Less of a need and more of what would be beneficial. They don't actually need any such training but one thing the armed forces teaches in basic is how to work together, even with people you don't like and that would be beneficial in an office environment (have you ever tried herding cats into a coherent meeting).

But it's a moot point as those with an abundance of ego and dearth of talent or self awareness would never accept that they'd learn anything from "basic" training.

Meta's free to decide what ads it wants to run. They're a commercial platform so it's not a free speech issue, although I suspect some will try to frame it as one. Blocking the lawyers ironically can help them since now they are getting press about the lawsuits and can trumpet "10 reasons Meta doesn't want you to know your being harmed. Number 5 will amaze you."

Which was the basis for the fictional Zero Point Module (ZPM) in the Stargate Atlantis franchise. Would be cool if those were real, but it's probably impossible to harness that energy.

Just remember that everything developed by Western companies is stolen Chinese tech from now on.

If women are delaying having children until they can better afford it, and affordability is decreasing, all that will happen is they get too old to have them before becoming financially stable enough to do so.

Whatever the issue is, the solution is the same and should be done for many other reasons: Get the cost of living down. Cheaper property, higher wages.

If the cheerleaders would have dated us in high school this never would have happened

It's reasonable to conflate the two when the proof is in the pudding.

Obesity tends to lower fertility rates in both men and women too.

They're leaving because the website is so stuffed full of literal Nazis that you can't avoid them. If you only consume what's in your immediate feed and then only consume posts directly from that feed then you're fine but the moment you venture into any sort of comment section or any of the kind of things where you would scroll around and look it's all Nazis.

Twitter was purchased to create a right wing propaganda tool for Musk because he depends heavily on government contracts and after interfering in the Ukraine war he was at risk of losing all those contracts unless he could get a favorable administration.

But it's the classic Nazi bar problem. You can't just have right-wing extremism and be all hunky-dory you're going to get nazis. You always get Nazis when you invite the right wing in.

That is an insultingly accurate stereotype sir!

People seem to be forgetting that Ukraine is still a nation-state. That's how they can defend themselves. A guy in the basement isn't going to be able to do jack shit. First off 99% of those guys will get identified and taken out long before they get any drones built. For the remaining 1% they won't be able to throw enough drones at the problem because they're going to be too busy scrounging up food.

I don't think folks have realized just the scale of poverty that the Epstein class has in store for us. Go look up what it was like living on an American Indian reservation back in the 1800s. Think that. Maybe worse.

That a fine upstanding company like Microsoft would engage in potentially anti-competitive behavior? Perish the thought. Quick fetch me my fainting goats!

On a more serious note elections have consequences. If you like having choices when it comes to software 45 years of zero antitrust law enforcement is one hell of a consequence.

Good for browsing and side by side though.

Companies don't care about the quality of your work or your skills. There is a small number of people who have unique and irreplaceable skills. They are a very small number. These are mostly people who are genetic freaks of one's kind or another. People who have amazing recall and focus and can learn incredibly complex mathematics or people who have incredibly good vision and hand-eye coordination who can become surgeons. Things like that.

For literally everything else good enough is always good enough.

Now if companies still competed against each other good enough wouldn't be good enough. Higher quality talent would produce a higher quality product overall and customers would flock to the better company.

We stopped and forcing antitrust law over 40 years ago. You can find the charts showing you the seven companies own basically everything. And those seven companies are owned by a handful of people when you look at who actually owns the stock.

So that gets you enshitification. I don't need to make a good product. If somebody comes along making a better product because they overall have better people I buy that company or I run it out of business. This is what Facebook does. You can look up the company's Facebook has bought and it's a who's who of up-and-coming social media competitors. Amazon did the exact same thing and it's how they became the number one retailer. It wasn't impressive tech it was buying their competitors and being allowed to do it by toothless regulators.

We broke one of the fundamental aspects of capitalism and they are downstream effects. In this case there's drastically less employment in our economy as a result and your wages and mine are substantially lower as a result.

It's a chesterton's fence. Don't pull the fence down if you don't know why it was put up

Your answer merely shows your narrative, And really, it is a simple question, that you refuse to answer. I say remove America from teh equation, you try multiple times to steer it back to Trump.

Usually you are pretty intelligent and insightful. Are you perhaps collecting yuan for your statements? I mean seriously, it is just a pointed hypothetical

It is not difficult to understand that it is a hypothetical that makes a point that there has always been a dominant country. That humans always get involved with others, often in Warfare. Does not matter if it is the British Empire, the failed attempt by Europe and Japan in the 1940's that led to the US becoming dominant, or the Roman Empire, or the Egyptians, Abashevos, the Hittites or Assyrians to name a few. It was always a "smaller" world, but some group was always willing to impose their will.

Now with this - My own answer - If the USA disappears overnight, China will replace it. See how easy that was?

peace out.