Ragebait isn't about seeing what the other side says.

It's about seeing an inflammatory caricature of the other side.

For example, a Liberal isn't going to see some Conservative discussing some of the hard tradeoffs we'll need to pay down the debt. They'll see a Conservative proposing that Trump be given a 3rd term and trans kids get rounded up and forced into conversion therapy or some crap like that.

Meanwhile, Conservatives won't see some Liberal discussing the economics of Universal Healthcare. They'll see someone proposing that the police be defunded and all drugs are legalized.

Ragebait creates echo chambers because it gives the false impression that everyone on the other side is insane.

It's a fun conspiracy theory, but this is actually just how biology works.

There's basically four kinds of things that can go wrong with our bodies. Infections, mechanical issues, system errors, and cancer.

Infections we can cure by helping the body to kill off the infection, it's only some rare stubborn ones like AIDS that are chronic like you describe.

Mechanical issues we can fix with surgery.

System errors? That's stuff like genetic disorders where our body creates too much of hormone A or doesn't create the proper form of protein B. The problem is in our DNA and you can't cure it without rewriting our DNA (which we're getting to).

And then there's cancers, which are similar to infections, where we try to kill it (as they're doing here), though weirdly, some research suggests treating it as a chronic issue might be better for the patients.

In either case, it's not the fact that pharma is deciding "don't make a pill to cure it, just find a lifetime treatment!". It's only in the past few years that we're reaching the point where we can actually cure things that were traditionally chronic.

For those who don't know, you should be aware that THE SINGLE BIGGEST EXPENSE they had in this trip was paying for the "jump the line" pass the poster said they "HAD" to have. It would have cost under half that without those passes.

And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

I've heard almost nothing about Threads recently. Certainly no indication they were more popular than Twitter.

Is their user count some sort of trick with how they interface with Instagram? Or is Twitter just turning into a ghost town without people realizing it?

This is one of the reason why Western governments do invest in foreign aid.

It's not just charity (though that's certainly an element), but the more stable and prosperous developing nations are the less likely they're going to have to deal with a refugee crisis.

I have some cousins who through a family member I'm not biologically related to inherited a congenital disease that the only current "cure" for is to have to have an organ transplant at some point in their lives. I have an idea of what you go through from knowing what they go through. I want to point out that you may be able to get your doctor to give you a prescription for the mRNA flu vaccine even if you aren't in the approved age range.

I think there's some nuance needed there.

Pelosi's trading is legal, it's highly problematic from an ethics perspective, but it's completely legal and somewhat common for legislators to do. So she can be criticized for using an unfair advantage, but it's not unprecedented nor a major sin.

Trump's grifts on the other hand do violate laws and precedent, those laws just aren't enforced.

For an extra $100k you get a pardon!

Your post reminds me of a conversation I had with a co-worker around 2004. I joined an investment club in 1996 so at the time, I had been in it for 8 years and I had some expertise in investing in stocks. He told me that the stock market made no sense. I told him that I agreed with him but I asked what specifically made him say that. He told me that he owned some stock in 2 small companies that were doing oil exploration. I don't remember the names of the companies. They both did a quarterly report after the market closed the previous day. Company A reported that they earned a lot more money than expected. Company B failed to hit their quarterly targets by a good bit. The market did some level of panic selling on Company A and punished them for having a good quarter but Company B went up in price despite basically failing in their quarterly report.

Not to digress, but people here might also remember when SCO stock held on for a few dollars for many years because if they actually won their big lawsuit against IBM et al,, their stock could be worth a lot more than a few dollars. It was pretty obvious for those years that there was no future in the stock, but people kept buying it and hoping.

I would mod you up if I could. As an American, I had no idea at all who they are. I suspect most of my countrymen can say the same. Not saying this isn't news and shouldn't be reported, but I guess it will only be a big deal to what I assume are the 100 or so weirdos in the USA who bought their phones and thought they were clever for doing so.

I'm American and Gen X. The Gen X thing is actually important. We were the original video game kids. We were the first generation to enter the work force where everybody in an office had a PC on their desk. We should be way better at tech stuff than we are. One of my high school classmates, who was a nurse by the way, almost brags that she "can't use a computer at all" and does everything tech related via her phone. This has not always worked in her favor. I have friends around my age who have no idea at all how to send money via Pay Pal, Venmo, etc. One friend who is an attorney and runs a small but reasonably successful legal practice with his wife (also an attorney), just kind of has his eyes glaze over and acts like "it's TOO hard!" if he has to click more than 2 buttons to do anything on a PC. Now if Gen X, again my generation, is like this, imagine how utterly hopeless older generation people are. My late uncle, a silent generation guy, kept creating new accounts on Facebook every time he forgot his password because that was somehow easier for him than trying to get help with the password. Sigh.

