The submarine company is also an example of this. Why listen to material scientists or engineers when you can cut corners to save a buck? Submarine experts told the CEO it was just a matter of time before the carbon fiber went pop, and that would be really bad for anyone inside at the time. But they saved so much money!

Of course, Musk wants it to be a far right playground so anything that goes against that will be removed, either as non-right-wing people no longer feel comfortable participating there or by moderator action.

And yet, he is doing a piss-poor job of winning. Trump is polling miles ahead, he is getting no traction from any part of the Republican Party, and he picked a losing fight with Disney, a corporation known for having legions of lawyers and winning whatever battle they are fighting.

Even better, the checkmark users paid to be alpha testers and get the privilege of using a paid app less than when it was free.

You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.

What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn’t denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless “unmask our kids” groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.

A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a “Democratic” candidate 🤦‍♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn’t that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.

Absolute insanity. Republican victimization culture is out of control.

K Holes 🤣

I am fine with them, especially since they can be used to indicate the tone of a comment that would otherwise be difficult to discern. However, when you do that every other word as emoji thing (like the various copypasta that go around) or you put hand claps after every word, then I will hate you for the rest of my life and haunt you from the grave.

NSFW seems to still load if you use old.reddit.com

Plato’s cave. If all you have ever experienced is a shit app, then the shit app seems fine to most people. Others will recognize its faults but not how bad it is because they think that the only alternative is to have no app.