https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ha...

What tells you people are leaving these?

Last I checked, Fecebook still has millions of active users, and fuckerberg is still raising a shit every time an app store adds a rule that restricts his ability to spy on people, as if he thinks he has any power to do anything about it. His net worth would take a major hit if people really left it, which would be funny, but it hasn't.

I still can't figure out what the fuck mastodon is, aside from the fact that Trump Social uses its code, and on toot.io right this second you'll find a feed of "toots" from people who only know how talk about how much they hate Trump, America, the right, etc. So I think it's safe to just call it Trumpadon. But at least it appears to be active, because there's definitely tooting going on. Or as the British call it, trumping. Either way, no obvious indication that people are leaving.

Bluesky is kind of weird, but there are sites that track how active it is. It gained millions of users at the 2024 election, then they seemingly just as quickly left. Ever since then, they come and go in little spikes that somehow correlate well with every news cycle featuring Elon. Oh, and the ones who stick around appear to find joy in painting swastikas on things, especially cars.

As for x...well, unlike Fecebook, it's not public and its valuation doesn't appear to affect the net worth of the guy who is most commonly associated with it, assuming its value has changed. The media enjoys quoting random people from it anyway as if the stream of consciousness of random twitter users is somehow newsworthy. But as with Trumpadon, no obvious signs that people are leaving.

It looked like you were having fun when you did it, so I thought I'd join in, didn't I?

Obviously I can't tell you what was in their heads with any certainty, but somehow you seem pretty certain that you can. You just did exactly that, after all. More than that, from the very first sentence in your very first post you seemed certain that I somehow "know it was morally wrong", despite the fact that I haven't even made any judgments about morality. Why? Because I wasn't the one out there getting shot, bombed, or kamikazed at all over the Pacific. Nor was I ever at risk of being tortured and starved in a Japanese POW camp. Obviously a different time, place, and circumstance, wasn't it? Much the same way it was no big deal to walk in on somebody in an outhouse and plant your naked ass right next to theirs.

But from that air conditioned armchair you've fancied yourself a proper judge and jury for 80 years ago in the Pacific theater. If you want to call out war crimes done at a policy level, as opposed to actions of individual soldiers, the best example I can think of is when the US handed over some half-million German and Italian POWs to Europe under the full knowledge that Europe was going to force them into unpaid labor, in many cases on de-mining duty, which was, even at the time, a war crime.

And what does this have to do with Porsche again?

The statement presented was whether it was a war crime. The answer is a firm no, and I already gave it to you. How much more candid do you want?

Besides, I'm openly troll. That's about as candid as a person can get. I'm not afraid to play your game, let alone beat you at it. I don't need a moral high ground when the very bridge you're playing stupid games on was already claimed by me.

Social media in and of itself is not. Certain forms of social media have been shown to be harmful, but this doesn't seem to make any attempt to understand or distinguish which, rather decides to perform surgery on it using a pipe wrench to the face. This is what happens when you act on a moral panic.

Either way, let Australia do Australia, I'm only giving you my take on it. They already make highly subjective things like parental ratings on games, music, and movies law, which is de-facto censorship by virtue of the fact that it makes it impractical to sell anything even remotely questionable in that market when stores can't legally carry them. Exactly why Germans only get to play games for ages 5 and up on steam unless they leave the country. Then again, as every German will tell you, if you feed him a swastika after midnight on a full moon, he'll turn into a Nazi zombie, so maby it's for the best that they ban that kind of thing and censor stick of truth there. Every country has a unique situation.

Well, let's see what the data says:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...
https://fiscaldata.treasury.go...

So...tax revenue is not decreased, and neither is welfare spending. And the US ranks high on the list of countries in terms welfare spending as a percentage of GDP.

https://oecdstatistics.blog/20...

The country that ranks the highest is France, and as you can see, their poverty rate isn't doing much better than ours. Notice Italy ranks third, yet their poverty rate is higher. As you can see, welfare spending isn't a silver bullet.

https://worldpopulationreview....

Indeed, we actually do better than much of Europe. Notice Scandinavian countries spend less than France and they're doing much better. I don't know whether it's coincidence or casual, but their economies are more market driven than even the US. We also know that countries who have eliminated their markets entirely (i.e. socialism) tend to fare the worst.

Note also that your preferred system where the markets are semi-free and the government exercises a heavy handed control of the private sector, forcing it to make decisions in the interest of the state when it suits the state, sometimes called fascism, isn't doing particularly well in the states that use it, such as Russia and China.

Indeed, I hope what you wish for happens to you as well. Merry holidays!

Oh and, honorable mention:

https://media.mbusa.com/releas...

I only need you to understand what I'm saying.

