The point isn’t profit making through competitive better products, but rather taking existing products and making them as terrible as possible while gaslighting the public that it’s still a great product. That way we get worse of everything and the people making everything worse get richer via higher profit margins and the higher stock evaluations that buys them.

Basically, most people realize their product is no longer good, but participating in its consumption is more rewarding to our lizard brains than the product itself. So people buy crap products just to get the feeling of using them as they did in the past.

Unfortunately that’s just the way we’re wired. And every nepo baby with an MBA has driven a truck through that psychological loop hole, destroying anything of value that the US was capable of making best.

No joke. Everythings been in decline for over a decade, but we’re too in love with the ritual of consumption to care what we’re now consuming is no longer of any useful quality. Something our government now 100% reflects.

There will be a time when that ends. And it’s coming soon. As no one born into this mess gets joy from consuming something of so obvious low quality. They never got to enjoy the good product our rituals came from, just the corpse of what our rituals now lament.

You’re not making a bad argument. Just the wrong one.

The system we have is now whatever Trump wants it to be. Going back to the system we had previously would now be just as radical as changing it into one that actually benefits us.

The system we had lead to Trump. Period. Why would you want that again?

Ask yourself: when should we go back to exactly?

Back to before the Patriot Act robbed us of our constitutional right to privacy?

Back before no child left behind made our graduating high schoolers functionally illeterate?

Back before Citizens United allowed corpate power to influence every single election for decades denying you minimum wage, universal Healthcare, or literally anything that would detract from corporate profits over public welfare?

Back before Reaganomics then?

Maybe further back before the business plot of 1933 to overthrow the government in place of business nepotism?

Or maybe before all the Tariffs we passed in the 1920’s that accelerated the great depression?

100 years later we literally have the same problems. Just without the benefit of actually stopping them from destroying our government.

Half the white house is missing. An elected congress person isn’t being sworn in. Our own military is in our cities and it’s to protect masked police deporting some citizens with no due prosses.

This is not a future we reached by mistake. It is a future that was inevitable given the limitations of our existing system, combined with the centuries sociopaths have had to game it. We should not go back to it. It will just lead us here again.

It would be far better to use as a model for a better system. Certainly many other countries already have. But do not let nostalgia blind you to the fact that the problems in the system we have are inherent, and they are not fixable from within using the systems tools. They allow for exploits to grow, and after a hundred years, fail entirely in containing them effectively.

During WW2, a very difficult decision was made to use nuclear weapons. Killing hundreds of thousands to stop millions from dying. If they were not dropped the losses in the south pacific would be well over 8 million dead.

The argument you are currently making, given the WW2 context, is for us not to drop the bomb. Despite us already being at a point where Orange Hitler is about to destroy Snap benefits killing millions more than USAID closing and COVID already have.

There is no more normal course of action given the current situation. And there hasn’t been for quite some time. Just because Democrats haven’t noticed that in decades, doesn’t mean they ever will. This article confirms they won’t, and was written as PR for people like you to believe otherwise.

Just following up from my previous answer: MOST officers only need to pass training on use of firearms once a year. It does vary per department, and some officers use their access to training and ranges to hone their skills. But MOST of them only follow the guidelines, and most guidelines only require recertifying firearm use once a year.

By policy, it’s different per police organization. But overwhelmingly the biggest orgs only force training once a year. And the metrics they use to pass for accuracy and use are lower than most concealed carry courses.

As someone who used to create judgemental use of force firearm training simulators for law enforcement, I can tell you right now you’re likely a better shot than 90% of our police force too.

The problem with that strategy, was that Republicans were not doing that.

So it was a bad strategy. End of argument.

If you are actively strategizing, planning around what your enemies are NOT doing isn’t strategy, it’s stupidity. And it is what Dems have been doing for decades. They just want to blame Republicans for their complete lack of foresight rather than ever be accountable for letting the GOP cuck every single policy of theirs. Now to the point of undoing hundreds of years of legal precedent and progress.

The time for integrity and thoroughness had long since passed before Biden took office, so using it to defeat Trump was about as effective as using a fax machine to share memes. Being anything but aggressive after an active coup attempt that miraculously failed is astronomically naive at best.

But Biden was handed a literal democracy destroying shotgun with one barrel labeled “complete legal immunity” and the other “infinite executive authority” and he looked at that gift from the Supreme Court and decided it was best left to the next president to use. Oops wasnt Kamala. So now instead of Biden expanding the executive branch to control congressional decisions such as how many members of the Supreme Court there are, Trump is doing it to consolidate complete power and authority.

