>Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class;
Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same” a hungry child gets called a parasite and kicked out of a free and/or reduced price school lunch program.
>> Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class
> Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same”
Those aren't the same claims.
Rather, the claim is that the party differences, to the extent that they are different, reflect differences among the wealthy political donor class who control the politicians and the policies. There are differences of opinion and approaches among the donor class.
Forget 50%, the US Navy built five rigid airships.
ZR-1 through ZR-5.
The only one that wasn’t destroyed by a crash that also killed most if not all of its crew was ZR-3 and its history is filled with so many near-disasters that it was pure chance that the rigid airships program didn’t have a 100% loss rate.
You think it is inappropriate to live in a fire prone area.
Your arbitrary line of appropriateness is wrong.
My arbitrary line of appropriateness is right.
It is inappropriate to live anywhere where there is a fire, earthquake, blizzard, sink hole, volcano, heat wave, tornado, and hurricane risk but also where there is not ample local (as in constrained to a single independent self-governing body) water, energy, and food resources.
There's no need to draw a discrete line and say it's inappropriate to be on the wrong side of it. People should be able to live where they choose. But people should also pay actuarially fair insurance premiums and market-driven prices for energy and other services, based on those risks and the associated cost to serve them. That's not happening today, because market distortions created by government entities force people in lower-risk areas to cross-subsidize expenses for people in higher-risk areas.
We can talk about what kinds of ads are appropriate but the right to use YouTube without paying either in money or time spent watching ads has never, will never, and does not currently exist.
This is a deeply interesting comment. Obviously, YouTube began and spent several years as an ad-free, subscription-free platform, so to state that no one has ever had the "right" to use YouTube without paying or watching ads is patently false. But why would someone make such statement? Are they too young to remember an ad-free YouTube? Do they have some vested interest in pushing the idea that the YT user experience has never been and never could be more consumer-friendly than it is? Has the state of political rhetoric in 2025 - the age of Applied Big Brother, where simply stating one's preferred history makes it "real" - trickled down to normal discourse?
Who knows? Anyway, I use an adblocker and Grayjay.
People can offer, graciously or not, you something for free.
They can then change their mind.
You are not entitled to it, you never had any “right” to it, and no force real or imagined in the universe will make that so.
I believe that payment in “exposure” is exploitative bullshit and many of my favorite video makers rely on revenue from YouTube as a not-insignificant portion of their income, so I pay.
Terms of Service say otherwise. Until the ads came in, users absolutely had a "right" to access YouTube's services for free. I'm sorry that you misspoke.
>If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor,
Why does it seem as though some people believe there is an infinite supply of rich people?
Income disparity is so great that the cost of parking is irrelevant to the mythical army of rich people waiting off to the side for parking prices to come down.
I'm not even in the 99%, I'm in the 97% and I don't give a fuck about parking. I'm driving downtown to buy a $600 Barbour jacket from Orvis. I don't care about $20 for parking and I'm not coming downtown more often if parking is $0.
>Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free.
If you are poor milk and bread should 100% be free.
Support for SNAP (food stamps) routinely and consistently polls at >70%.
People who assert what you just did are in the extreme minority.
SNAP doesn't make food free in the sense of free parking, it gives money to poor people to buy food. The equivalent for parking would be market-rate parking with means-tested parking vouchers, which would be a much, much better solution than what we have now.
I didn't even have to read the article to know that these are the bible humping jesus freaks out in west Texas from Amarillo down to San Angelo.
In addition to their freedumb risking the lives of others, getting measles is one of the worst things that can happen to a child. Those kids are going to get sick, more often, more easily, and more severely for the rest of their lives.
Means they're easy prey for the leaders of said Jesus freaks. Being more sickly for the rest of their lives means it's easier to "heal" them every so often and keep them in the fold.
One type thinks that the data being disappeared is "trans DEI libtard lies".
The other type believes that the federal government should collect no data because it is stealing a Job Creator's god-given right to act as a middleman in all aspects of human culture and charge money for access to that data (because that's, somehow, more efficient).
Sure, most Biden/Harris supporters are ultimately "centrists", like most trump supporters. They spend their life struggling to juggle costs of living and responsibilities of adulthood. They participate in a society that demands they use all of their energy physical and cognitive to just survive and they reasonably outsource their judgement regarding larger scale policies and politics to trusted leaders of their community. They then believe and do what those leaders tell them.
