Bullshit. There are vast areas of the western US and Alaska where this simply is not economically possible or even desirable. The same is true for huge parts of Canada and Australia and other countries that have very remote and thinly settled regions. Even when I lived in Ireland, which is tiny and relatively densely populated, there were rural communities that only had bus service once or twice a day.

The prefix “Mc” or “Mac” is Celtic anyway, not Germanic, so you failed in that sense too.

You mean my kids?

I work in industrial construction on massive unionized projects with tradespeople coming from all over the US and Canada and I can tell you for an objective fact that the number of guys --it’s almost always guys, which should tell you something-- who drive giant lifted obnoxious trucks as their daily driver vs the number who actually really and truly need them on a regular basis is like 100 to 1.

But even if it were only 10 to 1, that means we have 10 times as many of these giant gas guzzling dangerous trucks out on the road.

The industry has done such a good job at selling these trucks as part of a self-image, that a lot of guys are incapable of admitting that the only reason they drive one is because they think it looks cool.

I can easily do all of that and more with my non-lifted mid-sized long-bed pickup. It’s just a fact my dude; they are selling a self-image, not actual utility. Or what about a van with a roof-rack. In my professional experience that’s a lot more utilitarian if you’re a tradesman.

Again, it’s all about an image that’s been meticulously and brilliantly marketed and sold to very specific demographics.

To be fair, they are hugely popular in both Canada and Mexico as well. I’ll leave it to you to figure out why.

Hint; if marketing didn’t work, it wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry.

Not true at all. There’s tons of adaptive pressure. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t see the thousands of pelagic and shorebird species that we do. But even if what you say about the threat from predation were true --its not-- there would still be adaptive pressure from differential reproduction rates and access to nutrients.

They’re probably just “dumb” in comparison to corvids and parrots and the like.

Well obviously it’s very difficult for the poor to leave and if you aren’t poor it’s actually a pretty nice place to live.

Also most of the loyalists in the colonies fled to Canada during and immediately after the American Revolution, for obvious reasons.

This. I entirely understand that some people don’t have that option, but it’s worth reiterating that if you have a choice, you’re best off not to have partitions at all.

I run Mint on an 8-year-old Mac desktop machine with no partitions and it’s lightning-fast for everything I need it to do.

It’s also worth mentioning that I have said desktop machine because my wife is a pro photographer and Apple and Adobe have colluded for decades to create a kind of “planned obsolescence” whereby professional photographers are ostensibly locked out of the current industry standard unless they run a very recent version of Photoshop that by design isn’t compatible with hardware architecture that’s more than about 5-years-old.

None. My wife doesn’t know about tact, or the polite white lie or anything like that. She doesn’t have time for that bullshit. It’s one of her endearing qualities.

What a crock of shit!

Why would capital willingly poison its workforce as a deliberate policy? That makes zero sense.

I can see capital writing it off as a necessary side-cost of doing business, but I can’t see it as a deliberate policy.

Again, it makes no sense. Capital wants a relatively healthy workforce, not one that’s falling apart due to lead-caused neurological decrepitude.

I have a cousin who still insists that her mom died of pneumonia and that it wasn’t COVID. Her husband is currently in prison for storming the capitol on January 6th, which tells you all you need to know. It’s weird because she’s the only one in my extended family who’s even remotely into far right craziness.

Allegedly there are two known instances of people in the US dying due to complications from the vaccine, though one of them wasn’t the mRNA vaccine that the anti-vaxxers were most scared of. Compare that to the over 1 million people who died from COVID.

That and the fact that everything about our society shits on working people and tells them that it’s their own fault that they aren’t rich like the college-educated elites who look down on them.

It doesn’t actually make any sense, but I am telling you that this is a huge part of the resentment that Trump was able to tap.

Fair play.

Fair play

but that would require major reworking of large areas.

Yes, that’s precisely what will be required. There’s no getting through this without implementing massive changes to our way of life. Everyone wants there to be some kind of easy get-out-of-jail-free card, but that’s not how it’s going to be.

There’s ample evidence that living in small-scale tribal societies really is the best for our emotional and psychological health. There are entire books on the subject. The problem is that we can’t go back to that, nor would we want to. I would argue that we are still figuring out how to adapt to agriculture, it having been such a recent development in human history.

I don’t necessarily know what the best path forward looks like, but I do know that what we’ve built here in the US isn’t sustainable because it’s not working for too many people.