so, yes - i spent a lot of time around wealthy people when i was in school.

and, rather than integrate, i developed a pretty strong hate-on for them.

i graduated with a four year honours degree in mathematics in 2006. it's neither a b. sc nor a b.a. but a b. mathematics.

i went back to school from 2008-2010 to complete a similar 4-year degree in computer science, which would have been a b. sc., and because i had a lot of overlap from the previous degree, i walked away with 19.5/20 credits towards that goal. i decided, in the end, that i did not want to work in the industry.

during my second stint, i also brought my number of math credits at the graduate level up to more than enough than is required to earn a masters degree in mathematics. however, i neither registered for this program, nor applied for the degree. i had decided long ago that i did not want to work as a mathematician, in any context.

rather, i went back for three further semesters over 2012-2013 and in the process completed the requirements for a three-year b.a. in the sociology of law. this is not law school, and i was not training to be a lawyer. rather, they were undergraduate courses in case law (civil and criminal), as well as in constitutional law. i decided a third time that i did not want to work in this field.

i am a white person with a university degree, and then some.

i do not believe that i have ever made more than 20,000/yr, although there was one year where it may have been close or a bit above it. but, i haven't tried very hard, either.

i identify as a struggling artist, and a member of the lumpenproletariat.

can we primary gillibrand, now?

what happens on twitter should stay on twitter.

it is an absolutely miniscule slice of the voting public.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/the-case-of-al-franken

i didn't take this still shot, steve.

this is from a paper in your own state.

i know, i know, steve.

it's your opponents' ideas that are half-baked, not yours. that's your message. i get it.

and, maybe i'm exposing a bias towards people from the geographical area you're from. maybe it's just your accent. maybe it's not your fault.

but, it would really help if you didn't come off the way you do, which is as somebody that has a done a lot of drugs.

speaking of which, i would like to draw attention to kristen gillibrand pathetically removing herself from the race, today, in complete and utter miserable failure.

the answer to bernie's age problem was always al.

and, he would have beaten trump into the mud.

alas...

dude, i got the perfect running mate for you.

he can use al franken's staffers.

"woah, man, like.

what happens if you push this button, anyways?

they said it was fireworks. woah. fireworks. i'd like some fireworks right now.

you dare me?

you think i'm man enough?

fireworks. yeah. rad."

no, really.

i was just trying to figure out if he's a cokehead, or if he did too many hallucinogens growing up.

and, mr. bullock.

steve-o.

dudiolly.

what are you running for president for, anyways?

don't you know you can take a trip without leaving the farm?

*wink*

actually, i want to hope that the germans can figure out how to restrict immigration, subject to what is a growing popular consensus, without resorting to gassing people.

there's a lot of space to operate, between concentration camps and complete amnesty.

but, the mainstream parties need to pull their heads out of their asses.

https://news.yahoo.com/far-vies-lead-german-regional-130010332.html

and, we need to stop sending our kids to school in america.

they leave as liberals, and come back as democrats. that needs to stop. it's destroying the country.

i just wish i had something better to work with, in terms of pointing to alternatives.

so, sure.

if they want to run as american democrats on a harper-redux foreign policy, we can make sure everybody understands what they're saying.

and what the implications are.

in hindsight, we see that that is what really happened in the ignatieff soft coup that stabbed dion in the back - the party got taken over by democrats.

the left is not going to win power this election, but it could position itself to take a serious shot at in the next election - whether that is in four years or, more likely, in two.

but, it needs to get rid of may as much as it needs to get rid of singh.

the country is currently being run by a bunch of upper class snobs that went to elite american universities, and are only here to take a job.

they're a bunch of centrist democrats.

and, they keep proving it.

the liberals used to be the smart party, too.

they really did.

ok.

so, we can start talking about how trudeau's foreign policy is harper-redux if you really want.

because it clearly is.

the trudeau campaign seems to literally be intent on repeating every single mistake that hillary clinton made, in an environment where those kinds of errors are likely to be more costly (because we have a multi-party system) rather than less costly.

it underlies the basic point about this government: the people running the country right now are just flat out stupid people. and, i mean the lot of them, all of the staffers and people in the pmo. regardless of what you think about politics, the main focus in the election should really be in finding some way to get rid of, or at least put a check on, the stupid.

so, i have a better way to steal clinton's campaign slogan:

what is the best way to ensure that independent media can survive, uncorrupted, in the digital age?

let's not pretend we have the answer before we have the debate.

let's work this out.

i mean, this is a novel topic, there should be a town hall on this, not a ready-made policy from head office.

debate is healthy.

we shouldn't agree from the get go.

let's work this out.

"so, how would the media survive?"

through donations.

"but, it's unfair that the congolomerates are making ad money from this."

then ban it.

if you don't think your politicians should take money from corporations, then it stands to follow that you shouldn't think your media outlets should, either.

an independent media will be far more robust, far more independent, far more valuable, if you completely remove their dependence on ad revenue than it will be if you try and game the system so they get a bigger cut of it.

it's a weird thing to hear from bernie sanders. it's like he's undoing himself, swallowing himself whole. would he apply the same model to himself? no - he doesn't take money from corporate sources, he operates on crowd funding.

i'm going to have to pay close attention to this, because if this policy was written by who i think it was written by then it's aim is not to promote independent media, but rather to enrich the author. and, that's what i've been saying from day one.

if you really want to eliminate clickbait, then you take the profit motive out of it.

because that's their business model, and they can't and won't exist if you destroy it.

advertising is a horrific source of revenue. it promotes horrible things, at the expense of user enjoyment. it destroys us, as individuals. it eats away at our brains. it's an awful business model.

