But a convicted felon who is also clearly losing his mind was a prime, viable candidate...

Really? I'm already being modded Troll? What I said is 100% true. This has been an alert for mod abuse. Some people just don't seem to like reality.

Democrats seem to have a hard time grasping exactly why they lost to Trump a second time. Republicans are clearly not the only ones who have difficulty with reality.

You sound like a wife beater.

"Look what you made me do !"

You miss the point. The problem they DON'T HAVE is being a felon pedo rapist who had had many businesses go bankrupt and is only out for himself. It should have been enough that they didn't have that problem that people chose to vote for them. That's good I see it from Canada anyway.

> Neither side of politics is going to or can do anything about this.

> Going to? Definitely not right now but maybe if the problem gets bad enough.

> Can do though? State mandated housing quotas for all counties are a thing in some states now for instance. They could go farther, especially in some places but they're a start. We could also put substantially higher taxes on homes purchased after the first that applies to both people and companies to prevent them from being used as investment opportunities. We could also not allow homes to be repurposed into short term rental units via services like Airbnb thus freeing up a shit ton of housing. There's plenty that we can do as long as we have the political will.

> Neither side of politics is going to or can do anything about this.

There's plenty that can be done. Not slamming our closest friendly trading partners with tariffs - such as all the lumber we import from Canada, or household appliances from Korea, or furniture from Vietnam and Thailand - would be a good start. Not indiscriminately rounding up the day laborers and skilled workers who do a lot of construction would be another. Not jeopardizing the Fed's independence, running trillion-dollar annual deficits to give tax breaks to the richester, jerking the economy around, and disrupting the US' standing in the world would cause long-term bond rates to lower, bringing mortgage costs down.

Is any of this going to happen? I dunno. I know that the folks presently in power are actively making things worse, though. Just throwing up ones hands and saying "nothing can be done" also isn't a solution.

> Thereâ(TM)s that and the fact that AI is acting as this generationâ(TM)s Industrial Revolution. If the government doesnâ(TM)t help manage this, then the cost to the nation will be bad. The problem is that itâ(TM)s current planning is only good for two tweats, while other nations try to consider a 10 year plan and manage accordingly.

I wonder if AI could fix slashdot's unicode support. It clearly can't convince users to stop posting unsupported characters, not even God could do that.

But I think you're underestimating how much voter suppression and gerrymandering is going on over here. There is solid evidence that approximately 7 million Americans tried to vote last year had just couldn't. About half of those got stopped using illegal challenges to their signatures or their voter registrations. The other half would show up to vote on election Day and find a 7 hour wait.

There's also some evidence that worse was going on. Google around and you will find all sorts of scary shit. Most notably there are several districts where Kamala Harris was winning until exactly 250 votes and then Trump broke away. You can't bring up anything like that without being called a lunatic because Trump spent the last 8 years screaming about stop the steal.

Honestly though the voter suppression is probably a bigger deal. The big wall that protected voting rights, the voting Rights act, got struck down by a corrupt Court.

On top of that the amount and scale of propaganda is unlike anything I have ever seen in my entire life or frankly in human history outside of North Korea or Russia.

I watched Joe Biden listening to a question off camera and watched Newsweek report that he was staring off into the distance after they had crop the picture.

Meanwhile Donald Trump lost his marbles 20 minutes into a town hall meeting and just danced to his iPod playlist and that was played off in the media as bringing him closer to the voters...

It's so bad we had to create a whole new term for what the media was doing, sane washing.

That said I do understand the frustration. I don't think there was anyone who didn't know Trump was a convicted felon or shouldn't have known. The fact that Trump is a pedophile is readily available information. And then you have the other 25 credible accusations of rape not to mention the actual rape conviction that is technically adjudicated sexual battery but I'm pretty sure anyone with a daughter would look at that and call it rape.

I don't necessarily think the really stupid should be blamed. I mentioned this on another comment but I had a dumb as dishwater neighbor who voted Republican because she just could not parse information competently enough or think critically enough to know better. If you're going to take advantage of stupid people that's a bad thing and it's hard to get angry at people who can barely read.

But there is certainly a ton of people who knew better and voted for the sake of anger or hate. And yeah those fuckers can fuck the fuck off.

Fuck you, half the country didn't want this, yelled and screamed this would happen, and doesn't deserve to suffer. You should be banned for that comment. Better yet, you should be made to suffer that what you wish on others. Asshole.

> Yeah. It's almost like they know climate change is going to cause an inevitable, unbelievable disaster, have set themselves up for living with $500 cans of Campbell's soup, and are looking at colonizing Mars.

> Something is happening here. There might be reason behind political support for this skew. I'm very frightened it's not just limitless greed.

It's a combination of limitless greed and algorithmic "respect" for the troll game. The algorithms promote engagement, and rage is extremely engaging. It earns more clicks, pulls in more views, generates more data-flow, and earns more advertising dollars. We literally trolled our way into electing the loudest asshole in the country to the highest office. Isn't the future glorious?

And cheaper eggs because they more tightly regulate the conditions.

I am genuinely curious what made you think it was inappropriate to respond to me. Are you just a right winger? A trump supporter?

I'd be curious why. Since you personally experienced that right wing ideology does not work.

If you're just bugged by the amount of politics we are all in our late 40s to our mid-60s. Heck some of us are pushing 70. So politics and society kind of dominate our lives.

Like how if we properly regulated

> but people should know why their eggs became so costly.

You're absolutely right. Anyone and everyone that was paying attention at the time knew why the price of eggs shot up. Oddly enough, the Venn diagram of people with that knowledge doesn't overlap that much with people that thought Trump was the guy to fix it.

> Perhaps the democrats should pick better candidates. When your opposition is a felon that is disliked by most people and your opposition still gets elected that should speak VOLUMES to the choice your party made for a candidate.

It's still a puzzle for me. I'm not American, BTW, so that might make it more difficult for me to comprehend.

I simply can't understand why people would opt for Trump over *any* other candidate. I know about disgruntlement in the rust belt. And sure, I understand that in any country you might have up to about 10% of the voters supporting some ultra right wing party, or some other wacky extreme group. But *half* of the US population thought that Trump would be a good choice...

I find it baffling.