I watched my own father illicitly borrow millions of dollars by bullshitting other rich boomers, acquire vast acres of property across the country, promise the family he would pass it all down to us and our futures were set, then have everything taken away by courts as he and and the rest of my family drank themselves to death after snorting away every family assets on cocaine and other drugs.

I lost everything I owned after investing my time and energy into being there for my family and they just crashed out without any accountability to their next generation. Starting over in the middle of my life from nothing. I may never own property of any kind. I probably will never retire.

I feel like it was all just a microcosm view of what’s happening broadly. The legacy of the boomer generation is going to be crushing us for a century to come or maybe forever.

It’s a “meh” comic, but a good reminder that there are LOT of job-offer scams out there, and they’re very sophisticated.

They will call you and talk to you, they will set you up for an interview, they will “transfer” you to different people, they will have you fill out an application or test and finally they will bring you into a zoom call or other kind of tele-meeting for “onboarding” and at that time they will ask you to pay for “some small costs” of having certain equipment sent to you or application/security clearance fees, and they claim they will refund it from your first paycheck.

The moment any employer asks for payment for ANYTHING up-front, it is a scam. Every time. Run away, call consumer protection never mind they scrapped that, call authorities, doesn’t matter, just hang up or get away asap.

• Do not give any personal information to any company you haven’t checked out thoroughly.

• If they require any payments for anything before paying you, it’s a scam. Worth repeating because the number of people who fall for this is insane.

• If the job seems too good to be true, if the application process is stupid-simple, it is probably a scam.

• If the people who reached out to you won’t give you contact info other than themselves, it may be a scam.

• If the job offer seems too good to be true, if the pay is far more than you expected or asked for, if the work is so easy anyone could do it, it’s probably a scam.

• Check the company profile and call their main number. Many times the scammers use an existing company in another country or a defunct company as cover. If they’re an active company, you can often confirm with them through the main number if the offer is real or not, but be warned there are even scammers who make fake business websites.

• The people contacting you may speak perfect english, have no accents, and be confident and professional sounding. Do not trust stereotypes to be an accurate warning against foreign scams.

Even the most “shocked” right-wing pundits who were screaming “COVER UP!” during the first few hours have now pivoted to “If there are secrets in there that could destroy corporations, we HAVE to trust daddy and protect the identities of the child rapists. We may not like it but preserving economic stability is more important than the lives of children.”

Not even kidding on this one.

It’s already over, the dust just hasn’t fully settled as a large segment of the population is now being told all the moral outrage over “pedophilia” was just for when other people do it. If you’re a big businessman or political leader, well that’s just the cost of preserving the system that treats us all so well.

The party of morals, christianity, small government and individual rights everyone.

People connect with him because he feels relatable and “genuine” and if that boggles you, we who can type and read words vastly underestimate how powerful this kind of “don’t give a shit how stupid people think I am” persona really is.

Why should we be at all surprised when people like Joe Rogan and Donald Trump himself are so popular with people for their “charisma.” Charisma doesn’t mean suave and smart, it means you can charm some certain segment of people, particularly those who can’t tell the difference between confidence and dimwittedness.

While some might trash this take for sounding “boomer” you’re not wrong, on a very deep level the profound decline in American and European reading comprehension has led to nearly a quarter of our population being functionally illiterate, and the problem here is much deeper than reading scores or being well-read, the problem is without a robust, developed language system, your brain is far less capable of organizing and contextualizing even basic kinds of abstractions about our world.

We use words in our minds to create dialogues and monologs to explore meaning and synthesize ideas and understanding about complicated topics. Without words to create these narrations it’s much harder or impossible understand anything beyond what you immediately feel and see and hear, you become highly linear in your thinking and also highly reactionary.

You’re seeing people walking around like blank-eyed zombies because the number of blank-eyed zombies is literally increasing.