i'd much rather hear a candidate tell me that they want to completely ban advertising altogether, even if it's not entirely possible. pander to me that way - don't tell me you're going to share this dirty money around more.

because, i don't want it.

and this is what i do.

just cut me a check and let me do what i want. don't make it dependent on clicks or views. and, don't allow a collectivist system like a market to tell me whether it has value or not.

http://libcom.org/blog/meaningful-work-appeal-young-08102013

regarding this wang v sanders thing, though.

it's a false debate.

wang claims that his thousand dollars a month will create jobs, which is just silly. the only jobs it's likely to create are federal jobs in sending out the checks. sanders wants a job guarantee, instead, and claims people want to work - as though a thousand dollars a month is offering them any kind of serious way out of employment. it's less than i get on disability, actually, which is currently roughly $1260/month.

and, the ideas are not in contradiction with each other, either. socialism in it's purest state would see these ideas as working together, rather than against each other.

so, post-work anarchists will flip the question on it's head - we'll argue that it is precisely because we want to do meaningful work that we want the escape from market forces that prevent us from doing so. so, i'm not exactly opposed to a federal jobs guarantee - sure, i think that anybody that wants a job should be able to have one - but i am opposed to a system that tells you that you don't have an actual choice in the matter, and that opposition to what the left calls wage slavery is pretty foundational, as well. so, jobs if necessary, but not necessarily jobs (sorry.).

and, this is why it's important to point out that yang actually isn't doing this right. if he was presenting his policy in terms of an actual guaranteed minimum income - rather than a universal handout of what amounts to a pittance - then it wouldn't seem like there was a debate. sanders could present his jobs guarantee for those who want it, and still support minimum living standards for artists and other people that want to get out of the wage system.

i'm a musician, but i do a lot of writing, right? and, i don't want to charge you for this. i don't want to get paid per word. i don't want to sell this to a bourgeois layer. and, i don't want to bother you with stupid advertisements for useless garbage, either. i just want a nice little monthly check that lets me write what i want, when i want and how i want - and then lets me publish it where i want, too.

i understand that i'm not everybody. lots of people want to get up to go to work and get a pay check for it. that's fine. but, lots of people don't...

yeah, it's going to be a few more days before i do any sealing, but i've convinced myself that the smell from the baseboards is real and at least a major secondary source of the problem.

i'm actually convinced that the primary cause of the smell remains lingering effects of the sewer gas. it was pretty intense at the end, but it had lingered for a long time. so, there's a lot of residue in this space, and there's no real solution besides cleaning everything.

i'm clearly having some difficulty focusing but i'm plugging away, too. i should be done; as it is, i'm about a third of the way there. i just need to focus.

also: i would rather watch two nights with five people each than one night with ten people.

they probably weren't expecting ten candidates to qualify.

maybe they might want to ask around on that.

i'm not predicting this.

but, i'd like to see a final four of sanders, biden, warren and booker. those are the candidates that i would consider serious, at this point.

so, where does the support for all these failed candidates go?

hey, they're all posting low numbers, but when you add them up, you could get 10-15% in some polls. if they're all gone soon, some of the other candidates might get a bit of a boost.

i should add the caveat: i really hope that steyer doesn't get another poll in, but he probably bought the first three, so it's probably just a question of what's for sale. that's not good for anybody.

gabbard's supporters will probably go to sanders, even though that doesn't make any actual sense. getting rid of her should give bernie a mild bump.

of what's left, williamson, gillibrand and de blasio supporters are probably leaning more towards the leftier side, and perhaps the femalier side for the first two at least, of the remaining field. and, the other five will probably give biden a bump.

so, this is probably the debate stage:

i don't see anything surprising in the results, except maybe klobuchar qualifying. she's come off absolutely terribly in the first two debates. like, dumb, terrible. and, while what yang is calling a universal income actually isn't a universal income at all, it's not hard to understand where's he getting support from; i would nonetheless call on him to stay home. i'm not going to call for castro to stay home, but i do hope it's his last debate. the longer he sticks around on that stage, the more likely he seems to be to force the candidates into awkward positions that they'll have to walk back. he doesn't really have a serious shot at either president or vp at this point.

i would actually like to drag o'rourke around a little while longer. it's curiosity, mostly. and, i think booker belongs in the top tier more than buttigieg does - and would ultimately like to see him overtake harris, who is just digging herself a deeper hole on a daily basis, it seems.

so, it's just the bottom three that i'm questioning the relevancy of, at this point.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5471379/planting-trees-climate-change-theory/

i'm essentially proposing a carbon offset, and, as is the general case, the government here is just kind of doing a bit of it, just enough to get the headline it wants.

but, canada is really mostly a giant, uninhabited forest.

yes: we need to keep the tar sands in the ground. and, our per capita use is as bad as anywhere else. but, that's about not making the problem worse.

the biggest thing we can do to actually reverse the problem is to plant as many trees as we possibly can.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-federal-government-pledges-to-spend-15-million-to-restore-ontarios/

given that ford cancelled the cap and trade system, aren't there even already good ideas where to plant?

we should be able to push the treeline north, right?

regarding the burning rainforest, and political ambitions by the liberal party of canada, here's an idea:

what exactly are we doing to plant trees in the expanding boreal/tundra zone?

so, putting people in jail for vaping probably isn't the best reaction to this.

but, we don't seem to learn, do we?

i've hit a few thc vapes at parties, not to mention a little bit of shatter, and they definitely hit your lungs in a way that is a bit heavier, a bit different. i hope that they do a proper autopsy and actually figure this out.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5806783/respiratory-illness-vaping-death-health/?utm_source=Homegnca-national&utm_medium=MostPopular&utm_campaign=2014