Your +5 comment keeps the troll comment visible.

But as for real world harm Trump has caused there's a little over 500,000 dead children. That is the number of deaths caused by cuts to usaid since Trump took office. There is absolutely no debate whether these numbers are accurate the only debate is whether or not we should care since they aren't American children.

Even if you don't care about children outside of America I would like to think people are smart enough to understand that it's cheaper to drop food than bombs. On the other hand some people just really really love dropping bombs

Which is what basically everyone is going to do thanks to antitrust lawsuits forcing Apple to allow them to do that. At least in Europe I'm not so sure about the United States and how that will play out.

But my Netflix subscription is through Netflix not through Apple so Apple doesn't get a 30% cut. It's a little crazy that for the longest time they were.

I get that offering the store has value. There are Indies on steam who basically use valve as their entire marketing budget so the 30% valve takes is pretty damn good for them. Steam finds their customers for them and all they have to do is make the game and pop it up there. A marketing budget is typically about 50% of the cost of making anything so steam taking 30% is pretty damn good.

But it definitely would rub me the wrong way with subscription services. Although now that I think about it I wonder how it works when you sign up for an MMO from steam...

Right? About 1/5 of the world's fertilizer goes through that straight and unless it opens up real soon it's going to miss the growing season and we're going to have famines. One of the dirty little secrets of our current civilization is that we use oil byproducts as fertilizer and without those we can't grow enough food to keep the planet fed.

Now the good news is there is plenty of oil for several hundred years. But just because we have enough to feed everybody doesn't mean we will.

That makes Iran's threat on par with threatening to turn cities into glass.

One of the major problems in the world is people are too focused on showy stuff that makes good TV and not enough on The daily grind and all the horrible nasty little ways our world functions.

What the cool kids call the banality of evil...

If you're big enough to sue Bloomberg you're big enough to bribe Trump for a bailout.

Much much cheaper and much higher rate of return. Basically a guaranteed rate of return as long you don't cheap out on the bribe.

How many times have nuclear weapons been used? How sure are you that Russia's nuclear weapons work? How about america's?

But the fact that Iran can close the straight is a fact. They can do it without freaking out the rest of the world and without the incredible expense of maintaining a large enough nuclear arsenal that nobody decides to chance it and see whether or not those nukes really work.

Iran could have a couple of actual nuclear missiles but they would have to not only prove that they could hit countries that matter and targets that matter but also that they could maintain that capability. There would be a lot of doubt and questions around that that would always leave them open to invasion from people willing to roll those dice.

But all they need to do to close the straight is to drop a few mines and take some pot shots at some vessels. Pirates could do that let alone a functioning nation state.

The difference is between a threat that may or may not be able to be backed up and one that absolutely can be. That's why closing the straight is better than having a nuclear weapon. As an added bonus it freaks people out less so if Iran can return things to some semblance of normality we will all just kind of forget about it.

Gas prices have gone up a bit but it's nothing they can't absorb. You can see that in Trump's poll numbers. They can keep telling themselves gas will come back down in 2 weeks.

So you can keep that up until the midterms as long as gas doesn't get so expensive that it prevents them from paying rent or mortgages or buying food. That's the point where they have to abandon dear leader but we're not anywhere close to that yet for those people.

Owning the libs is part of it. My God they love yelling TDS. But it's also sunk cost fallacy.

You need to remember the take everything in the headline with a grain of salt.

The study isn't just saying that you think it's haunted it's saying that the ultrasound frequency these buildings emit puts humans on edge. As a consequence of that yeah if you are susceptible to believing in ghosts and scary things that aren't real then yeah you're going to be more likely to think something scary that isn't real is there and think that it is real.

But the headline of "ultrasonic waves admitted by some old buildings maybe unpleasant to certain people" isn't nearly as cool or is catchy or likely to make you engage and read and comment.

All I'm saying is whenever you see a headline you need to turn on your cynicism and critical thinking. Every single headline is always trying to manipulate you.

Only it's the strait of Hormuz instead of an actual nuclear weapon. And it's way more effective than any nuclear weapon they could ever get their hands on.

