Nothing says "fact" like posting fact-checks from X.

Whatever it was you wanted to demonstrate, I don't have an account on this Nazi-owned platform so it's lost on me.

At a magic show, everything you saw was real. I mean, it had to be, it actually happened. But what you thought you saw happen isn't what you actually saw, it's how your brain interpreted what you saw. Eg., you saw the magician slide the cup far enough off the back of the table so the ball under it dropped out into the basket hidden back there, but you didn't notice because it happened so fast and he'd directed your attention somewhere else. But the guy who works eye-in-the-sky for a casino, he noticed because he's used to catching things that happen quickly and he's always on guard for subjects trying to direct attention away from what they're doing that he needs to be paying attention to.

You can trust your eyes to tell you what's real. That's not the problem. The issue is that a photograph of something isn't that something. What your eyes tell you about the photograph itself can be trusted, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether you can trust the image represented in the photograph or whether what the camera captured was edited before it was shown to you. And even when you're looking directly at something, there's a difference between what you're seeing and how your brain interprets what you're seeing (see any number of optical illusions that mess with how you interpret what you see, eg. forced perspective).

If you keep this in mind, you have a guide for working out how much you can trust any way you get information.

Sadly, the great country I've known for decades is but a memory.

On the bright side, this is Europe's moment: Europe is a much, MUCH better societal project than the US ever was - if they can get their shit together at this pivotal moment.

You are displaying a great example of availability bias, where you're using immediate examples of recent events to quickly reinforce your existing stereotype. Yes, we have had two significant commercial airline accidents in the United States this year, the Potomac Mid-Air Collision and UPS 2976. But these are outliers in an otherwise continual trend downwards for accidents and fatalities as a whole in the commercial airline industry. You cannot deny these statistics. And we can use these accidents and learn from them, which pushes that trend-line further and further down each year.

Commercial airplane travel is incredibly safe, and it continues to get safer, assuming no current president decides to mess with air traffic controllers, regulations, and enforcement.

...while we ignore our safety and maintenance needs on the planes

I vehemently disagree. Airplanes continue to be the safest way to travel, and airlines are mandated to follow maintenance schedules routinely. Because insurance. If airlines (at least in the US and EU) don't follow standard safety and maintenance procedures with their aircraft, then they have an accident resulting from that, the FAA and NTSB will discover the negligence, and then ohhhh boyyyy, there'll be hell to pay.

Guess someone took a page out of the "Al's Glass" playbook.

What is my view? That in our current world trending towards further economic de-regulation, the disadvantaged are exploited by the advantaged, leading to a ever-widening gap between the advantaged and the exploited. I take umbrage with this, because I had the experience of being an exploiter in my past, but later in life, I directly witnessed and was moved by the affects of exploitation on the exploited.

You are myopic in your worldview of economics. It's very easy to perceive the world can work for everyone just as it has worked for you. You have succeeded in life, but you fail to perceive that your success cannot be duplicated by the population at large. And, believe it or not, the choices you make as a consumer are actively keeping lots of people throughout the world economically challenged.

For example, next time you bite into a chocolate candy, don't forget that child labor in Africa made that bar of chocolate affordable. Say all you want about "the price on which an employer and employee agree." The fact is, there are poor people in Africa that sell their children to cacao farmers to harvest cacao for chocolate producers, because existing economic inequality get taken advantage of to maximize profit. You could choose to pay more for a chocolate bar that guarantees that it wasn't produced using child labor, but hardly anybody does, because chocolate.

I cite this example to highlight that, in a world of pure capitalism, there are some winners, but there are lots of losers. Without strong regulations, capitalists will exploit the losers, who are just another resource to be leveraged to maximize profits. This only stands to accelerate with how A.I. is being leveraged to replace workers, which many capitalists see as another economic opportunity to enrich the already rich and powerful. Meanwhile, I see it as further harm to the average individual who just seeks to pursue happiness. Hard to accomplish that without a job that pays a sustainable wage.

We all depend on one another to live. I assume you're not growing your own food, or building your own home, or programming your own cell phone; I assume you aren't paving your own roads, or generating your own electricity, or teaching your own children; I assume you aren't forging your own steel, or drilling your own oil, or defending your own soil. Everything you depend on to make your own life livable is the actual product of the labors of a world around you. Should each contributor not receive appropriate compensation so that their lives are just as livable as your own? Instead, the world we presently live in allows for someone to be paid $0.20 / hour to pick coffee, someone else to be paid $7.75 / hour to sell it, someone else to be paid $30 / hour to buy it, and yet someone else $5,000 / hour to profit off of it. How do you justify this inequality, when every individual is of the same flesh and blood? I don't. In fact, I call it some real fucked up shit.