There’s nothing “rosey” about the struggles of pioneering communities in early European settlement in the Americas, nor in the way that people pretty much had to shelter together for the last million years before America’s founding, my well-agreed on thesis is that community is how our species has survived and the idea of single-family homes and individualism is not only a new thing in our history but antithetical to our very nature as a species, which is why “social death” is a mentally and physically harmful condition that we’re all vulnerable to.

The “American Dream” was for people to make their own way, and at the time it was groups of people who settled and built communities, it was the drive for wealth along with the sudden vast tracts of land that came with America that encouraged people to start spreading out into single-family homes and leaving one’s community or family system. If you curl your lip at the idea of staying with your family through your life, that’s understandable, but that’s because families and our perceptions of family has changed. It’s not something easily reversible nor am I making a prescriptive statement, I am describing how things have changed and if I were to prescribe anything at all, it’s that we need to work harder at renormalizing actual socializing, at making and preserving friend groups so we learn and understand emotional intelligence, so challenge ourselves to new ideas and re-learn compromise and compassion, something not just missing from the worst people, but broadly through all ends of the political spectrum. Understanding that our current state of loneliness and depression and anxiety is not a natural part of our lives is an important fact that we can’t lose.

We are not living how we’ve been adapted by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and it’s having profound impact on our collective mental health, and it’s allowing the atomization of our political perspectives to disastrous consequence.

Too lazy to address individual responses and too stubborn to edit or delete the original comment that got people on your case. It’s fine, go learn something new today. Don’t bother replying, won’t see it.

First partner is fine.

If you’re really concerned about security, you should know people can often crack this one pretty easily if you have public social media accounts. It depends on how much you have at stake. I don’t think it would matter for your Netflix password, but if it’s an investment account with tens of thousands of dollars or more, you should be aware that “hacking” is really just a very organized process of digging into data leaks and social media accounts to scrub as much information about a target as possible.

To this end, your childhood friend should be (237#0Je<-)Banana39999_willywarmer, and the street you grew up on is Jupiter’s radiation belt.

Funny, but no.

We are trapped in our own cultivated echo-chambers. You are a victim of the same cognitive control mechanisms as the right if you think there is at all a large enough wave of regret and “realization” going through the general conservative or even median voting population to effectively produce change.

This is still not enough. If you want to understand why, spend a day watching FOX or even CNN or MSNBC. Right-wing news is already moving onto other bullshit topics like trade and trans athletes and immigration successes. The other networks are using this latest drama to squeeze the last traces of pus from the emotional pimple from a population that wants to read a feel-good, satisfying “We got 'em!” story so they can get back to their comfortable lives.

The only way this will turn into anything with actual political action is if enough people actively serving in politics right now organize and use this to affect actual political decisions. Investigations, evidence, articles and coalitions. We were led to believe that the Democratic establishment was supposed to be doing this, as there really isn’t any other sizeable organization working in politics who can, but the sad truth is that most dems are just working as cover for the fact that the entire establishment, republican and democrat, has been bought or is actively being attacked and dragged out of the picture for not being bought. (See: Mamdani)

You want this to mean something? Go get involved in your local political groups and work on getting rid of the foundation of this pyramid of slime that supports our congress and senate.

I am addressing this one. Either you stand by it or adjust it.

I will type this again:

This kind of reply effectively kills any momentum that COULD be achieved from sharing the collective frustrations and feelings. It’s a thought-stopper.

Every movement and uprising against tyranny has started from enough people reaching a breaking-point and realizing that they all have to do something “right now” and this kind of “What are you doing” and “You go first” bullshit is just your own way of saying “I’m scared so you should be too.”

You are literally serving the interests of powerful and wealthy who want to keep our population subservient and scared.

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This kind of reply effectively kills any momentum that COULD be achieved from sharing the collective frustrations and feelings.

Every movement and uprising against tyranny has started from enough people reaching a breaking-point and realizing that they all have to do something “right now” and this kind of “What are you doing” and “You go first” bullshit is just your own way of saying “I’m scared so you should be too.”

You are literally serving the interests of powerful and wealthy who want to keep our population subservient and scared.

While not wrong, I don’t think this is necessarily the whole story.

