US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians

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chiobu said:
I wanted to find some uplifting and inspirational r/politics Biden thread for the 100th page but he only appeared in 1 out of 25 stories on the front page

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You would think that Trump was still president lol
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Remembering that /r/politics is literally owned by a DNC PAC... Well. They have nothing good to say about Biden, and it's obvious Trump is running in 2024... So they have to keep the fires lit. Remind people that they voted for Biden not because he was worth voting for but becuase ORANGE MAN BAD.

Also: If Trump mass pardons the 1/6 guys his first day in office holy shit that would be amazing. I heard he didn't do it in his last days of his first term because the Turtle threatened to support impeachment if he did.
 
Here's to 100 pages and many 1,000s more.

Only reason this thread gets called a hug box is bc we're not spurging out and acting autistic 24/7 like most of this site (OK aside from the late night posters).

Die mad about it. :)
 
chiobu said:
I wanted to find some uplifting and inspirational r/politics Biden thread for the 100th page but he only appeared in 1 out of 25 stories on the front page

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You would think that Trump was still president lol
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I'm starting to think at this point, Trump would be more effective as a boogieman than an actual President.

It is absolutely amazing how rent free he lives in these people's heads despite him doing almost literally nothing for the last 12 months.
 
Let's talk about infrastructure.

I'm gonna borrow someone else's words on this.

In case you missed it, the Fern Hollow Bride in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania collapsed when I municipal bus drove over it and ten people were injured.

Recently it came to light that in 2018 a man walking his dog noticed the bridge structure was rusted through and Tweeted the city about it.

That is just over three years ago.

According to the Post-Gazette article linked above:

[Mr. Kochanski] said it was just chance that he took the photo. He walks underneath the bridge at least twice a week with his dog, but, on that day, he happened to look up and noticed the detached beam, as well as some cable supports that seemed to have been added more recently to replace any function that the detached beam had provided. From that point on, it worried him.

“Until they removed the rusted beam, I’d look up every time I walked beneath the bridge,” he said. “But after that, I kind of figured it was taken care of and I gradually forgot about it.”

Mr. Kochanski had seen online that the last documented inspection appeared to have been 2017. Told that Mayor Ed Gainey said Friday morning that there was a much more recent inspection just four months ago, in September, he was stunned.

“If that’s true, then somebody did a pretty miserable job of inspecting,” he said.

According to 2CBS Pittsburgh:

Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse: Fern Hollow Bridge Had ‘Poor’ Rating Since 2011

Inspectors have listed the Fern Hollow Bridge in poor condition for more than a decade, although they said other local bridges are actually in worse condition.

Inspectors began listing the bridge in poor condition as far back as 2011, and as recently as last September.

In 2017, inspectors recommended it be overhauled “because of general structure deterioration and inadequate strength,” and recommended a restoration project estimated at $1.5 million. That project was never funded.

Now here is an interesting article from April, 2021:

Hundreds of Miles of New Bike Lanes Coming to Pittsburgh
Checking in with the Bike(+) Plan in Pittsburgh.

According to the article, the city of Pittsburgh is making progress on a plan that would bring the city’s total of bike lanes above 250 miles. The city last year added 13 miles of bike facilities to an existing 60 miles, according to Karina Ricks, the director of mobility and infrastructure for the city, who is cited throughout the article touting the benefits of bike infrastructure.

This is an image straight from the city’s Bike(+) master plan:

Screenshot_20220129-154630_Adobe-Acrobat.jpg


Apparently getting safely home on municipal busses because the brides don’t collapse isn’t on that list.

Here is another:

Historic Shadyside intersection has become official point of Pride

The corner of Ellsworth and Maryland Avenues has more significance than meets the eye.

In the mid-1990s, when LGBTQ Pride marches in Pittsburgh were small and grassroots, Richard Parsakian and others in the community held a homemade rainbow flag over that intersection.

And now the corner has been memorialized with a recently installed public art project to mark its significance. The intersection is filled with a collage of colors and shapes to represent every group of the LGBTQ community and to signify to visitors and Pittsburghers alike the role the area played in the fight for equal rights.

Now I will be the first to admit that I am not a structural engineer. But I am a PE in metallurgical engineering and I can tell you that it takes a long fucking time to rust entirely through a girder like that.

I’d also say, albeit slightly outside of my area of expertise, that there is clearly something wrong with the bridge’s drainage system if the Salt from the roads covered the steel sub structure and wasn’t safely drained away from it.