Our Supreme Court built a political Nuclear Bomb, that was 100% going to be used by Trump to destroy this country, and they gifted it to Biden first. His decision to not benevolently use it to destroy the holes in our Democracy MAGA has infested doomed us to be a corpse eaten by those MAGAT’s.

This article is PR for those who failed to protect our country to feel better about it. They failed. They sucked at their job by using clearly outdated strategies, and they did it despite our literal democracy being on the line. I do not blame the unstoppable force that is the MAGA GOP, I blame the Democrats who acted as tin cans for decades when they swore they could be immovable objects. Glad this article clears up the fact they literally never could be.

Yes, absolutley without question we can. And it wouldn’t even take that much resources.

The most recent wide scale study that was done was focused entirely on the world’s “needs” being satisfied in addition to basic resources like food and water.

The conclusion: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.

Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries.

With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large increases in total global throughput and output.

Thank you for the clarification. This phrasing of yours:

While that is idealy true, the reality of maintaining an ecyclopedia is not always so black and white.

Is almost identical in nature to every bad faith argument used in the last two decades to dismantle public infrastructure in America.

Namely, you say Wikipedia’s goal of factual clarity is an ideal that doesn’t exist, and then go on to amplify a small problem (factual disagreement) as the reason it’s “not always so black and white.”

While your point is about encyclopedias in general, that seems buried by your choice of how to phrase that point.

No offense intended by me pointing this out. As you did absolutely clarify at the end of your statement that people should still use Wikipedia.

It’s just that the phrasing you used is almost identical to MAGA and how they talk about Wikipedia being woke. I can go on Twitter right now and find several bots talking about how Wikipedia isn’t an ideal source of information using the same language and argument you just did.

I appreciate the clarity you provided on what kind of decisions the editors of Wikipedia have to make, but I feel there’s likely a better way to phrase it that makes Wikipedia seem stronger rather than weaker because of it.

No offense, but your examples of Wikipedia’s “Grey area” absolutley pales in comparison to an entire grokipedia that presents absolutely no counter points whatsoever.

If the choice is between:

• a self moderated encyclopedia that unquestionably will have some grey area edges cases where an active community will discuss the best way to interpret the facts.

Or

• a self-owned encyclopedia created for the sole purpose of hiding facts billionaires don’t like.

Then the choice is very much black or white in deciding which is better to use.

I’m a millennial. In my 40’s. My first job was working at a video rental store that no longer exists. When I was working there, they raised the minimum wage to 7.25 an hour. And in my entire adult working life since, that rate has not increased, now going on 20 years.

The fact that over 30% of the states in this country STILL only pay that same minimum wage is abhorrent. No one in those states has made a dime in 20 years, they have only had their purchasing power decrease as inflation outpaced their pay.

An entire generation of Americans worked the best 20 years of their entire adult lives just to lose money from doing it if it happened in those states.

If you’ve ever been to NY or Jersey you’d realize this is like 15% of the people you pass in the street. Strong chin, olive skin, good health, dark hair, Italian background. Guy looks like half the people in any gym in Brooklyn.

Eye brows are different between the two images. Could just be grooming. Shoulders appear to be different widths, but that could just be a jacket.

But the point is, both look like a young health Italian guy from NY. The differences between the images are more than enough to cast doubt. While there is a resemblance, it’s not even close enough to consider guilt due to all the discrepancies that appear when you look closer. The suspect could legitamately be a different person.

They reviewed our Indie game as “too woke” 6 days before I even had keys to send out. They literally don’t even play the games, just knee jerk to their audience 😂

Can you put capitalism in there too as this describes the same thing?

Find it hilarious that this study is like: “Telling people yes makes them addicted to hearing it”

When it’s literally the reason every billionaire is a sociopath. Everyone tells them yes, because they have all the money, and it makes them think they’re great. So they aquire more money.

So of course they invented AI to work the same way.

Which team is actively tearing down the Whitehouse again? Or stealing executive control of government agencies from congress? Or arresting TV personalities? Or banning porn / free speech? Or illegally putting their child sex trafficking friends in minimum security prisons?

Trumps pedo seasoned mushroom tip can’t possibly be hitting your prostate so good you can’t see this. You just like it enough not to look.

