We destroyed public education half a century ago to cut the oligarchs taxes.

Half of our public still thinks giving the oligarchs the remaining crumbs they can no longer make corporate landlord rent with will somehow be urinated back on them as prosperity.

Our public can't learn.

The ideal laborers. You can exploit them until they're bruised and bleeding, then then just point at the powerless, starving, dying homeless person on the sidewalk and say they did it and you should hate them for it. Problem solved.

Dont forget, it all starts with:

Greed/avarice = rational self-interest

Greed is a character deficit, a personal failing, and a destructive force. We've made it our primary practiced cultural value. We deify the greedy instead of condemning them for their greed. We've made greed a virtue, having largely abandoned the term in favor of self-masturbatory, complimentary terms for it.

You don't get to a place where empathy is a foreign concept, where your capital score is more important than the social contract, without demanding far more resources than most would need for a hundred lifetimes being tolerated by society.

The Gordon Geckos, Ebenezer Scrooges, and Mr. Potters were cautionary tales about bad people with bad values, villains. Yet Oliver Stone supposedly gets letters from fans who thank him for creating their fictional role model.

The situation highlights the need for conservation and further study to protect water resources in the region.

At this point I just roll my eyes and chuckle at the lip service paid to our species' determined mass-suicide in the name of short term private profit.

Our species refuses to so much as consider winding down our maximum growth/metastasis global economy in favor of finding equilibrium with our only habitat, so at best we'll make civilization impossible and at worst we'll make any human survival at any level impossible.

They all know the reality.

They just also know it's the poories problem in their lifetime, not theirs.

This isn't a society, it's a death cult of greed.

Ready to Rumble

Train A is heading south.

Train B is heading north.

They will both remain in the same time zone, and even the spectacular collision will not be enough to propel any bits of bone or steel into another time zone.

The question already declares that the trains will collide, but I can make the question completely humane and even prosocial despite that with some additional context:

The Train from Town A contains only 100 billionaires with heavy petrochemical interests in their portfolios, all chained up and drenched in gasoline as Stuck in the Middle with You blares on the train car's speakers on a loop.

The Train from Town B contains only the 100 most enthusiastic Fox News viewers, all there voluntarily having been told that not getting on the train is a leftist plot to make them trans. This got them pushing and shoving one another to board faster to, quote, "show them filthy libs."

All proceeds made from concessions at the collision viewing party, as well as selling the wreckage for scrap, will be donated to charities that house the homeless.

For the purposes of this question, let's say the trains are propelled by linear induction and are effectively launched at full speed in a matter of milliseconds.

Two trains are driving toward one another. The first train leaves Town A at 5am traveling at 60 miles per hour. The second train leaves Town B at 7am traveling at 70 miles per hour. The distance between Town A and Town B is 455 miles. What is the exact time that the collision will occur?

Ecological collapse is imminent; please buy more products

If there is a better epitaph for Humanity, I have not heard it.

Can we Laser etch this quote onto the moon's surface before the last human dies please?

No way for either party to get their hands dirty if you're both literally swimming in pools of blood.

What is Trump's brand again? Remember his game show's theme song? Something about being a proudly greedy fuck? The same thing Americans have been indoctrinated worship and aspire to since the Reagan Revolution?

Thank the bipartisan worship of market capitalism and greed for Trump, for the rejection of academia, for the ruins of public education, the end of regulation(like antitrust) and law enforcement as it stifles profitability, for the end of the habitability of the planet... on and on.

And we're still unwilling to reject economic growth/metastasis and working against one another to get moar as our only pursued national goals, even here, at the fucking end. Pathetic.

I wouldn't vote for him with a gun to my head, but let's not kid ourselves, Donald Trump is about as representative of this shithole as it gets. He's like the United States as a country took human form, a fat, proudly ignorant, proudly greedy, ego score obsessed bully in an ill fitting suit who would sell his own children for the right price. He's more American as it is than apple pie ever was, and at least as American as our national pastime of school shootings. 🇺🇸

The ACA was a national version of the Heritage foundation's for profit friendly Healthcare bandaid that bent over backward to keep for profit insurer's cut in and was initially instituted by a Republican governor. It didn't even put us in the right direction, because the right direction is ending the role of private insurer middlemen in Healthcare, which is yet another national disease we suffer. It insured more people at the cost of expanding the profit base of the market capitalists, the enemies of almost everyone else whether they love that enemy or not.

The Democrats have never done what needs to be done, take some of the profit from the oligarchs that profit off society and only succeeded with societal infrastructure they don't want to pay for, and give it to society through the commons.

Until a party starts addressing the greedy profiteer elephant in the room, nothing can improve, so nothing will improve until this gold plated cesspool collapses, almost certainly by the impacts of capitalist made climate change.

This system is comically too far captured by the capital market to have any reasonable hope for rehabilitation. It has protections upon protections, both through effective propaganda cannels and then force, to prevent any economic rehabilitation that doesn't hand even more GDP to the 0.1% at everyone else's expense.

The Reagan Revolution is more responsible for Trump than Trump and the crony oligarch masturbatory clown show we call an economy.

Imho, the last chance to save this faltering country would have been to reject the trickle down economic con, Reagan electorily, and Welch culturally.

There was just no coming back from doing that and convincing their former opposition to take the bribe money with them, today's neoliberals.

The last 40 years have just been leftover momentum, playing pretend this country wasn't over as anything but an oligarch exploitation trap.

The United States as a society irrevocably died around the time the first millennial was born. Twas unrepentant greed workshop that killed the beast.

I'm ok with that, since our species has clearly accepted mass suicide in the form of the reverse terraforming of our only habitat to be hostile towards our species for private short term profit.

If we don't value human life having a survivable habitat beyond the next few decades, why should we value it next hurricane season?

🤷

Wouldn't have been my choice, but that doesn't change the reality.

I mean, that's by design.

Americans have been trained to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires from birth for half a century though oligarch captured public education and their for profit media. It's quite useful, as those successfully deluded advocate against their own interests, like hating progressive taxation they'd benefit from as citizens, but would have to pay when, lol, they're the rich ones at some undisclosed point in the future.

It's why we're a bunch of rugged individuals at each other's throats for oligarch scraps and are actively hostile towards the concept of ever being a society. So long as they've convinced us to fight one another hoping to beat our fellow citizens and "win," as capitalism demands, we'll never collectively demand equity.

Fortunately for theoretical future generations born into this greed/exploitation trap, oligarch made climate change cannot be bribed, discredited, disappeared, cut in, or deluded into playing ball.

Reality will assert itself, and quite violently going by the climate scientist's projections and our species apparent lack of any sense of self preservation.

More of that "free market" Republicans and Neoliberals love crowing about on display.

Can't have commerce happening for prosocial reasons, only greed!

The sociopath capitalists want us poories to be jealous of their concierge medicine based longevity to feel superior, but jokes on them, they made society so shitty and desperate that we see premature death as peace at last!

Checkmate, owner class!

And we're still obsessed with economic growth/metastasis 😂

"Herp derp don't worry! we'll just keep injecting steroids and nutrients directly into your tumor. It's the only way to save you. The tumor just needs to be so large that it will magically discover a way to keep metastasizing even larger... forever!"

Won't that absolutely kill me even faster?

"Oh, yeah probably. Who fucking cares though, growth!"

This is just hatred

Yes, this is indeed America.

Every 2 years since Reagan, we get a vote for either Greed(D), or Greed+Hatred(R).

Greed+Hatred won this cycle. Not getting hatred as a result would be the confusing thing. A welcome confusing thing, but confusing nonetheless.