Iran now has the power to crash the entire world economy. All thanks to the staggering incompetence of one senile old man and a bunch of sycophantic hangers on and a bunch of people who couldn't figure out that making a known rapist and pedophile president wasn't going to end well for them...

The thing is so far about 40% of the country here in America has been completely insulated from this mess. It won't last but it's looking like it may hold out for them until after the midterms and then they don't matter anymore.

We wouldn't need laws.

I know that we're all nerds but you can't technology yourself out of human interaction. Human beings are still human beings and do human being things.

Technology can help and sometimes because human beings suck so much we just have to hope it saves us.

The problem with relying on it exclusively is that there's no guarantee we're going to get the technology we need fast enough and good enough to keep Pace with human beings doing bad things.

As an example it is perfectly possible for us to stop the effects of climate change almost immediately with a rapid transition to wind and solar energy.

That transition is completely on hold while the oil barrons make sure that they get control of global energy supplies.

So we have a technological solution to a major problem the human race is facing but social and political forces prevent that from happening.

You see this with nuclear power too. Nuclear power has been a effective and safe form of energy for 50 years but it requires very very strict maintenance schedules that end up being very expensive and it is extremely tempting for a businessman to come in and claim they can do the maintenance for a fraction of the cost because of the magic of the free market and then they just don't do the maintenance. That's basically what happened in Fukushima.

Again there's a technological solution that is completely broken by social and political forces.

We are nerds and we don't want to hear that. We grew up being told technology was going to solve everything and we wanted to solve everything. Not just because we love technology but because being nerds we're not big fans of human interaction.

The right wing and the corporatists always want to put everything on the state level. That's because they can exercise complete control over government and you at the state level.

The national level is too big for them to control completely. There's too much money and too many people to bribe and too many eyeballs on everything.

The county level doesn't work either. It's too expensive to take over everything. You can do highly effective voter suppression at the county level because you can Target that carefully to the right districts but if you want total control of a government county level politics just has too many people involved to buy off and bribe everybody.

The state level is the Goldilocks zone. It's small enough that you can bribe everybody with reasonable amounts of cash and there are few enough people involved that you can manage them and control them all. But it's not so large that everybody is paying attention to it. You might be able to name your senator and maybe even one or two of your house reps but can you name anyone who represents you in your state legislature? Can you tell me who your attorney general and your secretary of state are? Maybe some of the hyper politically aware can but most people have no idea.

So if you pay attention what you're going to find is that the Epstein class is constantly trying to get everything managed at the state level where they can maintain little fiefdoms with little wanna be warlords.

You historian types will recognize this as a feudal system.

Need to make sure that when the transition finishes they are still the ones in control of electricity and energy. So they have to slow down the transition.

It's not about money or greed it's about power. Greed is wanting more stuff. They don't just want more stuff they want the ability to tell human beings what to do and then those human beings have to do it. That's not greed that's lust for power

Billionaire oil owners and Saudi Arabian Kings are pushing this. Wind and solar are going to take over from oil no matter what so the goal right now is to slow down the transition in order to make damn sure that the people who will control energy today will control it tomorrow.

There is a little bit of right wing ideological nonsense that helped put Trump in power don't get me wrong but honestly it was mostly voter suppression that put him in office.

But nobody really cares anymore about being ideologically opposed to clean energy except I have full of absolute lunatics in their late 60s and early '70s. The kind of people who sit around watching Fox News all day waiting to die but for some reason just can't seem to do it. But they are a tiny minority. And even the handful of coal miners left Trump used as props during his first campaign figured out that they don't have a future

When you start a business from scratch there's a lot of what's called sweat equity.

That used to be how you came up in the world. These days what you do is find a bunch of grandmas and grandpas with retirements and cheat them out of it dumping them on their relatives to take care of in their old age while slashing their Medicare and then profiting from the privatization of it.

But there was a magical time when we had antitrust law enforcement and extremely high taxes on the ultra wealthy limiting the amount of power they could wield against workers and small businessmen. Lasted about 40 or 50 years before voters got stupid again.

It's kind of odd that you don't know that. You're awfully young to be here on slashdot...

Google "progressive taxation" sometime. It's a whole thing.

When you have that much money it's not money anymore, it's power.

I don't like having a Epstein class. Maybe you do, but you're gonna need to explain to me why.