So I have a Gne X friend who got scammed a few years ago. We'll call him Adam. Adam's job is an elementary school teacher. His computers skills are very poor. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being great and 1 being terrible, I'd rate him a 2. He's a 3 at absolute best. How bad is he? Attach a USB flash drive to his PC and ask him to save a document to it. He has no understanding at all how to change directories so the document will save to a new place. He got scammed because of his poor computer skills and the fact that he doesn't do his own income taxes, which as I will explain led him to believe a false claim the scammers made and this false claim was what made the scam work.

It was during summer break from teaching and one morning his mind was distracted over some activity he had coming up in a few days. He was on his PC, probably visiting a site he really shouldn't have been on, and some pop up appeared claiming that his PC was under attack, but click on this button and we can help you save it. The distraction thing played a huge role in why he clicked on the button. He clicked on it and immediately got contacted by "Microsoft Support" and got on a phone call with the scammers. They told him some wild tale about his bank account possibly being compromised, so he gave them control over his PC and allowed them access to his online bank account. Some banks have an offer on their websites where you can "apply for a loan in minutes", so with control, the scammers did that. They did not actually get any money but the loan application got approved and that approval changed some sort of total in his account to show the addition of the loan amount. With that change, they convinced him that scammers had deposited money into his account and he would have to pay taxes on that money, so he was in big trouble. That's not how US taxes work. If things worked that way, Elon Musk and others like him could destroy their critics by making massive deposits into the critic's bank account, taking the money back, and laughing as the victim had to pay taxes on a, say, $100 million deposit that is now gone. So the scammers got him to use his bank money to buy Amazon gift cards, which he transferred to them as they assured him it would "protect" his money from a big tax bill. I think that after that they tried to get even more money from him and that finally made him suspicious and the call ended, but his bank account was drained of a little under $20,000. So these scammers pray on people with weak PC skills and little knowledge of how the US income tax system works and that's how they get suckers to give them money.

I'm not even sure if it's that deliberate, or it's just the fact that Trump is thinking about rigging the election... so he talks about rigging the election.

But it's hilarious how consistent the pattern is. Normally with something like that there's just a few occasional examples. But with Trump if he says "Democrats are kicking puppies!" chances are that we're about to find out that Trump kicked a puppy.

He's not a genius, I sincerely think he's average to slightly below average intelligence for a software dev. Just look how clueless he really is when he pretends to be a technical guru in front of actual experts.

That doesn't mean he doesn't have some exceptional skills, but IQ isn't one of them.

First, he's hard working, at least in spurts (during critical deadlines), and he's willing to make and implement big decisions quickly. Just look at DOGE, Republicans have been trying to lay waste to the US government for decades, but Musk is the only one to actually do it. It was a complete disaster, but it wasn't ethics or common sense that stopped the previous attempts, that's a legit talent for Musk.

Second, CEOs aren't allowed to lie, but Musk has figured out that you can get around that by building a cult of personality and then making ridiculously optimistic predictions and then sell minor advancements as progress. The result is he has a core group of retail investors that buy his stocks based on vibes and refuse to sell once in. Since these retail investors prevent the stock from going down too much institutional investors also jump in on the ride. It's basically tulip bulbs.

I really don't know where your problem is coming from. I assume you're here because you're an IT guy. Me too. My Roku has worked fine for about 10 years now. Everything that connects to it is via wifi. NO ISSUES. NONE. I stream TV from Xfinity via wif ito the Roku and again - NO ISSUES. I have a more modern Roku that I use in a different part of the house, but my main TV is about 10 years old and the newer Roku can't form a stable HDMI connection with it. I'm guessing it's an old HDMI version issue with the TV, but the older one still works with the old TV so I have kept it.

I agree he has an extremely high risk tolerance, though that doesn't make him a good person.

His car company is pretty small as car companies go, SpaceX means some new satellites, but Starlink is the only thing that's really making a difference to normal people. And Neuralink might help a lot of people in the future, but it largely R&D now.

His wealth doesn't come from what his companies have done. It comes from his ability as a promoter and its ridiculous effect on the stock price.

He worked hard to get Trump re-elected, if he was in fact the tipping point, he has harmed the environment far more than he has helped.

Not to mention all the potentially hundreds of thousands of people who died due to his cuts to DOGE.

It sounds like this is more to do with your ideology than Elon Musk.