Palo Alto has made an artificial law to harass people who live in recreational vehicles.

San Francisco completely banned parking RVs on the street, several years ago. The wealthy are showing their heartlessness.

Californians, how about campaigning for a California law establishing the positive right to park an RV you live in on any public street, and to leave it there as long as you like, except for daytime no-parking zones?

The idea of "meritocracy" has served as an excuse for making life harsher for most poor people. The fact that a few — those who are exceptionally hardworking, gifted, and lucky — win a better life provides an excuse for the elite to claim that the harsh life for the rest is their own fault.

In most cases, those few are competing for a limited set of slots. Even if everyone were as hardworking, gifted, and lucky, they couldn't all get the rewards.

But even the slots were plenty, we can't demand that everyone to be gifted and lucky. We don't live in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. We ought to make a decent live available to everyone, even those who are less capable, or unlucky.

US student loans, actually from private banks rather than from the government, have put many former US students into a debt trap they can never escape on their own. The nominal size of the debt keeps growing due to penalties.

Plutocratist politicians attached the last wall to this trap around 15 years ago when they made it impossible to get out of student loan debt through bankruptcy.

A progressive Democrat is running to unseat Paul Ryan, and now that Republicans have shown their true tentacled face, he might succeed.

Anyone in Ireland that wants a driver's license will be required to get the new biometric ID card.

In effect, Ireland is introducing a national ID card "by stealth".

If Irish people don't organize to defeat this, I predict that in a few years they will require everyone else to get one.