I think you've captured it perfectly with "Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor?"

The enshitification of the car.

It’s possible they also see the storm coming and are too scared to do anything either.

No. Many of them like Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were all aboard.

Certainly brightened my day. “Bro, do you even friend?”

There are lizards or beetles that tumble down sand dunes.

Maybe cartwheeling humans could lead to some adaptation where the whole body becomes the wheel.

Wheels are not balls. Balls are common in nature. Wheels are not. The difference is that wheels need roads, which are not common nature and a large scale artificial objects.

That makes sense. Even in the Pullman book there were natural roadways for rolling.

In one of Philip Pullmans His Dark Material novels there is a race of creatures that have a symbiosis with a tree whose huge perfectly round nut can be grasped by their fore and hind limbs and they roll around that way.

One of the Animorphs spin offs had them too, it was meant to be specifically genetically engineered or something from distant memory.

Am trying to see a silver lining here.

Dirtier air, sicker people. More profits for big polluters. Why vote for this?

Right-wing agenda. Simple as that. Maybe they would say something like all that monitoring is a gross waste of resources, and it's being done by liars falsifying data and misleading the public.

Living in rural Spain service is chill. Am used to it by now. Went to an upmarket restaurant in France other day and it took me ages to realise the waiter was vibing me the whole meal for a tip. Such a weird transactional space. Person literally smiling and being agreeable for money. Insane.

>Person literally smiling and being agreeable for money. Insane.

And you think other hourly service workers aren't being that way to some degree? Lol.

> And you think other hourly service workers aren't being that way to some degree? Lol.

Like plumbers, electricians, mechanics, carpenters/framers?

“Insane” is probably a bit strong

It’s interesting how silent the world seems to be on this. Like it’s it’s just a big nothing burger.

I believe there are two reasons.

First, there have been so many recent scandals, people are tired or unable to focus on yet another scandal, no matter how egregious.

Second, it appears as if almost all the rich and/or powerful are involved somehow, so it's nearly impossible to stop or fight it, so why bother?! Get rid of one paedophile only to help another gain power.

On top of that, I have the subjective perception that the world keeps getting more and more complex and difficult to fully understand. There are way too many loops of information to be deep into

I think you would get over that perception if you attempted to live in a primitive style for a while. Hunting and gathering food while avoiding predators, finding mates, and staying warm is as complex as anything we do routinely in the modern world.

And even if it were less complex under some rubric, the complexity of such primitive skills is still more than sufficient to saturate our capacity for it.

World leaders: there is little benefit to speaking out on this but a huge cost.

Everyone else: there isn't much to say. Everyone knew he did this. The US decided to elect him anyway. Additional confirmation is redundant.

I think I have resigned myself to the US falling into a dictatorship. Besides not much any of us can do about is there?

The resignation is 100% by design. They do _everything_ in their power to make you resigned.

Not without a lot of violence that most likely won't end up doing anything in the age of remote drone assassinations and missiles.

I think just about no one is remotely surprised by it.

So yes, in a way, it is a big nothing burger.