If you banned private vehicle use in cities without sufficient transit, overnight such transit would, as if by magic, suddenly appear. Private bus services are a thing.

But they’re shit even for that. Part of tracking Social Security benefits is tracking taxes paid to Social Security. Unlike other forms of ID, like credit cards, SSNs have no check digits or other means of error prevention. Take a valid SSN. Change on of the digits. That new number is also a valid SSN. Any random 9-digit number can be a valid SSN.

What this means is that all it takes to screw up any form with an SSN on it is to have illegible handwriting on a single one of the digits. You make a single easy error on an employment form, and now your SS taxes are registered under the wrong number.

I’m also skeptical of the Social Security Bureau’s stance on insisting it wasn’t intended as a broad identifier. OF COURSE it was going to be used as an identifier! It’s the only single ID number that the federal government gives out to everyone. OF COURSE it’s going to be used for that. Such a number is of such obvious and great utility that of course it was going to be used for broader purposes. If you create something of such obvious utility, you have an obligation to make sure it’s made well.

It also really strains credulity when Social Security has an entire system dedicated to allowing third parties to verify SSNs. It’s literally called The Social Security Verification Service.

If the Social Security Administration really didn’t want SSNs being used for purposes other than Social Security, then they could have easily prevented them for being used for such purposes. Think about how your SSN works with your bank. You apply for a bank account. They ask you your SSN. You tell them. But how do they know that this information is accurate? Your bank contacts Social Security! The bank has a form you sign that gives permission for them to as the Social Security Bureau to confirm your SSN. And the Social Security office happily obliges.

The Social Security Administration doesn’t just tolerate the use of SSNs for third party uses. It actively facilitates such third party uses of SSNs.

You missed an option.

But table saws are no good for resawing, you need a bandsaw for that!

How do I safely drill holes in 1/4" acrylic paneling without cracking it?

Or maybe…some rogue inventor discovered a revolutionary technology that would disrupt the status quo, and The Man had him declared insane! Tell me more about the machine!

This transactional relationship with minority groups is precisely why Democratic popularity among minority groups is slipping. You pretend to stand for racial justice as a principle. Then, the moment a racial group no longer supports your movement, you abandon your principles of racial justice. You join with the fascists and openly celebrate that group’s persecution. Yet you still ask other minority groups to vote for you, as you stand for racial justice, LGBT rights, etc. Yet how can people not see what is in front of their very eyes - the moment support for their group becomes politically inconvenient, that group will be thrown away like an old tissue.

The same Democrats who said that people needed to ignore Palestine in order to protect LGBT people are now those throwing the trans community under the bus.

Does this asshat realize that the only non-immigrants in this country are the Native Americans?

Watch out. He’ll try to deport all the Native Americans to Northeast Siberia. Their ancestors were just very, very early illegal immigrants.

Luigi appears to have given his life in the service of the innocent. He shot an evil man who killed thousands of innocent people, but whose compatriots had bought the law to make their killings legal.

And his writings? Nothing but compassion, benevolence, and an unshakable sense of justice.

Luigi has all the hallmarks of a classical saint. He’s literally a martyr for the innocent. He gave his life to help people he will never meet.

As far as I am concerned, the man is literally a saint. Saint Luigi of Baltimore. And if they execute him, they will multiply his power a thousand fold.

Nah. Let the drama queen go out like a drama queen. Make him be the test dummy on the next Starship test flight. We could use more entries on the “Inventors Killed by Their Own Inventions” Wikipedia page.

I mean, I don’t want to kill Musk, but I would certainly toast his obituary. The world would objectively be a better place without him on it.

They were sold into slavery. That prison leases out convicts.

Republicans lie. As any fascist party, they don’t have any consistent ideology beyond hurting people. They’ll invent whatever reasoning and justification they need to justify their bullying, and they’ll immediately abandon that reason for another convenient excuse when necessary.

Republicans lie. They knew damn well what Project 2025 was, and they were in favor of all of it. When they said Trump had nothing to do with it, they were lying. Republicans ultimately don’t care what happens to society, or even themselves personally. They would gladly vote to lower the quality of their own lives, as long as the undesirables were hurt in equal measure.

Superman is almost as great a menace to society as that maniac Spiderman.

I would love to meet the people that thought they could use even worse genocide to excuse their own genocide.

This message is literally saying, “dismantle your military, and we will ethnically cleanse you.”

From January 1939, Superman single-handedly tears down a low-income neighborhood. He wasn’t attacking a group of political activists. He just decided that a group of homes were slums and thus worthy of being demolished.

https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Action_Comics_Vol_1_8#Synopsis_for_Superman:_"Superman_in_the_Slums"

What’s it like being a crab in a bucket?

It’s not always getting worse. It’s that things only get better if you have consistent pressure from the left to force Democrats to get better. The pressure to cave to corporate centrism is always there. You have to have some correcting mechanism, otherwise the party will just drift further right. This mechanism has existed for decades and it has served, and continues to serve, to keep the Democrats from decaying further towards conservatism.

Yes, obviously Project 2025 exists. There’s no need to gleefully trot out all the horrible things Trump is doing. Obviously he’s doing bad things. The problem with Democrats is they think that because Republicans are going to do awful things, that gives them a blank check to do anything they want. They can do any evil they want, just as long as they’re a little bit better than the Republican.

And you mention LGBT rights. The same centrist Dems who cited LGBT rights as a reason to throw Palestinians under the bus are now advocating for throwing trans people under the bus. It turns out, when you’re willing to sacrifice one minority group to the fire, then you’ll be willing to do it again. They justified letting the Palestinians burn in order to protect the queer and trans people. Now they’re justifying letting trans people burn, because in the name of the greater good, we have to make sure to protect everyone else.

Centrist Dems are the “first they came for…” poem in human form.

That IS the banality of evil that poem warns about. At every stage of fascist empowerment, a lesser of two evils argument can be made for letting one minority group or another have its rights taken away. Pretty soon all the minority groups are dead, because at every stage you thought sacrificing them made sense for the greater good.

Better yet. Let’s make the border between the two countries fluid. Any US state that borders Canada, or any Canadian province that borders the US, can vote to switch countries at any time. Require a large 2/3 majority threshold. Which nation does a better job providing for its citizens? I say we let states/provinces decide for themselves and vote with their feet.