Heh... If you think the popular vote is going to fix things, Scotland would like to know your location.

aThat's why there's also the Disabled Adult Child Programme, but you only get it if one or both of your parents have died, retired, or become disabled after they've had a long-standing work history. In addition, there is the plan to achieve self-support, which I'm actually signing up for because I want to set aside some money when I start a potential business I'm working with through VR and Avita.
Interestingly, my attorney said to me once that American Society has always been grossly unfair, and I don't think even a pandemic would make it fair, unless it meant the end of human civilisation as we knew it.

@932
I've been monitoring the real estate market.  It hasn't gone down.  It probably will, soon, in my opinion.  But it has so far been all right.  The $600 unemployment stuff has kept things afloat, but that probably won't go on forever.

@934 It is, quite literally, terrifying. My girlfriend uses a wheelchair. So even though she isn't high-risk in terms of her immune system, she *is* high-risk in terms of wheelchair + hospital = all sorts of ableist complications we want to avoid. I've volunteered to take care of her should she get sick, because we don't want to infect any of her attendants. Essentially, I've volunteered to take a bullet for her.

Realistically, I'll probably be OK. I'm late 30s, work out regularly, eat a reasonably healthy diet. But I'm still volunteering to roll the dice for her, because me taking care of her probably means I'll get sick.

And we have an Idiot In Chief doing idiotic things. We have a dumbfuck governor doing dumb-fuck governor things. And, TBH, we have dumbfucks in this thread doing dumbfuck things. I am, quite literally, having nightmares about losing my girlfriend, her ending up in the hospital and me having to fight for her, *me* ending up in the hospital...all because so many of us, from the president down to individuals, are being fucking idiots. The infection rates both in the US and Texas are staggering, and I wish we were anywhere else. I'd love nothing more than for my girlfriend and I to get the fuck out of Texas and America, and let the idiots who want to run around without masks run around without masks until they all fall down. But that's a lot easier said than done.

Anyhow, welcome to the late afternoon panic. whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com is pretty much my only source of political news these days, and I've stopped reading the ticker they headline each post with because it freaks me the hell out. I hate borders. Wish I could move to Canada, or pretty much anywhere else at this point.

Here's one of several examples of what fuckers in my neck of the woods are doing. Also, lest some of you conservatives throw down and claim "Austin media, liberal!" I actually disagree with many of the stories this channel publishes, so don't dismiss it because it's from Texas' pseudo-liberal enclave:

https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/1 … e-support/

TLDR: Folks didn't think Corona was a big deal, had a party to flaunt that. 14 family members sick, one dead. They can't even morn the dead family member because they can't attend the funeral. This is some shit, and to those of you who refuse to mask up, fuck you brutally with a red-hot spike. Pre-emptively issuing myself a warning while not giving a fuck. I just don't get how anyone could not care about this. And I'm not saying that as a democrat wanting you to vote for my candidate, because I'm not. I'm saying that as a human being wanting you to keep the human race alive so, hopefully, we can actually do some good to make up for all the bad we've already done.

Supposedly Florida as well.

@940
I'm not saying it's great. But compared to SSI it's amazing, and if I understand things properly they count way less of your assets, i.e. the value of your possessions isn't held against you, and it's just generally closer to "here is some money".

The electoral college and its power is the reason I flat out refuse to vote. people give me shit about it sometimes, but I'm not going to check a box when it doesn't matter what my opinion is.

Re: worrying about a significant other becoming infected and/or hospitalized, been there, done that, and it actually happened. I have alluded to this quite a few times, and the aftermath is still really raw for me. Not in terms of my partner's recovery, which, thankfully, was relatively good, all things considered, but in terms of the fact that I worry that he could potentially get it again. While it's possible that your immune system would at least be a bit more equipped to deal with a second infection, it's also possible that it would leave you more vulnerable, since we don't entirely know what the long-term effects are. So, yeah, that shit keeps me up at night too. And having the potential to lose someone you love, not just in the abstract, but as an immediate threat, that doesn't leave you when the threat passes. Maybe it would if I were a stronger person, but I simply am not. I blame myself for the fact that it happened. I was a fucking idiot, and didn't take the virus seriously when the lockdowns were starting to occur. I'm not a super religious person, but I was definitely raised to emphasize all the hellfire and brimstone bits of Christianity over all else, so I tend to believe that God is quick to punish, much like a domineering parent. I wouldn't know anything about that, either, but I digress. Anyway, I truly believe that I was given a wake up call, and that's my cross to bear. At least the whole thing about God not giving one more than they can handle in their life must be true, because I wouldn't fucking be here if anything worse had happened.

indeed, I don't know what I would do if I was in that situation.  This virus is for real but I just don't like how the media has to pump fear into everyone.

@943
For what it's worth, we know for 100% certainty that immunity lasts at least 5 months, and every day that goes by without definitely documented second infections is one more day on that number.  Everything so far w.r.t. reinfection has been attributed to errors in testing and such a small case number that it's safe to disregard it as not real.  It's almost certainly going to last much longer than that anyhow, when scientists say "we don't know", they don't mean "We don't know and it's bad", they literally just mean we don't know.  Everything reputable I've seen suggests that it will be long lasting immunity once the vaccine exists, but they can't say that because the cost of being wrong if that turns out not to be the case is stupendously bad.

@945
The media has been downplaying it consistently.  Every time the media says "Experts say it can't get this bad" it goes ahead and gets that bad.  Being as most of the media coverage until very recently has been continuously "It can't get worse, we promise" followed by it getting worse, I'm not sure how that's pumping fear into anything.

Of course the worst part is, the media has been repeating experts.  And those experts were right, and if this had been literally any other developed country we'd not be where we are now.  But Trump fucked it up repeatedly, and even now that he's following the script somewhat he can't actually just follow the script for more than a few days at a time.  SO, welcome to 2020, your real life reality tv show as government.  Worked out so well for all of us.

@948
I wouldn't oversimplify socialism.  Everything I've seen suggests that it doesn't scale up like you'd think.  It can be done at scale, but it doesn't seem to work out as $x per citizen no matter how many citizens you have.

Also cost of housing is complicated too, being as what happens with that is that it's about how many people want to live somewhere more than anything.

You're an oil and natural gas producer.  This makes fuel cheap, but at the cost of what is likely to be some rather big problems over the next 30 to 40 years.  There are other countries--I believe Norway is one--that are able to pull socialism-like policies off because of oil, and it will be interesting as in interesting times over the next while, being as oil is now at a place where it is going to become fundamentally devalued.

I think the U.S. could use some socialistic policies, but just, it's not so simple as waving a magic wand and saying hey U.S. get your shit together and decide you want it.  Deciding we wanted it as a country would go a good way toward it, but not as far as it needs to.