What is more important:

[applegrove]

If you think a golden ballroom is more important than childhood cancer research… I have nothing left to say to you. Please unfollow me.

#pediatriccancer #cancermom

— Bonky (@shesbonky.bsky.social) 2025-08-05T21:40:02.847Z

Applegrove:

I don't care if it is privately funded. That money comes from tax cuts and DOGE cuts. It also comes from people who don't give their money to charity like every rich person should.

[wordstroken]

1. Wow! That is powerful. And heartbreaking.

🦋 wordstroken

[MLWR]

2. So very true.

[mwmisses4289]

3. The sense of Noblesse Oblige died out

by the beginning of the 20th century. And was certainly no more by the end of the 20th.

[applegrove]

5. The countries got more liberal in the 20th Century. Some

Last edited Tue Aug 5, 2025, 11:04 PM - Edit history (3)

of the rich sent their sons off to 2 world wars. Some people feel they have to give back. They must leave the world better. They stopped seeing themselves a nobles. They felt guilt. They voted for the Roosevelts in the US and the Liberals in Canada. That is what i have seen in Canada. Our rich love our healthcare plan and 'elbowed up' at Trump's threats to annex us. Many of them know the mess that is the US health care system from their condos in Florida which is why they quickly sold them and moved home in protest of Trump.

I think Republicans, the Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation and the like purposely changed that at the end of the 20th Century for many Republicans.

Remember before the 20th Century some rich people in England still had sugarcane mills in the Caribbean, slavery before 1838 was how they could afford to build such big mansions in Great Britain. England had colonies until the 1960s around the world. My family knew the family of the Dutch official who had the job of dismatling a Dutch colony in Asia. He was so despised by the rich class and pretty much everyone in the Netherlands for doing so that they had to move to Canada permanently.

There was awful stuff going on. Before FDR there was no income support. Democracies were getting more liberal till Trump came along (think Obamacare).

Now we have Trump who teaches that a charity is just another vehicle to scam. The tech bros want to be completely isolated from the people who use their products every day for hours and make them the tech bros rich and they don't want their product taxed. This lot is unattached from humanity to say the least. It will make them mentally ill if they are not there already.

[lastlib]

6. I think it died when Gordon Gekko said

"Greed is good." That was the knife in the back. The big-money class took it to heart.

[slightlv]

7. Yes, I agree...

and this was the timeframe of Reagan, which is where I think it all started truly manifesting. Up until then, it'd been the talk and planning over dinners at nice restaurants and meetings in smoky rooms. The R's had truly been trying to break the Democratic Party since before FDR. They detested everything they stood for, which was directly opposite from what the R's believed. It really isn't a difference of an agreed upon end goal, which differences in only the way we get there. What has been growing more and more is an ideological difference between the members of both parties. There is no way to compromise, because there is no compromise to be had. What is the compromise between feeding a child and letting it starve? Between kicking grandma out of her house, or helping her to afford to live there as long as she is able? We're talking such deep, moral and ethical differences that I see no way a bridge can be made between the two ideologies. A third party is simply going to end up combining the worst of all worlds in an amalgam of chaos.

The "Greed is good" theme is when I think we truly lost the young people of that generation. I was just out of the Air Force and looking to go into college. I knew I wanted to major in Psychology, but everything had changed over such a short time. Everything was centered around "business" and "finance" and MBA's. I thought maybe by the time I graduated, the world would have shook itself awake again and see how far from a civilized society it had strayed, and maybe people would be important again by then. Boy, was *I* wrong!!! I got my degree, but I didn't bother with a Master's in it, as I'd planned. Instead, I got into the ground floor of tech workshops and taught myself the ins and outs of computers. That was the only thing that allowed me to survive and raise my daughter... even though it was at a much lower salary than my male coworkers.

But everybody jumped on that MBA bandwagon and everything was centered around money, money, money.... we never recovered from that, in fact we just grew more enmeshed in "things" every year that passed. And, I believe, to the everlasting sorrow of our soul, because I sure don't see it changing anytime soon...

[llmart]

9. My experience

I started college full time in 1981 but I was 31 years old. Both of my children were in school all day, and it was always my goal to get a degree. At that time colleges were opening up more slots for women in the School of Business. I had worked as an executive secretary in prior years but could never go any higher than that because I had no degree. i jumped on the bandwagon of getting my BSBA but it had nothing to do with money for me. I majored in Human Resources because I thought as a manager I would have some power to promote more women, increase their wages and give them the bennies they deserved. It truly was an altruistic choice to major in that field. In my thirty year career at various organizations I feel there were several times I was able to help employees realize all their potential.

[slightlv]

11. I ended up with a degree in Psychology,

which I couldn't apply to anything beyond minimum wage. But man, could I type... fast and accurate. So that's how I made a living... until computers. They captured my imagination so much when they first came out, I learned everything I could... read everything I could get my hands on, and took apart broken computers just to learn the insides. A few workshops later, and I was the PC "guru" at my place of work. My career ended up being able to anything on a computer, at least a little bit... and pretty damned good at a lot of it.

But I paid it back. As I built working computers from "broken" ones that were due for trash, I gave lessons to those who needed to learn, especially women who were trying to start a life of their own after divorce (like I was). I never charged for these lessons; I loved doing it, and I knew intimately what money was like as a divorcee with a kid. And I concentrated on what a woman would need to know to get a decent job. At that time it was Word Perfect and/or Microsoft Word. Excel. Harvard Graphics. A little bit of programming and basic DOS if anyone was interested.

Eventually, with getting a buy-in from a few more business on their old computers, I helped my sister, a teacher at a poor bario catholic school set up a small computer lab, and then networked them to the Internet. She and the kids were over the top! (LOL)

Those were the good old days, as far as I'm concerned. Most men would say I screwed up because I didn't charge money for doing any of this stuff. And, I probably did. But damn, it felt good sharing the knowledge back then. And the look and feeling of these women when they mastered something was really all the payment I needed!

[Grim Chieftain]

4. Anyone who supports him is an evil, soulless stain on humanity

He takes depravity to a new level. I hope he gets what he deserves, if not in this life, in the next.

[flashman13]

8. No They buy politicians.

[Submariner]

10. I wish I could be alive to see

the next Democratic president tear all that down and replace the Original Rose Garden.