I saw people pissed off about this on social media last night. I didn’t even really understand what they were upset about. Other than the fact that it’s a handful of people sitting at a table, I didn’t really see any similarities with the Last Supper. Christians don’t own the concept of people sitting on the same side of a table.

TV shows put all the people on one side of a dinner table all the time - because of camera/blocking reasons. Is every episode of Eight Is Enough blasphemous?

In Kentucky, back in like 2015, we built a much needed new bridge across the Ohio river with money from the Obama administration.

When construction was almost complete, there started being rumors about tolls. And the city was like “nah, we wouldn’t do that”. And then a month later they were like “here’s how the tolls are going to work”.

It’s all hired out to a third party that expects to make profit off of it.

And the tolls don’t recoup the construction cost, they offset future maintenance costs.

And after a few months in operation, the private firm collecting tolls announced that they weren’t making their projected profits, so they were increasing the tolls. It was like $2.50 to cross one way. And it quickly went up from there.

After maybe 6 months they announced that they were having trouble collecting tolls on semi trucks. So they were again raising tolls on cars.

A lot of people have to cross this bridge just to get from their house to their work. So now it’s like $6 or $7 per day just to commute.

The private company is awful. There have been people who have transponders on their cars that end up with huge fines and late fees because they get double billed - billed by the transponder and billed by the license plate cameras. It takes hours to get through on a phone call. Their payment website is constantly down. Now they’re just telling everybody that it takes months for them to generate your bills so you can’t even believe the numbers, or like sometimes they’re just randomly billing customers that have transponders for trips they didn’t take.

IT IS FUCKING HORRIBLE.

And the "drivers’ that should be paying the largest part of the bill - the trucking companies (as their vehicles weight the same as a dozen cars or more) don’t pay anything and just people trying to get to work every day have a $200 per month commuting bill that they didn’t sign up for when they bought their house on the other side of the river.

And the city is stuck in this contract - where a private company can unilaterally raise rates and overcharge and double bill - and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve heard stories of people trying to register their car and finding out it has thousands of dollars in tolls. Buying cars that have thousands of dollars in tolls outstanding that can’t be registered until the bills are paid.

And all of this, not to build a bridge. The bridges were built before the toll company even got involved. But just for future maintenance on the bridge.

And the net effect of all of this is that people who live in this city have learned to never use the big beautiful new bridge. Because even if you do everything right, you still get screwed. So all the tolling has done is coerce more people into using the old, outdated, beyond-design-capacity bridges that the new bridge was built to take the load off of. The new bridge is constantly empty and the little two-lane 70 year old bridge next to it is busier than ever.

As a transplant recipient who is now listed for a second transplant.

Nobody wants the state to murder people to increase the supply of organs.

Stop couching your vengeance fantasies in altruism.

In America, even the Democrats would block something like that.

Both parties in our country have decided that nothing should happen unless a person who is already rich gets richer. That Government should never take any action if it possibly reduces the chance that someone else would make profit off of a problem.

Like we don’t even build roads any more, unless we make it a public/private partnership where taxpayers pay to build the road, and then a private company takes over toll collection.

My town built a bridge across a river - not even really a new bridge, sort of replacing a existing bridge that was free to cross. And in the last few months of construction, the city announced that they’d partnered with a private company to collect tolls to fun maintenance. It was $2.50 to cross (one way) for cars when the bridge opened - like 6 years ago - and they’re increased the tolls every opportunity since then. So now it costs more than $5 - each way - to cross the bridge for cars. The price for a Semi-truck to cross has on;y risen by 25% in the same time.

And they’re notoriously bad. They double bill. They bill errantly (sending people bills who didn’t even use the bridge). They’re tolling system will be months behind. They’ll put liens on cars that they claim crossed even when they haven’t yet sent a bill.

The city government knows about all these problems and they are just like “our hands are tied, we signed a contract with them”. So that bridge will be a Govenrment-enforced, for-profit scam for at least another 30 years.

And sometimes the city doesn’t even get their full cut, because they apparently promised in the contract with the company that there would be a certain minimum daily use. So some days the city forgoes their cut, in order for the company to hit their promised profit for that day.

Mind you, this company didn’t’ have any part in building the bridge. And they don’t run physical tollboths. They just built an array of cameras and sensors and have a payment portal website. And yet we let them gatekeep the bridge and the money generated by the bridge.

And of course, use of the bridge is always low, because people drive 20 miles out of their way to use the free bridge. And the more they raise the tolls, the more people avoid the bridge. So the more days the city doesn’t even take a cut.

This bridge is basically in the middle of a city - so some people commuted across the old bridge for free, now they have to pay $10 in tolls just to go to work and back home. Or they add 40 minutes to their commute, add unnecessary traffic to other roads in town.

Just because a Democrat led city Government didn’t believe in paying with tax dollars for maintenance on a bridge that was already built.