what bothers me is the vast swath of independent voters who for some inexplicable reason believe the Republican party is better for the economy even though every time they get in charge they immediately crash it and the Democrats have to try to clean up the mess.

You act as if they're choosing the Republican candidate. For the last several decades, the winners have come from protest voting (ala hating the other guy/girl). Though that doesn't stop people from assuming they have some kind of mandate and overreaching like crazy. Which then leads to the pendulum swinging in the other direction when the next party overreaches.

In the old days, we had long runs of same party control...MckKinley/Roosevelt/Taft. Harding/Coolidge/Hoover. FDR/Truman. Reagan/Bush. You'll note that pattern stopped in the early 2000s when the presidency started seesawing back and forth. People don't want any individual anymore. They don't want the other guy. And you're gonna see this again in 2028 when the Dems landslide a win. And of course the message they take away again, like fucking fools, is that the public somehow is in love with all their policies and wants them to ignore half the country and go as extreme as possible with their agenda. And then we're going to get a Republican again in 2032.

You're technically both correct. They are a monopoly, as Webster's defines the word. They aren't yet a monopoly under US law.

None of them were/are Democrats. Neither are they Republican; they are all opportunists. They just discovered that conservatives (especially the religious ones) are easier to gaslight.

I'd argue it's not that Trump is an opportunist. It's that he's a narcissist. And the Dems refused to suck up to him or even give him an ounce of respect. They had the opportunity to advance so much of their agenda by just kissing his ass a bit, but they were too proud. Foreign leaders have generally leaned this lesson as well.

Gas takes time and money to get those boilers (steam engines) up and running..

Not really...relative to the other energy techs, gas is one of the quickest and cheapest to toggle on and off as needed. That's why they're ideal as peakers.

I believe that you are gullible. Which of us is correct?

I am. The man is actively giving away his wealth and has been for at least half a decade now: https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...

He's on record on wanting to give away 99% of his wealth over the next two decades. If he actually wanted to keep growing his wealth, his wealth growth wouldn't have been flat for the past 5 years (when practically every other billionaire has nearly doubled or tripled in that time: https://ips-dc.org/total-u-s-b...).

I know you really badly want to believe Gates is still a cutthroat little shit. But believe it or not, people's priorities do change.

Is it possible Gates found it was more lucrative to monetize aid to poor countries than climate aid?

I believe the days of Gates caring about money are behind him. You can fault his past motives, but now he seems very clearly focused on philanthropic work.

Methane is at 490 g CO2 per kWh. That is bad. Stop attempting to justify burning fossil fuels instead of nuclear energy.

Coal is double or triple that. Perfect is the enemy of the good. Nuclear is fine for baseload. Nat gas is fine for supplementary peaking and filling the gaps in low demand areas (where nuclear would be overkill) with poor wind or solar coverage. Basically coal power should be declined, nat gas should be maintained at current levels, and renewables/nuclear should be expanded to fill the gap as coal retires or power needs increase. In the long run, batteries would supplant nat gas and we'd start declining nat gas usage as well, but the battery tech isn't there yet. In no world should we be shuttering nat gas plants with decades of life left just to "be more green".

Less factory works, more eldercare workers. Problems solved. Also get money from selling ever increasingly value added goods to the world.

I don't think you quite understand how steep their population decline curve problem is.

I think that's a relatively recent development (in the US, anyways). Prior to the past few decades Democrats and Republicans were parts of the same communities: they'd go the same churches, shop in the same grocery stores, watched the same TV shows, maybe played disc golf at the same courses. Recently that has measurably changed (with the exception of the disc golf situation where there probably isn't data to substantiate the argument). The amount of overlap between Republicans and Democrats in the factors that broadly constitute "identity" has fallen off a cliff.

100% absolutely. And that is a both-sides-ism. Neither side sees any redeeming values in their political opposites. There's no middle ground. There's no debate/discussion. There's no "how you feel? why did you come to that conclusion? here's why I feel what I feel" It's all insta-tribal, label and dismiss, even the moderate opinions. If you're not lockstep with their political views, you're "one of them"/"part of the problem" and dismissed. Probably the age of social media that did it, but everyone is unreasonable and rabid these days.

As supposed to the old the donald subreddit, who would ban you for even mildly dissenting opinion. The fascist censorship ideology is on the far right. The far left will engage and debate you in good faith, at least until you come back with gaslights, ad hominems, and deflections.