Also, again not as a structural engineer but someone who a lot about the strength of steel, I’m having a hard time understanding how two tension rods are an adequate replacement for a girder.

Let’s put this all together.

The city was well aware that the Fern Hollow Bridge was in poor condition for over a decade.

They did some hackneyed fix to it and it passed inspection barely five months before it collapsed.

The city couldn’t find the money to fix that bridge, or others in worse condition, but dies have the money for bike lanes to achieve some Woke goals of reducing car emissions and letting people walk to places where they can buy fresh vegetables.

Bike paths for suburban yuppies to bike to the Whole Foods and LGBT street murals.

That is the government’s priorities.

Not fixing bridges with sub structures that have rusted through.

And when the Federal Government gets involved what do they do?

Secretary Paternity Leave tells us how roads and bridges are racist.

I think the problem with the Fern Hollow Bridge was structural corrosion not structural racism. But what do I know, I’m just an straight white male engineer who believes in objective facts and that 2+2=4.

Our government tells us we’re racist if we don’t pass a trillion dollar infrastructure bill but the entire time our government knew the bridges were rusty and needed replacement but spent money on bike paths and gay crosswalks until the bridge collapsed and tax paying citizens got hurt.

This is a perfect example of the decadent bullshit that our nation has become.
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People should be absolutely furious about this. 'Uwu, we can haz bike lanes!' instead of fixing fucking bridges so they don't collapse.
 
Absolutego said:
I remain utterly fascinated how this party has just cratered from their seeming invincibility ca. 2008, just because Trump got elected in a surprise upset.
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get ready for more

we're about five minutes away from the trans narrative collapsing, for example
 
You can't run for reelection on "I kept maintenance & repair well-funded." Government isn't much different than the private sector this way...nobody gets a promotion to the C-Suite because they did such an excellent job at making sure nothing broke.
 
cybertoaster said:
Say you're a white black supremacist.

Hire only white guys who're black supremacists married to black women.

Have your entire board be the whitest pastiest guys all cosplaying black panther and doing the wakanda pose.

Enjoy the unlimited seethe.
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I mean, I know you're joking, but you have to start reporting demographic information to the EEOC once you hit 200 employees, and if you've got too many white males, doesn't matter how progressive you are, there are civil rights lawyers who do nothing but sift through data, looking for a company to file a class-action suit against.

It's all well and good when redditors seethe, not so much when the seething comes from a federal judge who just slapped you with a ten-figure fine and a requirement to hire a DEI coordinator at the executive level and spend a minimum of X% of your annual budget on her office. This actually happens, and conservatives don't want to do anything about it, so it's only going to keep happening.

I worked for a growing start-up for some years, owned and run by, who else, a group of right-leaning white guys. As we approached the 200 employee threshold, I warned them that "we hire the most qualified people, and we just haven't found any black women who meet our standards" wouldn't fly with the EEOC. Anyway, they have a Director of Diversity & Inclusion now.
 
Jaimas said:
When I was in the activist pool, a common joke is that if you could make it two tiers up, you were set for life, because everyone I worked with twenty years ago knew some idiot or another who landed a gig canvassing for some mid-level establishment hack, did the same work we were doing on a volunteer basis (half as well) and got paid a hefty salary for it, only to piss it away, and, if anything, that's gotten worse since I left. There was stories during 2016 of people getting paid six-figure salaries for the DNC while never even showing up.
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this is also how big city government (doesn't) work
and it's closely tied in with black Greek organizations
one of the reasons Colorado and Arizona are the strange mix of hyperfunctionality and weird fuckedupness that they are is the constant influx of competent government employees who just give up one day trying to report to someone who hasn't been in the office since 1998 and move to those places
Idaho and Nevada are like that too but add Mormons
 
chiobu said:
I wanted to find some uplifting and inspirational r/politics Biden thread for the 100th page but he only appeared in 1 out of 25 stories on the front page

View attachment 2935021

You would think that Trump was still president lol
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The Republican leader of the National Governors Association? You mean Asa Hutchinson? LMAO.
 
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Jaimas said:
No need - I will tell it to you straight, as someone who worked for them: the Establishment Dems have never been good with funds.

Ever.

When I was in the activist pool, a common joke is that if you could make it two tiers up, you were set for life, because everyone I worked with twenty years ago knew some idiot or another who landed a gig canvassing for some mid-level establishment hack, did the same work we were doing on a volunteer basis (half as well) and got paid a hefty salary for it, only to piss it away, and, if anything, that's gotten worse since I left. There was stories during 2016 of people getting paid six-figure salaries for the DNC while never even showing up. There were people who worked for the non-Hillary Dem Candidates that were still getting paid by the DNC long after the primaries were over and they were no longer needed.