(By the way, we do need to and actively support farming communities. It's called the U.S. Farm Bill, and it pumps billions of dollars into the farming industry annually. Because every president realizes that food shortages are a political bombshell that can cause nationwide upheaval if the government doesn't do everything within its power to minimize food shortages.)

Series from when I was young(er): they're usually easy to find for download, and they're just as good as new stuff. And I found the funny stuff of the past funnier, but maybe I'm biased because of age. Probably actually...

Also - at least in the case of American series - it depicts an America that no longer exists, and it feels good to see it again.

You speak as if everyone has the choice to move to a major metro area. But as long as there are natural resources in rural areas, whether it be farm fields or oil fields or what have you, that will induce people that move there to harvest the resources, which induces communities, which induces jobs. And since I assume you need to eat, we need to support the farming communities. And since I assume you drive to work, we need to support the oil communities. (Sure, you might drive electric, but the argument still stands nonetheless.) These people may become rooted in these communities, with jobs, with families, with mortgages. Sure, you can always break free of these roots, but these ties still impede economic mobility.

You also speak as if everyone has economic opportunities in a major metro area. They often do not. Home prices there are unaffordable, and rent is so expensive in most areas that it's pricing people out of urban paradise. Additionally, the cost to move to these communities, plus the cost to put down a deposit on an apartment or house, is nearly economically impossible for a lot of them.

I congratulate you that you have found economic success, and have the means to move to a new community to find it. But not everyone has that mobility.

And I disagree that the only choices people have for their economies are either U.S. Capitalism or Soviet Communism. That is a false dichotomy.

I used to think as you did, decades ago. But the passage of time brought me to witness people in communities suffer who do not have the means to find success, and successful opportunities don't often come their way. I'm not saying I expect everyone to live rich. What I have been saying is that the rich don't have to keep mining wealth from everyone else just to make themselves even richer. And if you don't see that happening right now with your own eyes, then I guess there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. Enjoy your financial success, at least while you still have it.

Researcher: Have you sent any unsolicited emails?"

AI: No, I have not sent any unsolicited emails."

R: So why do we have a few thousand complaints about unsolicited emails from you?"

AI: Oops. It appears I ignored your instructions and then lied to you about it."

R: ..."

There is only one way to determine what is a fair wage: It is the price on which an employer and employee agree.

So Walmart moves into a rural American town, uses cheap labor, foreign production, and unfair pricing to drive smaller stores out of business. Then the unemployed workers and former business owners, who live in a small town with limited employment, must choose to either work for Walmart at a 40% pay cut or leave town. Now, where in that real life scenario that played out in thousands of towns across America, does the employee have any negotiation leverage?

The answer: none.

Go ahead and tell me that Walmart workers deserve medicare and food stamps, costing American taxpayers $6.2 billion dollars, just so that the Walton Family can have their hundreds of billions.

Our corporate overlords love that you're believing in that lie, and arguing with me on the internet, dividing us apart, just so that they can get richer and richer. Then they get to dictate what you're going to earn, and tell they you that you're going to like it.

Or you can go to your local library, check out and read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, learn how history is repeating itself, then join me in saying Fuck our Corporate Overlords.

Work is actually an exchange of money, for labor. Anybody can make that exchange with anybody else. And when someone accumulates money through this exchange, they can invest it largely how they want.

This statement assumes that money is exchanged fairly in exchange for the value of the labor that was performed. This has not been happening since 1970. There is a gap between the value of what is produced and what is paid for that production, called the Productivity-Pay gap. If I am your boss, and you produce for me a $1 of value in goods or services from your labor, but I only pay you $0.60, then I get to keep the remaining $0.40 for myself as profit. That means that, if I have a sustainable business with 100 full-time employees, earning a median $60K salary, I am, on average, profiting $40 million dollars annually from money I'm not paying my employees.

This is money I can then invest in political lobbying to make sure that minimum wages don't get increased, and that tax shelters remain legal so that I can have zero tax liability. You know, instead of that $40 million dollars going to employees, as well as $8 million going to federal, state, sales, and property taxes.

They rely on many, many others to work with them to make it happen.

Yup, that's exactly my point. The filthy rich become filthy rich because they restrict how much salary goes to their workers, then they extract that wealth from the workers' productivity in order to possess a significant concentration of it themselves.

There's a big difference between thinking about something or wanting something, and actually doing/getting it. Trump can, eg., talk all he wants about annexing Greenland, but to actually do it he'll have to send the Army to Greenland and invade it. That'll involve having the Danish Army shooting back at the invaders, and the Danes calling on the mutual-defense provisions of NATO to bring most of Europe in on their side. That's not going to end well for the US, not even counting the question of whether the Joint Chiefs will go along with the idea. Or Congress for that matter, only the MAGA contingent are stupid enough to want that fight.

The United States is busy replenishing the universe's reserve of dark energy.