u/DeanoPreston

Many cities will use public money to fund NGOs to make some problem go away. These NGOs are often created by cronies in the city government and the executives of the NGOs pay themselves fat salaries.

Ostensibly the NGO works on solving the problem. But if the problem goes away, the fat salaries of the NGO executives goes away. So the NGO will go for years without making any progress. Or will find ways to surreptitiously make the problem worse. Murky accounting keeps the public from seeing how money is spent.

This is why problems like homelessness in California keeps getting worse despite more and more money being shoveled at the problem. (In my city, we spend about $100k/per homeless person per year).

This type of corrupt structure needs to be outlawed at every level of government.

(NGO stands for non-government organization)

The Socialists are not going to get the outcome they want, that is, well Socialism. Or at least Socialist president and a Socialist legislature.

Instead their far-left policies are going to be a bridge too far for rank and file centrist Americans. They will be alienated and forced to pick between tax policies that will crush everyone except the ultrapoor and the ultrarich and Republican corruption.

(Also, Socialists seem to now think unrestricted immigration is a good thing, despite the fact this drives down wages and makes housing more expensive. This historically was NOT a Socialist policy)

And the Socialist seem to be trying to primary moderate Dems in winnable races, replacing a sure Dem win with a radical who will lose against the Republican candidate.

So basically Socialist are going to alienate the American center and sabotage moderates. It's like a mob mentality movement without a coherent strategy.

When the US put curbs on who could be considered a refugee because the system was being gamed and abused, the had a meltdown.

We're suddenly NAZIs because we want to protect ourselves and our cultural integrity and not import half the 3rd world.

It's very curious the left has been silent on this matter when European nations started to crack down.

Unchecked migration is harmful to the host country and I'm glad we're finally doing something about it after the Biden admin nearly destabilized the country.

There's a nootropic subreddit, the one missing the "r" in the name where the mod has a company that sells researchy sounding drugs with alphanumeric soup for names. To protect the innocent, let's call this company "Everyscam".

Ever wonder how Everyscam gets away with selling big-pharma's prized research drugs without being sued into oblivion to protect their intellectual property?

Most of those drugs are abandoned. Basically failed pharmaceuticals being sold as nootropics. The rights to some of them have been sold to different companies, who try to find a use for them. There's one, let's call it JUNK-356 that was first tried as a treatment for MDD. When that didn't work it got trialed as an adjunct for MDD. Then it got trialed for various deficits like autism. The original creator dumped it.

So what's the chances that JUNK-356 will make you smarter? Probably zero. But the placebo effect is strong. Nobody is immune to it. If you think it is making you smarter, you might actually study harder and do better on tests, just because you think you can. So I guess that's worth something.

At least most of these failed drugs are probably safe. The creators conduct extensive safety trials before the actual testing begins.

Central planning and corruption in the USSR caused all sorts of weird shortages.

I was listening to Alexei Nalvany's autobiography. He said his mother had to get up at 5am to wait in line for what little food there was in the stores. And his father was an officer in the army so they had it a bit better.

As a child, his most prized possession was a colorful empty beer can from some western country. They had nothing like that there and even adults were amazed by it.

Meanwhile, there was virtually no social mobility. In a system where everyone was supposedly equal, peasant farmers were basically serfs.

The propaganda machine lied about everything. Trying to demonstrate Chernobyl was no big deal, thousands of people were ordered to work outside exposing them to radiation. When the right thing to do was to tell people to stay inside for a week or so.

There's plenty of stories out there. But people need to learn the hard way usually.

Imagine she deposed Janeway and is now running the ship.

Would be spicy

You say, but Deano, out of 193 countries in the world, the US ranks 3rd in gun violence.

Yes, but if you exclude Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles and Chicago from the stats guess what - our country's rank falls to 187 out of 193.

That puts us on par with countries that have the lowest rates of gun violence, such as many Western European nations.

Blue cities, or more accurately, the constituents of blue cities are the problem.

It might be normal, I don't know. Coming from Bose QC ultras which have no hiss, but my older QCs definitely had hiss

So, is this normal?