My 80yo Conservative Boomer Mom messaged me that she's feeling depressed about the Blue Tsunami election results, and lamented that "We refuse to learn from our mistakes so I guess we'll just have to try Socialism once again to prove to ourselves that it doesn't work."

Le sigh; we long ago tacitly agreed to disagree on Politics because Fox/Limbaugh talking points don't hold their own when you have to support them against earnest challengers instead of just going to commercial after a long rant and mic drop. She'll legit cry and eat a box of grocery store donuts if I answer, no matter how tenderly because elderly Mom.

Anyway, Reality right now feels like living through the long slog of an Ayn Rand novel wherein the world is falling apart around the Elite Technocrat main characters because of Socialism. Only, in this reality, these very Technocrats are the ones already in charge, and the world is falling apart for the masses because of the exact opposite of Socialism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, currently works as an engine concentrating wealth and power upward to these top few as opposed to downward toward the masses. In other words, the very solution she held up, turns out to CAUSE the exact dystopia she used 644,000 words to exhaustively describe. Basically, the mythos that modern Conservatism is built upon, stands demonstrably and today blatantly obviously, objectively false to its very foundations, and the reality of this becomes ever harder to deny or effectively challenge.

America's two party system sucks. It locks everyone into an artificial dialectic wherein if you disagree on a given topic, you MUST therefore represent an extreme caricature of the opposite party. There's no place in this paradigm for anyone outside it; for example myself aligning closest to Libertarian values that generally go fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I can get both strong Ds and Rs angrily REEEE-ing and pushing me away within 30 seconds of diving into a serious discussion of current events vis a vis politics.

Welp, thanks to domestic and geopolitics, stations in California are posting diesel prices of $9.99 which is the highest number possible without massive upgrades to pump and display systems. I'm old enough to remember when gas topped $1.00 circa 1980. Pumps back then had physical digits in mechanical displays, and many stations modded the internal gearing and added a painted or stickered on 1. next to the mechanical digits, and many stayed that way for years and years.

My first adult job was at one of the last LA area stations that hadn't converted the service bays to a mini mart with 1 cashier and digital remote pumps. I thought I was applying for a mechanic job but that old fart just used me as a pump jockey till a Pep boys hired me.

We'd run payment to the central cash box and run change back out, and process MasterCharge and Bank Americard payments using an old school chunk-chunk quadruplicate form imprinter. After each sale, we'd reset the pump with a special square key and the numbers would noisily reset to zero.

I remember one day, the gas price had fluctuated up like 4c since the week before. This old fart, plausibly a WWI vet, took his anger at this with me, an 18yo with zero control over the fact; shouting, WE SHOULD HAVE JUST TOLD THOSE IRANIANS HOW MUCH WE'D PAY THEM FOR THE GODDAMN OIL!!! The he tried to screech off like a power flex in his 20yo 8MPG lead sled that was obviously misfiring on at least 2 of its 8 cylinders.

Funny afterward, I was working at a tire store 2 years later when the old fart station owner came in to buy 2 tires for a customer's car. He spotted me across the shop and started yelling out, DON'T HIRE THAT GUY, HE'LL QUIT ON YOU!! HE'LL QUIT! HE'LL QUIT ON YOU!! As he kept on, I realized he wasn't joking, he was still seriously bitter over me quitting after ignoring several inquiries about promotion to mechanic work. The other pump jockey I had worked with was 30 years my senior, content to coast in a near minimum wage nowhere job.