything.


  • In the US at least it starts off with the fact that something like half of all births are totally unplanned for. Then through some combination of hubris and stupidity most Americans don’t actually make any substantial effort to learn how to be a parent. Then between the cost of it all and the general social malaise lead to the parents lashing out at the weakest and most vulnerable people in their vicinity - their children.

    Of course our society facilitates this bad parenting. Family planning is extremely inaccessible and sometimes even looked down upon. The same goes for therapy or counseling. Children cost a lot and there’s very little universal support. Still though it’s kinda shocking to me that people don’t take it upon themselves to make an effort to learn and plan. Anecdotally it seems that millennials and Gen z are more inclined to that though which is good.


  • This whole thing has been such a naked attack on trans people, public education, and the state it’s absurd that nobody seems to see what is going on. It all started because a trans girl competed in the pole vault here. Now as someone that participated in high school track in Maine I can definitively say that nobody except the couple dozen girls who compete in it care about high school girls pole vault here. A few years ago a trans girl that ran in a cross country race was also targeted despite people caring even less about girl’s cross country.

    There are a lot of problems with women’s high school sports here. They underfunded, there’s basically nobody to coach them, they lack adequate facilities, transportation, and equipment, they don’t even really get attention in the local news. These fascist hogs don’t give a shit about any of that though.

    Now maybe it’s a bit conspiratorial, but these attacks on Maine coincide with state Republicans unprecedented efforts to cause a months long government shutdown with a people’s veto of the proposed budget law. I personally believe that this is not just a spontaneous attack on trans kids or rebellious governors, but a test case to see if the Republicans can effectively gut state governments through quasi-legal means where they otherwise couldn’t win power through elections.

    It’s the only thing that really makes sense. All these cuts will fall way harder on Northern Maine (which is Trump Country) than liberal Southern Maine. They don’t like trans kids but they’re not targeting the big liberal states over the same issue. They certainly don’t care about girls sports. It would fall right in line with Project 2025 to strangle a small purplish state until it gives in just enough for Republicans to take power and then set us back 40 years though. And if it works here they’ll try it out in other states. They’re targeting Maine because it’s isolated from the national consciousness but there’s plenty of states with slimmer Democratic majorities that would be easier to topple.


  • Yeah because we absolutely refuse to invest in good medical infrastructure instead insisting on a byzantine network of isolated capitalistic care providers increasingly pressured by market forces to withold care mediated by a parasitic private insurance market. Maybe the wealthiest percentile can afford their own private infrastructure but anyone below that, even people making 200k a year, aren’t going to be able to afford their own hospital, let alone a network of doctors working in tandem like is typical in basically every even partially industrialized society.

    Not to mention the pollution, consumption, or social rot. Those probably are not good for us either.


  • I went to my local protest. While it was huge I have to say I think I was more scared inside of it than anyone outside would have been of it. The whole thing was incredibly poorly organized. Everyone was body to body in the middle of it with no paths to get through. People brought dogs and small children into that which probably didn’t go well. Walking through I kept getting smacked by people being careless with their shitty cardboard signs with smug one liners painted on them. There was no unified chanting or anything like that but also it was too loud to actually talk with anyone or hear what any of the speakers were saying. It’s unclear who set the rally up or if there’s anyway to get involved further. I’ve been in moshpits that have been better organized.



  • Getting out of stocks in January would have been smart. Now it’s kind of a crapshoot. it depends on how old you are and what you’re planning on doing with the money though. If you’re young it’s probably better to just hold your positions. If you’re nearing retirement you should probably already be investing a lot more conservatively regardless of the state of the market.

    If you don’t have an emergency savings or you have high interest debts then it might be better to put your income towards that rather than the 401k, moreso the closer to retirement you are. If you’re young and have a safety net you should probably just keep putting the money in though.











  • You need to start talking to people yesterday and innoculating your neutrals/supporters. Tell your neutrals and supporters exactly what the company and the stool pigeons will say and make sure they understand your response so that when they hear those things they remember what you told them.

    Your response a lot of the time will be “that will be decided in contract negotiations” or “that will be a democratc decision made by all of us”. Make it clear that the stool pigeons don’t want your coworkers to negotiate. They don’t want your coworkers to have a choice. They and the company want to dictate the rules to you and your only choice is to obey or quit. Your union wants to have actual negotiations with the company and for everyone to have a say, even the people who aren’t pro union. Your coworkers need to know that anti-union propaganda is an attempt to restrict them so that when they hear it they understand it’s an attack on them.

    I would avoid defamation of anyone but if there are characters that are particularly disliked it’s not a terrible idea to point that out to people. Usually organizing focuses on leaders but there are anti-leaders who repel people. If your stool pigeons are anti-leaders you can use that.


  • Idk if this varies but when/where I was in highschool they used the unweighted GPA to determine class rank or something like that so while there were all these people that slogged through AP and honors courses paying very close attention to their GPA, the valedictorian ended up being some dude (who in academic terms was nowhere near as talented as some of the others) who coasted through the mid level courses with a near perfect GPA.

    The actual smartest person in my class though was this dude that was nowhere near the top of the class because he never did his homework but he was far and away smarter than anyone and a decent musician too. He never got any recognition for it from the school though.