It’s more that our collective narrative has been atomized, and people have been given their permission slips to stay comfortable, to only consume the news and stories and narratives that preserves their comfort. (Note that comfort is not the same as happiness, this conflation is absolutely wrecking our entire society, learn they are different things and you will make great progress in your life.)

Our addiction to comfort comes from survival impulses, and capital has learned how to exploit this, to give us food and drugs and products to buy and shows to watch and video games to escape into and podcasters and streamers who take care of the mental work for us. None of which makes us feel satisfied or complete, but placates our survival urges and makes us not seek change or new ideas.

The internet and related algorithms has shoved a wedge deeply between our shared realities. We are no longer forced to listen to the uncomfortable perspectives of others. We are no longer required to adjust, to compromise, to adjust our views. As individuals you may think you’re very self-reliant and self-actualized, but we’re talking populations. Populations are like liquids, they seek certain lowest levels. Our levels are now manufactured. This means you can live in willful obliviousness to uncomfortable truths without ANY consequence.

So even if someone “knows” that there is something like a concentration camp being built, there is no chance in their world for it to intrude on their comfort so the incentive to DO SOMETHING about it is not there, so it just becomes an uncomfortable presence which we tend to unconsciously avoid. We then create stories in our heads to rationalize and validate these feelings. Cognitive dissonance is not some mental fallacy that only “stupid” people fall into, it’s hard-wired into each of us as a survival tool to avoid creating problems in our predictable lives.

edit: reminder people, there was massive pushback about the US getting involved with Europe and Germany before and during WW2 even as evidence of genocide was coming to light. This isn’t new. What is new is that we don’t have social pressure anymore to do the right thing. There is absolutely no incentivization to change stances.

The best example of how the world has changed and changed us is by rewatching The West Wing. A show that if aired today, would probably end up with the production studio burned down.

Hyper-individualism is a much more modern idea that may have its roots in our founding but it was exploited by capitalism during the post-war financial boom last century.

Before we had media showing us “how it should be” families lived together throughout their lives, communities helped each other and American towns pulled together and helped each other in a variety of ways. The whole idea of single-family homes was invented by the housing industry to get people to buy three to four times as many homes. To sell this they started leaning harder into the idea that you’re the protagonist, you specifically, you are special just for being American, you are special for wanting your own things (that are advertised to you) and so on.

And before industrialized America and throughout the last several hundred MILLENNIA we were a communal species, it’s why we have so much contradictory hard-wiring that influences how we feel about our social standing, about other people’s feelings towards us, why there are so many people who latch onto authoritarians and fear strangers. These are ideas that run in direct opposition to “rugged individualism” and they are clear signs we’re not living the way we’ve been designed by literally millions of years of evolution.

Capitalism has pried apart the very fabric of our species and weaponized it.

If you’re going to use a movie to deliver populism and morality, it better be a good movie or you’re just handing ammunition to the world’s worst piles of shit.

We need to all collectively admit to ourselves that Superman is tired and over and from a different world. We can write new stories that will connect with and give hope to a far more apathetic and cynical population.

Don’t forget getting yelled at for “camping” because that’s the only way you can possibly play.

I feel like if parents took the internet more seriously from the start and were more actively engaged in what their rotten teenagers were getting up to online we might have had at least a slowdown of the awful decay of society as our worst intrusive thoughts now not only have space to be seen without consequence, we have entire communities supporting each other’s rotten intrusive thoughts.

It’s entirely demographical.

I was unemployed for a while when private equity butchered the company I was manager at, at some point I spent about a week playing as dedicatedly as some of the younglings and I got really good, really fast, but the moment I had to get back to the grind I fell off again.

You simply cannot compete with kids who’s primary concern in life is if their mom will keep paying for their ChatGTP subscription to do their homework for them when you have bills and family and medical procedures and loans and thousands of ropes of responsibility pulling you in different directions. You simply will not compete with people who can play several hours a day when you only get weekend nights, when you’re already exhausted and just want to sleep anyway.