You're part of the problem. Let's just say the bar for labelling an opponent as a gaslighter/ad hominem/deflection is far lower than you would think. Mildly dissenting opinions are nuked all the time on left leaning subreddits. You just haven't experienced it because you don't have those opinions.

Much of the body positivity movement just says you shouldn't be mean to fat people, or anyone else, because of their body shape.

"Much" is a bit of an exaggeration from my personal experience -- that movement was very hostile and actual preaching obesity as a virtue. Like "fat pride" and "healthy at any weight". It reached a level of toxicity where people attempting to lose weight were actually shamed and called traitors by the movement for a failure of solidarity. Like I get what you're saying it should be, but that's not what it was. It's like I can tell you the Tea Party started as a sane group of fiscal conservatives complaining about taxes (and it did), but that's certainly not what it ultimately came to represent.

I guess that's where our opinions differ. The other kids absolutely can and should do something about it. All it would take is one or two of the "important" kids in the class to stand up and say "Hey, howbout you all knock off the bullshit, you're better than this."

Wow, how long have you been out of high school? Seriously, good luck with that. The ones most likely to be acting out and being self important shitheads typically were the "important"/influential kids (ala Mean Girls). The responsible smart ones were typically meek, shy, without power, and often bullied. So, short of self reflection (again, good luck), any kind of ring leading would not go in the direction you suspect.

So, for those of you into coal, why?

I don't think they're into coal so much as they're against market manipulation. Well, with the exception of West Virginia, where their entire economy is kind of built on coal.

Also, the push against coal pairs with the push against natural gas, and there's way more reasons to be against that push.

Maybe look under the large heading "Unsubstantiated claims" which lays out several examples known at the time the article was published

Please. Buried at the bottom of an article with a sensationalist headline and an assumption of truth in tone? I'm not going to hunt down dozens of more examples. I lived it. It was everywhere in the news, on every news site: https://www.washingtonpost.com...
"Key claims in the indictment, furthermore, snowballed into a big media story, raising specific concerns about reports in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and ABC News â" as well as more general concerns about how outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, McClatchy and Mother Jones handled the story."
https://archive.is/Mqz1m

Any fact checking or doubting was always a footnote or an afterthought. Often, claims of "verification" and "corroboration" of the dossier were made (such as with CNN), when they were wholly untrue. You're either super young (and hence weren't there), or being deliberately obtuse.

Now shall we contrast that with a certain mainstream American press outlet's coverage of the Biden laptop?

Please do. Find me literally any outlet other than Fox News that was reporting on the laptop with any degree of seriousness in 2020 or early 2021. You won't find many, if at all. Moreover, whatever coverage you find will be written in a way that makes the claims seem ludicrous or "russian disinformation". It wasn't until late 2021 that any news site even started taking it seriously: https://www.politico.com/news/...
That same article calls out the way it was treated when it broke: "it was unclear what to make of the alleged leak of material from Hunter Bidenâ(TM)s laptop, especially after social media companies moved to restrict access to the story and a bevy of former U.S. intelligence officials dismissed it as likely âoeRussian disinformation.â

Look, I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over, so we're clearly getting nowhere. You clearly see no difference between one news article based on uncorroborated hearsay and spread across a wide variety of news sites for months during an election campaign, and another also based on uncorroborated hearsay that was intentionally buried for about 9 months during an election campaign, purely based on "feels". We're never going to find common ground. Enjoy your bubble. I concur Fox News sucks and I think Trump is a terrible president, if that gives you any solace. But stop believing news media is somehow "fair". It's not. Trump is right when he says the news hates him and will come after him with any shred of damaging material they have. Very often, that material has merit. In this case, it did not. But they didn't care, and they plastered it everywhere anyway.

I think you might have misunderstood what actually happened in the two examples you cited. In both cases they say the mainstream press took a more cautious approach when the reliability of the sources was questionable.

And I believe that statement is incorrect. The Biden laptop story was first broached in October 2020. The Steele dossier was around December 2016. Go check how many news reports were written about the laptop in 2020-2021. Then check how many news reports were written about the dossier in 2017. The two don't even remotely compare. The dossier was not taken with a cautious approach. The laptop was.

This is nine months after the release of the dossier: https://www.theguardian.com/us...

Where, I ask, is the "cautious approach"?