100% This. Walmart is far from the “aw shucks” helping the common man image it wants to portray

Walmart won’t kiss the ring. They supported Trump. The only thing they’ll do is fight him if it looks like they can’t control him.

They were damaged by the last administration. And the Bush administration. Their states are the ones which are hellholes that get shittier and shittier with jobs leaving out and poorer and poorer. It becomes more difficult to actually leave red states because affording to get the fuck out is nearly impossible. When they vote on something that makes things better, the state government overrides them saying they didn’t know what they were voting on.

YET THEY ALWAYS VOTE THIS WAY

They will not figure it out. They are lost to the cult. I don’t know what fucking Piece of Eden the republicans got hold of to control them but holy fuck living in a red state is just like that comic up there, they look at the person who says they hate them and says “He tells it like it is.”

I’ll express from someone living in a red state. The fuck am I going to do? I’m over half a thousand miles away from the state he’s fucking with, and he’s probably not there most of the time and again thousands of miles over, with all the power of money to get him wherever the fuck he wants to go vs my little car.

So build up support. A third of this country voted for this, and a third of this country sat out. So you’ve got a third that’s actively angry about this, but scattered literal thousands of miles across the country. Kinda hard to gather to this. Sure we gather to protest but this administration isn’t going to give two shits about it, this entire situation is proving that. But gathering and protesting IS the power we have so we’re doing that. Unfortunately the cameras aren’t on that because the people supporting this are the ones with the media.

As someone put it, most of us are slaves to our paychecks, living on the barest margin of survivability, and that’s been the way for decades. Y’all get to see the chest thumping “America is the greatest place!” but lets be honest, most of us are so disaffected that what we’re watching is the horror of a monster taking over, but the country we were raised in and told to love there will be very little sadness when its gone, just sadness for how evil it will become. But that living paycheck to paycheck means in order for me to go somewhere where I can maybe put up resistance because right now I’m surrounded by people who support this… and these are the people who have been arming up in ready for a war for years… would be to uproot completely, and even the bluest of blue states would happily let me die in a gutter if I don’t have job. So either I stay and support people who will be hurt when it gets worse, or I become at best a martyr, or at worst, another statistic that the news may not even bother reporting.

The answers will vary, but why are we allowing this to happen? I’ll say my answer, some of us have been fighting this for years, over a decade since the Tea Party got mad that a black man was president, have been struggling to change the trajectory of this ship away from the iceberg. But I’ve seen the people of my country as a whole grab the wheel, lock the door and say it’s their god given right to drive into the iceberg. So at this point in the analogy I’m just gathering life preservers and making sure people have them on even as many of them will tell me the ship is unsinkable.

Work in medical too, but work in the lower sections with the blue collar workers while living in the bible belt. They’re all Trump fans and think this is all great.

The best advice I have is find your people, the ones you know who’ve been against this (not the non-voters, they folded to apathy, and will fold when the going gets tough) and start working on survival plans. Gardens, mutual aid, mutual defense, how to hide those in danger ESPECIALLY if you’re the cishet white guy. Build the community as best you can.

This is not some big overall “Fight the bastions to overthrow” but right now as a regular schmuck in the middle of nowhere, right now this is what we have.

I can’t think of a smaller city in the US that fits “so many have heard of it”

You included London but didn’t include London? Shameful.

Good lord this makes me happy I’ve not worked in corporate and stayed in blue collar work.

Someone steals food in a shop, that someone’s gonna have a bad day and the boss yells at anyone “whining”, including the guy who got his ass kicked.

Strange that politics who call for deregulation never deregulate useful things.

Funny that right? Those that call for deregulation would probably call for deregulating the legal time frame that a company has to support their devices.

And as to what we did with ours, effectively trash. We have a medical junk guy who comes through yearly and picks up the stuff thats getting thrown out, he parts pieces out he can sell, sells scrap otherwise, etc. Also sells a lot of equipment to smaller hospitals out in rural that will make do, and a lot of stuff we have goes to Project Cure which sends medical devices out of country to places in need. The funny part about the rural hospitals and Project Cure is… neither of those can happen because, as I said earlier, can’t verify their accuracy anymore so for my hospital, about 30 units of trash in one day.

I work as a biomed, our hospital had to buy completely new sets of a type of ultrasound machine we have. Why?

Because in order to do the yearly preventative maintenance you have to go through the manufacturers program to test calibration. They stopped supporting it this year and shut it down. Legit these machines were working just fine, but now in order to keep up with verifying accuracy they’re essentially bricked. They did it on the exact day they hit the year mark that they legally were required to support in order to sell medical grade equipment passed.

This is only going to get worse, not better.

He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile.

Honestly think he’d be safer in North Korea. Kim Jong Un could at least see him as an ally of “the world is against us.”

Putin already views Trump as a puppy that makes messes on the carpet… while running a dog fighting ring.

Personally I hope so. They’re burning the world, it’ll at least be fun to watch them flounder in the process.

Hell, I think my biggest problem is I can’t think of anything dumb enough before they’ve already got it

I used to think I was a pessimist. But now after multiple “There’s no way people are that dumb” and being wrong I must be an absolute optimist.

Or how about the part where all their chicken’s bland as shit. “Spicy” my ass.

Popeyes is the superior chicken fast food. I’ll fight anyone on this hill.

I’ve had practice eating at Popeyes.

Boy howdy I’m just imagining HIPAA with this.

Pretty much post Roe v Wade she’s been out at the very forefront on the abortion debate because Biden being a catholic and male was about the worst possible person to put on this, vs Harris’s main job was to show the White House’s position on it.

Oh, not been in the news… right. Same news that’ll talk Biden’s age all day, not Trump’s age or his lies.

Left leaning here, dunno about you, but run channels with other left leaning progressives. I’m on a border between two states, I make it a point that my state when state/local stuff comes up, I get the news out, I get the word out, I try to drum up voting. Anyone in the other state, a massive collective ‘meh’. Same comes with the local votes.

“But Bernie” is the cry.

Voting isn’t just about the damn presidency. It’s a shit slog from the lowest levels all the way up and all the crowd I know in the left leaning can’t be faffed to show up for anything local so of course it’s going to be centrist on the top. The reason the right wing has so much power is they’ve made it a point since the Reagan era that anyone without an ® after their name WILL NOT run uncontested even it if it’s a superintendent to a school.

Yes, the Democrats are run by centrists because that’s who shows up to all the elections no matter how small or petty, but the lefts show up at Presidential elections and whinge about how nothing changes.

I hope I’m preaching to the choir when it comes to voting on the small elections, but unless you’re in a very different place than I am, if you did you’d pretty quickly notice you’re the rare leftist there.

Hillary in her campaign was focused on removing Citizens United.

After she lost, hasn’t been brought back up again.

At this point there’s a con happening all over the country all throughout the year. Dunno where “south” is for you but the big one I know about is Texas Furry Fiesta in Dallas in March.

Granted Texas has like 4 of them going nowadays by itself lol.

I have the aftershockz Air. Aftershockz as a company apparently changed and went to Shockz when I got my second set so there I got the openrun. I still find my using the Air for my work time which is my more used one, but I think I got used to the fit of it (ran with those for like 3 years) but the openrun works pretty well IMO.