They’re all wrong. Xavier is a masterpiece that will give you mind worms that never leave (in the best way possible)

News at 8:

Gullible business owner conned by Trump for the 13,123 time.

“I just didn’t think the 100’s of years of data we have on Tariffs and what they do to business was correct when Trump said otherwise. My son is blind from staring into an eclipse because Trump said that couldn’t happen too, and now I’m starting to think he might be wrong about stuff.”

I liked it when cartoons were this dumb instead of reality.

(This is not a quote from the article. I’m combining multiple stories of people getting conned by Trump for comedic effect because it’s the same story everytime.)

I am by no means an expert, but there has been a significant amount of studies done on the estrogen in our water levels increasing:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2854760/

Detection of estrogens in the environment has raised concerns in recent years because of the potential of these compounds to affect both wildlife and humans. " The incomplete removal by publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) of excreted endogenous estrogens and prescribed estrogens leads to their introduction into surface waters and potentially into drinking water sources that rely on surface water. Estrogens, specifically estrone (E1), 17β-estradiol (E2), estriol (E3), and ethinyl estradiol (EE2), have been detected in numerous studies of wastewater influents and effluents. (Several links to the studies of the levels of estrogen in waste water are then provided after this quote).

This study in 2009 concluded that kids are exposed to more estrogen in milk and food than water, so it shouldn’t be a problem to worry about. However, at least imo, it never looked at overall levels of estrogen intake increasing from all combined sources as water has certainly added to it at least marginally.

So that’s all to say, I’m not 100% behind this being all true, just that there’s actually quite a bit of valid scientific studies that have proven there’s now more estrogen in our drinking and waste water that seems to be at least corolated to our medical use of it.

So! It’s actually kinda crazy how accurate your professor might be. Because progesterone, the chemical in birth control, does indeed break down into estrogen under the right circumstances. The components of broken down progesterone pass through the body via urine, enter the water system, and - this is the important part - is far too small and difficult to be collected or filtered out of the water.

So people taking birth control have absolutley added an insane amount of estrogen to the water supply. And most tap water now does have low levels of estrogen in it because people have been taking birth control for 60+ years.

In that same time, the average age of puberty has continued to fall.

So, it sounds a bit wild, but that theory is far more feasible than most realize.

You do realize you were adding to that hell right? Just because you hate Mormons doesn’t mean you should be saying that publically 12 times in a day. Twitter is hell because racists are there doing the same, likely about Mormons just as much as Jews.

Just because you aren’t racist doesn’t mean the hate you are spreading needs to be spread. Hate Mormons on your own time, or hate the religion, not those practicing it.

But fuck Charlie Kirk. He’s one guy and his death unquestionable makes the world a better place. But he was a shit head by his own actions, and most Mormons I’ve met are just as gullible as anyone else getting taken advantage of by an organized religion.

Just saying, it’s hard to find places online, and even harder when you go in hot. Don’t go in hot. Maybe Bluesky would treat you better. Their starter packs actually are great ways to find niche communities. The surface level Bluesky is where most of those flurries are. Below that there’s actually quite a bit of righteously enjoyable counter culture. Just don’t go in hatin.

This is the second No Kings rally. Isn’t that reoccurring? I get what you mean, but Trumps only been president for 10 months. In that time, all US media has been gobbled up by fascist conservatives who are fighting tooth and nail to make every American at these protests seem like a terrorist extremist.

The protests WILL increase. And they WILL keep reoccurring. There’s clear momentum gathering.

Just that momentum needs to be slow, and silly, to effectively disrupt the false narrative being broadcast on almost every single news network in the US right now.

Trump won because people here fully believe whatever bullshit the TV tells them. Batboy and Bigfoot are basically real to these people, and there’s literally no convincing them otherwise because it’s now on every channel they watch.

We need those people to see how the TV is wrong before they can even begin to understand how wrong our country now is.

If protests were every week the moment Trump took office, then it would just become white noise to these people.

Letting Trump dig his own grave by constantly altering the narrative is more effective than giving him the same material to work from that got him into position in the first place.

Hardcore Republicans are finally seeing how dangerous the rhetoric is becoming because Fox News is telling them people in Frog Costumes are Terrorists. Now that it’s obvious they aren’t, maybe more of what Fox News has been saying isn’t true as well.

Slow and steady resilience to a Fascist whose going senile is a far better way to defeat that fascist than becoming the terrorists he wants his opposition to be.