Oh yes, definite worm vibes.
One thing he has taken from me, despite my best efforts, is some of my empathy. I do still have a little for her, but very, very little.
Trump promised to cut electric costs in half. Bills in energy-rich West Virginia now top mortgages
President Donald Trump, as part of his campaign pitch to “make America affordable again,” promised to cut Americans’ electricity bills by half during his first year to 18 months in the White House.
“And if it doesn’t work out, you’ll say, ‘Oh well, I voted for him, I still got them down a lot,’” he said. “You will never have had energy so low as you will under a certain gentleman known as Donald J. Trump.”
It hasn’t worked out.
…
“It’s breaking me. And there’s nothing that can be done for it, unless the president does something,” Michalski said about her skyrocketing power bills, adding she no longer supports Trump. “And I don’t see him doing it. He’s had plenty of time.”
He’s had plenty of time.
He just needs two more weeks.
Don’t sell yourself short. I bet you have a lot of empathy (and sympathy). For the victims of her stupidity and cruelty. She was stupid enough to think he would make America affordable. And cruel enough to not give a shit about the people who were certain to suffer under Trump’s regime (a category which, ironically, included her, albeit not so much as many others).
Our disdain for her is a kind of empathy, in that it conveys an understanding of her cruelty, her ignorance, and the predictable consequences of her own choices. Empathy is not synonymous with sympathy.
These definitions are technically wrong but they’re the ones I use:
- Empathy: the ability to comprehend someone’s situation or POV.
- Sympathy: the ability to feel bad about their situation on their behalf.
It’s easy to have empathy for stupid selfish cruel people. They’re very easy to understand. Just imagine an ill-behaved toddler in adult-sized clothing. It’s nearly impossible to have sympathy for them; especially not when they get what they deserve.
I mean, y’all both have incorrect definitions of empathy, as empathy is sharing an experience through understanding or mutual identification.
Sympathy vs. Empathy: What’s the difference? | Merriam-Webster
I kind of think we do experience her feelings. She is indifferent to those who suffer undeservedly, and we are indifferent to her suffering. It just so happens that she deserves it. Likewise, she feels bad for herself and we feel bad for the people she has harmed. Empathy!
Is there another term for that, when we share the same feelings, but not for the same subject?
Nonsense, Trump has dramatically cut our utility bills. Just ask Karoline Leavitt. Anything else is fake news.
In other news, chocolate rations have also increased.
I read the article about this woman’s plight, and if she hasn’t done so, she should find out if her utility companies offer budget billing, which spreads your bills out over the year. We started that years ago when we were getting hit by enormous utility bills in the winter and summer. Doing so at least allows you to budget your monthly expenses.
Otherwise, I simply no longer care about her or anyone else who admits to voting for the Orange Peril and now finds themselves in desperate situations as a result. It saddens me to say so, but my heart has become hardened to these kind of stories.
She could have seen the writing on the wall and not voted for him.
He did do something. He took away the solar tax credits. So he did do something to help the coal and petroleum industries, and billionaire buddies. That won’t help those complaining about energy costs
I installed solar, just under the wire of Trump cutting the credits. 3700 sq foot house. My last electric bill was $0. And we don’t really conserve that much. No need. I sell excess power to the electric company, I make more than I need.
This could probably go in one of the other threads but this seems like a good place for it. For the last few weeks/months, we’ve been hearing about the post office changing where and when things are post marked. A move that seemed transparently aimed at mail in voting.
Today, my local news has an article about the unprecedented number of late mail in ballots for our election a few days ago.
Might be paywalled, but here’s the gist of it.
- Milwaukee’s election office received an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots the day after the election, rendering them invalid.
- Madison and Green Bay also reported similar postal delays that caused absentee ballots to arrive too late to be counted.
So, they accomplished their goal, right? Screw with mail in ballots and cause people’s votes to not get counted.
As for the leopards and their faces, we’re seeing headlines like “Takeaways from Wisconsin’s Supreme Court blowout election” and “Steamrolled in Tuesday’s election, Wisconsin GOP looks for answers”.
I have no idea if these two things are related, but, at least to some extent, I hope they are. What I mean is, I hope the left won because more people voted left, but I won’t be mad to learn that the new USPS rules fucked over their own party.
The reasonable conclusion if that’s what happened is “stupid enough to vote MAGA, stupid enough to not compensate for the attempted disenfranchisement and thereby presenting one’s own face to the leopard”.
Lacking evidence one way or the other, I find this nonetheless quite feasible.
I’m not at all sure the post office has changed its procedures - I found a couple of reddit threads from three years ago where the answer to " At what point does USPS postmark letters?" is that mail was postmarked when it got to the sorting plant, even back then. And some mail gets missed, so if the date of postmark is important, go to the window, wait on line and ask to have it handstamped. USPS might be telling the truth about the procedure itself not being changed - according to them , the change is in their transportation system so that a letter I drop in the box at my local post office may not get to the sorting station the same day. Truth is, unless I asked for hand canceling, there was never a guarantee that it would be postmarked the same day - any individual piece of mail could have missed the truck going to the sorting center.
That only works so far, especially for those on a fixed income.
When electrical costs alone are running more than rent or mortgage and folks still have additional bills for natural gas, water, sewage, etc. budget billing isn’t going to help.
The one thing budget billing does is blunt the immediate impact of price spikes. The piper will be paid; just not today. But over enough months, they’ll get their money. As you rightly say.
The downside, at least with the way I’ve seen budget billing work in the past for me personally, is that at the end of the 12-month cycle they look at how much you’ve paid versus how much they’ve charged.
If there’s a big shortfall, they’ll reset your next 12 months high enough to meet the current prices and pay back the shortfall, and some more as a safeguard to ensure that doesn’t happen again. That can be a real triple whammy of price increases. Which is the same process used for escrow accounts for taxes and insurance paid along with a bank mortgage.
If we assume ongoing trumply inflation and periodic trumply energy price spikes are both a semi-permanent feature of the next almost 3 years, well, that lady’s money supply is gonna run dry somewhere along the way.
Or they’ll do what the municipal power utility does hereabouts: bill the shortfall in a lump, and jack up the monthly payment (plus pad).
Fortunately, thanks to an abundance of hydro, our rates are quite low — for the moment, until AI data centers eat us alive.
Or the snow / rain stops falling due to AGW.
So many cheerful futures to contemplate! 
Yeah, I was cogitating about tossing in an ETA to that effect. Haven’t looked at statistics lately, but according to the Mark I Eyeball the snowpack in the Cascades is noticeably below normal.
Yeah the Colorado mountain snowfall is very low. Same with the front range. Hell, the whole state.
The mountains provide us with water, there will almost certainly be restrictions this summer.
We are looking into xeriscape. We would do it regardless of the water situation though. Makes sense.