You can get involved in protests to try to make them pay attention. You can write letters to your representatives and prospective candidates. You can ask good questions at town halls. You can campaign for good candidates.
Voting is the least important thing you can do. Ultimately you have no choice but to vote for the least worst option but if that’s the only thing you ever do, you’re helping to bury all of us.
You still need to hold the Dems feet to the fire. Just handing them your vote as the least worst option just means you’ll never be offered any good options. Make them work for it.
Yeah, this is what we all thought when the internet was shiny and new. Turned out that everyone was assumed to be a straight white man and if you made it clear you were not, you’d get harassed.
I didn’t get through all of your post because this starting point is so fucking naive. Sorry.
It’s not just that when you add the time getting to and from airports, getting on and off the planes, and the time lost that could have been used to work, this argument does not stack up. These people are responsible for the rail services the rest of us have to put up with. There’s zero incentive for them to make the trains cheaper or more reliable if they’re allowed to fly whenever they feel like it.
Same for every politician. They should have to suffer what they put the rest of us through. Incentives, innit.
Straight cash only. Gift cards are a scam. An interest-free loan to the company selling them, which they only have to pay back when the card is used, or never if it isn’t used in time, and the recipient doesn’t get a choice where to spend it nor put it towards anything they’re saving up for.
My heart used to sink every time I got a gift card, requiring me to be organised enough to keep it safe and remember to take it with me into town. Worst present ever. Sorry.
*I’m sure there are exceptions, if you know the person well enough. But if you don’t know what to buy them, you probably don’t know them well enough. And you’re still giving scammers an interest-free loan.
If you cannot be arsed to think about how power works, there is no helping you.
Still, at least France will get its revolution. All those people out on the streets, it’s inevitable, right? So easy, the whole world would be a socialist paradise if only people weren’t so stupid and lazy and too busy keeping a roof over their heads to be more like your saintly self.
There is no reason for a large private rental market to exist. You don’t even have to ban private landlords, just make them compete with the most cost-effective provider: the state. Governments can borrow cheaper than any landlord and rent out indefinitely, turning a surplus (aka profit) at a fraction of private rents.
There’s a very high level of support for NHS strikes, around 2:1 for vs against. Mebbe cast aspersions on those with the power to resolve them, not the people the Daily Mail will never give a platform to.