The other type of Biden/Harris supporter has the privilege of time and energy to spend examining the situation critically and recognizes them as just supporting further corporate control behind the guise of bureaucracy instead of "strong men". But they vote/evangalize for them anyway because at least they don't actively advocate for harming people out of spite.
The only thing they care about is next quarter's share price.
The wouldn't kill and eat your grandmother if it was legal to make a little money, but 100% without exception they would look the other way and profess innocence if SOMEONE ELSE killed and ate your grandmother and it made them money.
edit: and they would character assassinate and/or sue you for criticizing them in a large enough forum.
In 1992, unless you were rich you had a $2,000 386SX-33 sourced from parts out of the back of Computer Shopper magazine.
Here is a 386SX-33 running Windows 3.1 (1992) launching WordPerfect for Windows 5.2 (1992) a perfect representation of what a normal, typical, average person in 1992 would have as a PC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYjrX2P4iY4
WordPerfect takes 45 seconds just to start. You dropped $350 on an ATI Wonder that has hardware acceleration of Windows 3.1 video calls just to get smooth window moving and resizing.
What about a 486? Lol you didn't have a 486, those were for CAD workstations and servers. You had a 386.
Three years later, lusting after Windows 95 and frustrated with slow performance, you shell out ANOTHER $2,000 on a Pentium 75 with 8MB of ram and a 528MB hard drive.
Sure, with the lower FSB that means you're less than half the performance of a Pentium 133 despite having 56% the clock, but you're a regular person with regular person money.
Windows 95 takes over a minute to boot, Space Cadet Pinball takes 15 seconds to launch, and you buy City Streets for Windows which takes 3-5 seconds to redraw its viewport every single time you reposition the map.
From the day you could first afford a PC you chased upgrades: more ram, a hard drive with a higher rotational speed and bigger cache, holy crap they can do 3d in hardware now, can I afford a 256kB COAST module?
Then one day, in about 2011-2012 that all stops. Sandy Bridge. SSDs. Now you only upgrade every 4-6 years: when performance doubles or windows stops supporting your CPU or you drop your laptop and break it.
And even that 386 was hot stuff in 1992. I was in high school then and stuck with a 286 with 16-color graphics and like a 40mb hard drive or something. We got a 486 right around Christmas 1993 I think, which was a mind blowing upgrade at the time. 256 colors in DOS video games and Windows could display 16k colors. CD-ROMs that had little postage stamp videos and we got one of those CD-ROM encyclopedias.
We had like 286 class machines in most of the lab my senior year of High school in 1994 with amber displays and we learned Turbo Pascal on them. The school had a handful of 486s but they were setup to run exactly the same software as the 286s, no Windows for us. They must have waited till they replaced everything to start using Windows.
In spring 1995 I spent like $250 (or was it $500?) of my summer job earnings on 4MB RAM for our 486 to get Doom to run better. The upgrade struggle was real. That was a ton of money for me and my parents thought I was absolutely nuts but eventually gave in.
When I went to college I spent essentially my entire summer's earnings on my first laptop, it was close to $4k back then and it was not exactly great!
Market forces aren't real. They are artificial arbitrary rules agreed upon by a majority of participants in a financial system.
They are not natural laws like Newton's law of universal gravitation and the fact that even one person thinks they are is the greatest scam ever pulled on humanity.
Humanity will never be free until it rids itself of economists and MBAs.
They're as real as any other aspect of human nature. There are no "artificial rules", just humans acting according to normal human behavior. Ignore that at your peril.
>There are no "artificial rules", just humans acting according to normal human behavior.
There are uncountably many examples of humans, presumably normal, existing outside of the rules set by free market capitalism and not collapsing into a black hole.
One such example is the Indigenous peoples of Australia, who lived for tens of thousands more years than the concept of free market capitalism has existed, without even the concept of money or property beyond what one carried on their person.
I have to assume that they are "normal" humans.
Even today many aboriginals struggle with "tHe NaTuRaL LaWz of tEh MaRkEt JuSt LiKe GrAvItY BrAh TrUsT Me BrAHHHHH" because they've only been exposed to them for less than 0.3% of their culture's total existence.
There are examples, today, right now, this very minute, in (extremely northern) Europe of presumably normal humans who look at the rules you consider to be "natural" with shock and horror.
A cult has convinced you that their ideology is natural law. You can both participate in this system and realize that it is all bullshit and not be a hypocrite.
Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same” a hungry child gets called a parasite and kicked out of a free and/or reduced price school lunch program.