My cat's name is Nancy Reagan. She's almost lived up to it. And no, she doesn't like you either and if you try to pet her you'll get what you deserve.

Some cats have official titles. I had another cat whose title was "Chief Inspector." He was known to do home invasions and conduct snap inspections of my neighbors houses. He had more friends in the neighborhood than me.

None. My wife doesn't know about tact, or the polite white lie or anything like that. She doesn't have time for that bullshit. It's one of her endearing qualities.

I'm GenX as well and I will straight up admit that my wife and I got lucky, purchased a house in a "distressed" neighborhood in Portland because it was all we could afford, and now, 20 years later, the neighborhood is fully gentrifying and our house and property is worth way more than what we owe on it.

I'm conflicted as to how to feel about it. While on the one hand we very innocently bought the place because it was in a shitty neighborhood and was all we could afford, on the other hand I now know that we were what the urban studies people refer to as "bohemian colonizers," meaning that without knowing it, we were, by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification.

Again, I am of several minds regarding how I feel about the whole thing.

You know, that actually makes sense. 14-year-olds. It would explain a lot about hexbears.

Where, oh where are all of our apologists?

Maybe still figuring out what the "talking points" will be?

We're all waiting for the inevitable bullshit.

Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn't really count since most of us know it's a scam.

Yeah, it's so strange that people confuse you with a Kremlin bot when you repeatedly spew the same fucking bullshit talking points as the bots themselves.

More than one thing can be true at once. Sure, saying "excuse me" is perfectly reasonable, but it's also true that a lot of people are obnoxiously oblivious of their surroundings in public.

Great concentration of wealth is also highly destabilizing. We are seeing this play out before our eyes in real time right now.

Man, a lot of you Americans need to unionize. None of this happens at my work and it's precisely because we're unionized and have a contract that specifically says that our employer is bound by strict rules. Granted, we don't get a month paid vacation, but we can't be denied time off, can't be compelled to be on call, can't be forced to work overtime and we have PTO accounts, healthcare and a pension that get paid into on a weekly basis.

This mirrors the experience of anyone who has studied linguistics.

Because everyone speaks at least one language fluently, they tend to assume that they understand how languages work, while having zero awareness of the fact that people have spent generations studying language and communication at the PhD level and that almost nothing about what we reflexively intuit about language actually holds true.

And I say this as a purely amateur linguistics nerd who does not claim any real formal expertise in terms of academic credentials.

Capitalism is fine as long as its well-regulated and is only one component of a larger system. It's no accident that the best countries in the world to live in all rely in part on well-regulated capitalism together with robust democracy and relatively high levels of what in the US would be called socialism.