On a staff level, they burn cash like crazy, but where it hits ludicrous speed is that throwing cash around in giant amounts is literally their only response to anything.

It's why they perpetually got played by the oldschool Dems at the grassroots level; they can throw money around with legendary faire, dominating airwaves with massive ad buy-ins, fucking enormous campaign promotions, and huge events intended to push turn-out, but that is literally all they can fucking do. And I'm mostly sure they do it because they feel it isn't their cash. Then the funds run dry and they're always flabbergasted when it fucking happens, even though their staff likely told them about it three years or more in advance.
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My understanding is that the DNC political machine runs into the same problem as unions. Organizers become a class of people which continually grows, drawing more and more money to do less and less work. They collude to hire on their friends and family to do the things that were once their responsibility until you're paying 4-5x as many salaries to do the same amount of work. Meanwhile, on the RNC side, it's more corporate, where everything is results based and pros do the work as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they can get on to the next job and the next paycheck. As below so above, as it were.
 
Capsaicin Addict said:
People should be absolutely furious about this. 'Uwu, we can haz bike lanes!' instead of fixing fucking bridges so they don't collapse.
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Even in city-like areas bike lanes make no fucking sense. Take Flushing Queens NY for example, that area ALWAYS has cars parked next to the sidewalk, making almost all the streets narrow as fuck, increasing the risk of bikers getting hit by drivers. Meanwhile the sidewalks are almost double of what suburban sidewalks are due to the fact that there's no grass on the corners.

When I was a kid, I was always told to stay off the streets when riding a bike because drivers are assholes. Years later, it's now ok for bikers to ONLY ride on the street and nowhere else? Not to mention you have those speed bikers that act like they own the street.
 
In Portland, they're purposely getting rid of car lanes and narrowing bridges to make driving less convenient, and then adding in bike lanes that basically no one uses even in the 100 or so days of the year when it's not raining. It's fantastically stupid.
 
SSF2T Old User said:
Even in city-like areas bike lanes make no fucking sense. Take Flushing Queens NY for example, that area ALWAYS has cars parked next to the sidewalk, making almost all the streets narrow as fuck, increasing the risk of bikers getting hit by drivers. Meanwhile the sidewalks are almost double of what suburban sidewalks are due to the fact that there's no grass on the corners.

When I was a kid, I was always told to stay off the streets when riding a bike because drivers are assholes. Years later, it's now ok for bikers to ONLY ride on the street and nowhere else? Not to mention you have those speed bikers that act like they own the street.
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Some cities are just banning parking on the street, so the hundreds of people who drive can make way for the tens of people who bike. The parking garage companies support this rule, of course.
 
SSF2T Old User said:
Even in city-like areas bike lanes make no fucking sense. Take Flushing Queens NY for example, that area ALWAYS has cars parked next to the sidewalk, making almost all the streets narrow as fuck, increasing the risk of bikers getting hit by drivers. Meanwhile the sidewalks are almost double of what suburban sidewalks are due to the fact that there's no grass on the corners.

When I was a kid, I was always told to stay off the streets when riding a bike because drivers are assholes. Years later, it's now ok for bikers to ONLY ride on the street and nowhere else? Not to mention you have those speed bikers that act like they own the street.
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It doesn't help that you get bicycle 'activists' like Critical Mass who think it's cool to screw up major roads in a city by biking in this huge pack of retards.

I swear, somewhere I saw rules regarding bicycling on roads. One of them was 'bike single file'. But invariably, the faggots will ride side by side, taking up more of the lane and making it harder to pass.
 
ABC/Ipsos poll of 510 adults shows that 76% of Americans think Biden should consider "all possible nominees" while only 23% want him to uphold his promise to select a black woman. Only 28% of non-whites polled want a diversity hire and 54% of Democrats want him to consider all possible nominees.
 
chiobu said:
I wanted to find some uplifting and inspirational r/politics Biden thread for the 100th page but he only appeared in 1 out of 25 stories on the front page

View attachment 2935021

You would think that Trump was still president lol
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If you really want to make them seethe on that sub I've found the best way is to just post positive shit about people like Manchin or refer to him as President Manchin. I think they actually hate him almost as much as orange man right now because currently he's the main one wagging a finger in their face and saying "no, bad dog, you shit on the carpet, no more treats"
 
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