By far the biggest complaints levied against EVs come from the low energy density of the batteries (weight, size, distance.) This is going exactly in the opposite direction. It's also not cheap enough to make low end EVs competitive with petroleum cars, even in developing economies. Mach E and Model 3 and Model Y it was only ever sold in the budget, lower range version of each. R1T is a pretty big car, even for a truck. Yet rangewise it's barely competitive with the much smaller Model S. Unless you're going to pack a massive battery pack on an even more massive car, or you intend on making an even lower range Nissan Leaf, I don't see the benefit.

Just as above, you'd have a point for this if the topic was grid power storage.

A couple of things to unpack here:
- The energy density of this car's batteries is claimed to be 180Wh/kg. That's less than what people driving around in Teslas right now already have.
- This was already supposed to be shipping by now
- Another Chinese company already shipped what it advertised as a solid state battery. Only it isn't. But they're still allowed to do that in China anyway.

If the underlying tech does what it claims to do and comes next year rather than three years from now, then you're almost getting somewhere due to the other advantages of lithium polymer, though we've still not seen any improvement in energy density.

Nope. Both actions were to diminish the enemy's capacity to fight. Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined were firecrackers compared to Tokyo. The main reason nuclear weapons are banned now is because of the after then known effects of nuclear fallout. Tokyo itself could only feasibly (but not necessarily) constitute a war crime now, simply because we have the capacity for guided munitions. Furthermore, napalm, like any incendiary weapon, is still legal to use. In those days, the only realistic way to bomb anything (aside from nuclear weapons) was carpet bombing. If you tried to fly anywhere near low enough to get any degree of accuracy, on say a building, you would just get knocked out by AA fire. This may come as a shock to you, but just because John Wayne could shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hands instead of aiming center mass doesn't mean that police and soldiers aren't expected to aim center mass.

To this day, bombing is still done even if it is known that there will likely be civilian casualties. Nobody (other than people who think every John Wayne movie is a documentary) has any expectation to the contrary. You guys typically think the Bradley Manning leak video depicts a war crime, though anybody who has any idea what constitutes a war crime and what doesn't could easily tell that it isn't simply by watching the video. Once you add the context behind it, then it becomes blatantly obvious that it doesn't even begin to meet the definition of a war crime. Well, blatantly obvious to any reasonable person at least.

Nope. The topic was Porsche. Somebody mentioned Porsche's behavior. I quipped that they were founded by Nazis (or at the very least, Nazi collaborators.) A few posts later he comes in with "butwhatabout..." completely pointless (and off-topic) virtue signaling. So I verbally flicked him in the ear for being stupid, baiting him to do more stupid shit, then here you came to combine forces in a virtue signaling carebear stare. Either that, or one or both of you just came here to argue that Porsche has some kind of moral high ground. Not that it matters because both constitute internet entertainment.

You're right, they belong in bubble wrap.

Which people often did when running pyramid schemes. I.e. send a dollar to the next 5 people on the list and repost, and you'll get rich! Was a thing on BBSs too, going way back. By 1995 basically nobody would put their real email address in their post header.

They can discuss religion as well. Teachers can't.

But all of this only applies while they're at the school. Outside of school, they can do like my history teacher did and wear a "real men love Jesus" shirt. Which, as an atheist, I thought was hilarious.

Ultimately, what they can or can't do on the job comes down to their employment contract with the state. Just like any other job, really.

It's a good thing the only state with such rules has a voucher system, meaning private schools, where such restrictions don't exist, are a viable option for teachers there.

True, though governors often do.

Checks and balances usually have to come down to a game of rock paper scissors.

That's interesting. The common consensus among psychologists appears to be that social interaction, even online, is actually a healthy thing. So things like texting, video games, or other behavior that either require or highly encourage you to be an active participant. What's considered unhealthy is being a simple observer, or just a content consumer, and having that replace your social interaction at a younger age. Especially short form video and photo sharing, i.e. tiktok, instagram, youtube shorts.

If what you say is what's really happening, then Australia is probably going to make things much worse. This is why legislating based on moral panic is a really bad idea.

They've never had that power to begin with. The executive brings both prosecution AND enforcement. The job of the courts is to interpret the laws. They can issue an injunction, but they do not and never have enforced it. The executive has the explicit power to commute and pardon, thus nullifying injunctions. However, the legislative has the power of impeachment.

It has always been like this. You'd know this if you had ever bothered finish middle school, rsilvergun.

Until they come after video games. But you'll say nothing, because you aren't a gamer.

No love lost for social media, mind you, I don't even use it. If the whole industry went bankrupt tomorrow, I wouldn't be bothered. But what you're saying is that, rather than being able to have your own discretion, the government made the choice for you. One of the important parts of growing up is learning how to use your discretion.