They definitely have a symbiotic relationship.

Noone has claimed that.

Trump didn’t write this. He wouldn’t know what “atrophied” means.

like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.

That didn’t really happen though.

Nero has been pretty much redeemed in modern scholarship. The majority of the stories about him stems from slander written by avowed enemies of the Julio-Claudians (Tacitus and Suetonius in particular), later amplified by Christian writers who carried a special grudge against him. The archaeological evidence suggests he was a capable ruler, who carried out lots of large scale projects that were pretty beneficial overall, and he certainly didn’t set Rome on fire and fiddled while he watched it burn.

Yeah, Americans love to fantasise about their beloved 2nd amendment (regardless of political persuasion), but they have never ever used it for what they (falsely) claim it was intended for.

What is an uber pool? I am imagining some sort of German engineering wonder.

You are arguing from ignorance. The terms republic and democracy and so on have rather solid definitions in political science. Republic is not a very informative descriptor of the poltical system of a country, it just means that the role of head of state in’t heritable, ie. that it isn’t a monarchy. The actual political system of a republic can be basically anything except a monarchy.

A republic just means that a country doesn’t have a heritable head of state. All of those listed countries are in actual fact republics. It says next to nothing about the actual political system of a country besides the role of the head of state. Lots and lots of dictatorships are republics. Many democracies are republics as well, but as you can see it is the dictatorship/democracy part which describes the important part of those countries political systems, not republic.

Many Americans are confused about this, because they have been indoctrinated into thinking that republic is the main descriptor of their system. Mainly because it was an important descriptor back in the 18th century, when most countries were monarchies, but much less so in later times when most existing countries are republics.

There are lots of republics where the president does serve as a literal figurehead without any consequential powers, so a republic does not necessarily turn up with a Trump. In fact the US is rather unique in how it has combined republic with absolute monarchy in the office of the president, probably very much a sign of how antiquated the constitution is.

It definitely does not work in an environment where lazy aggressive apatheists will support a system they don’t like by claiming it can’t be changed.

If everyone stopped tipping tomorrow, the only people that would be hurting are the people who serve.

Who would then not want to work in those places that depends entirely of tipping. And then it hurts the owners of those places.

How are you unable to realise this? It is all connected.

Unfortunately as this very thread shows, a lot of Americans are mindbogglingly not in agreement about that. Which explains a lot about the current predicament of the country.

It works both ways. If noone tips then noone will work at restaurants where their wage consists solely of tipping. That is also how capitalism works.

OP says they are from Eastern Europe. They have no reach there.

Yes, but not as much as they are now. That really says something.

Because the GOP are not only as complicit in this as Trump, they are the root cause of all this happening, and cutting medicaid has been on their wishlist for decades. McConnell termed himself “the grim reaper”, exactly based on his objective to cut thing like this. I don’t understand why people keep considering them as some separate entity from Trump.

Trump is the manifestation of the GOP.

As with all of his crimes that would require someone to hold him accountable, so not really.

That is pretty much how the mechanics of human consciousness works. We also know we are going to die some day, and that it is most likely not going to be very pleasant leading up to it. But we still manage to block out that knowledge of finality in our daily life.

No, the current climate change situation is unparalleled in human history.