Always remember that 50% of the population is more dumb than the average American.
Which begs the question of whether or not the median would be pushed up by conservatives actually being a minority in the US (studies claim that 60% of the population is more left leaning than the government regardless of who is in office), or if it would be even worse because we’re all actually just that dumb.
AI run on statistical probability. The more options there are in something, the harder it is to get right. A clock face becomes hard because practically the entire clock changes from moment to moment, and logos on shirts are similar in that they’re largely all in the same place but vary dramatically in shape to be as distinct from each other as possible, which is basically the exact opposite of what an AI wants. When your whole thing is basically averaging stuff out on a probability curve that’s weighted towards specific keywords, having massive variation in your data points is bad.
We do, but it’s really scaled back compared to what we used to have. There are so many scars of abandoned rail lines all over major cities where they were torn out and replaced with road infrastructure. So many central train stations that are shadows of their former selves.
In short, the US has absolutely zero high-speed rail infrastructure - and barely any rail infrastructure at all compared to what it used to have and the size of the country.
This was one of many proposed high-speed rail networks from (I think) the late 2000s/early 2010s, but the fledgling train companies were largely strangled or bought up and closed by freight rail, car, and fossil fuel companies, so nothing ever happened.
Fun fact I found out recently, we figured out how bumble bees fly sometime in the past decade.
In short, at that scale the laws of aerodynamics as we know them break down and the bees are basically swimming in air instead of flying.
This timeline needs a new writer…
First past the post is also forever broken as it inevitably leads to a two-party system.
As somebody with a bit of learning on the matter (it’s amazing the hats you have to wear to prove you deserve to live - from anthropologist to biologist to archeologist), it’s interesting to see how the language of the community has evolved as our scientific understanding of sex vs gender has.
The term started as transsexual, and there are older people who refer to themselves by that term, but by the 2000s the term had shifted in favor of transgender, noting the recognition that sex doesn’t equate to gender that happened around that time.
Then came the use of cis as well as AMAB and AFAB (assigned male/female at birth) in order to better describe the complexity involved around the fact that a doctor has to declare you one gender or another when you’re born, and the easiest way to do that with the highest likelihood of being correct is based on sexual characteristics - namely, what genitalia you have. So cis is used to describe people who have no reason to disagree with the doctor’s assessment, and there’s a lot of discussion around where intersex people fall in the community (do they fit in the trans umbrella term?).
People like Dunning-Kruger up there are basically arguing that isotopes don’t exist.
I don’t have a PhD, but my understanding of the basics is this:
All people start out developing as female in the womb before a certain point where a large dose of testosterone caused (usually) by the Y chromosome activating (basically the only time in life that it does apart from starting puberty AFAIK) causes the proto-labia and vagina to push outwards and form the ball sack and enlarging the clitoris and urethra into what we know of as the penis. This is why you can see that line down the middle of your ball sack; that’s where your labia fused together. It’s also why the tissue that makes up your ball sack is biologically identical to the tissue that makes up the inside of the vagina. It’s an outie vs. an innie.
There are many reasons why this wouldn’t happen “correctly” since biology is more a wonder of things somehow working at all after evolution is done with them rather than a perfectly designed, well-oiled machine. Sometimes the Y chromosome simply doesn’t activate, or it does, but the person has androgen insensitivity and so the testosterone doesn’t do anything, or they develop as female but have testicles where their ovaries should be, rendering them infertile but otherwise a perfectly normal woman. Sometimes a person is XX, but they experienced a higher than normal amount of testosterone during development and developed male instead of female.
And that’s before you get into the issue of intersex people, who are often surgically altered as babies when they’re born by the doctor to match with the genitalia that the doctor thinks should be the “correct” one. In a number of places, the doctors don’t have to ask permission or even tell the parents after.
Also, your definition of cis male is slightly off. “Cis” is the opposite Latin prefix of “trans,” meaning a non-changing/stable state of being, and in this case it’s used to mean that one’s gender identity matches up with the one that you were given at birth. It ultimately has nothing to do with what genitalia you have, and it’s simply an identification saying that your sense of gender matches up with the sex that the doctor declared and that you therefore aren’t trans. It’s an after the fact solution to the question of what to call people who aren’t trans and comes from the use of trans to identify somebody who transitions from one gender to another.
Related:
Yep. Every time they’ve pulled farther right and lost, they’ve blamed the leftists for it for being too extremist in their policy demands or claiming that their issues aren’t as important, like in the case with Millennials and housing costs, student debt, climate change, etc. Despite trying to make some headway on those issues, they’ve always refused to campaign on them.
No, they were never going to do that. They’ve already said that they learned their lesson, and in 2026, they’re gonna double down on the losing strategy that they’ve been running since Clinton was in office and run on building the wall on the Mexican border and deporting immigrants to court the moderate Republican vote that doesn’t exist and never would vote for them even if it did.
By the Presidential election, it’s already years too late to force them to actually do good things. Protest votes and withholding your vote have done nothing to stop the slide that led to Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in tow in the 16 years that I’ve been voting. If you want change, it’s only going to come by threatening the position of the people in charge of the party and replacing the old guard with people like AOC. Whoever gets elected President does neither of those things. Unless Krasnov declares the Democratic Party a terrorist organization and has them all arrested as political prisoners. But then we won’t have to worry about voting ever again, just like he promised.
At the height of its power, the Nazi party made up less than that percentage of the population of Germany. It doesn’t take much to ruin it for everyone.
Case in point: US President Donald Trump, whose approval rating has historically hovered around 30%.
Those of us with front row seats to the shitshow hope you’re right, because even just last week, my dad was saying, “It could never happen here!” when I brought up how the playbook Trump is using is the exact same one that Hitler used.
They’ve gone full mask off, which is why there’s the sudden backlash. The hate speech rules now include a section that explicitly says that it’s okay to call LGBTQ people mentally ill. They’re the only group with a specific carve-out in the rules saying that it’s okay to post hate speech about them.
I speak Tumblr, let me translate:
Royalslimefather reblogged it from knifemilf, who reblogged it from someone else. The OP could be thousands of chain reblogs down, so it doesn’t matter who. But if you go back far enough in that chain, you get to Marine biologist shitposts’s response.
The way Tumblr works is like if Twitter had comment chains instead of quote-tweeting.
How about a foreign business? For example, a British company. The US deployed into the Middle East at the behest of British Petroleum after the largest democracy in the region elected a leader who was going to kick BP out of the country for exploiting both the country’s resources and people through horrible wages and working conditions - we’re talking company towns of the 1900s style labor practices. So the US backed an up and coming dictator who destroyed the government on the promise of still allowing BP full control of the country’s oil - Saddam Hussein.
Or how about the US funding companies like Wal-Mart with subsidies while also paying for their workers’ wages because more than 50% of them are below the poverty line while they come into an area and destroy all the local businesses and drain the wealth of the people living in the area.
Or the most recent example, the US passing a law banning a company with a social media platform called TikTok while citing reasons that US based social media companies aren’t held accountable for, despite being just as guilty.
Then, the US hasn’t been capitalist in a long time. Probably never was. The government has always interfered in the interest of one group or another. Sometimes, that group is (was) the public at large when it comes to labor or environmental rights. Sometimes, it’s in favor of big business. Oftentimes, it is. Interfering on behalf of one specific big business over another is just the latest step in the road of corruption that has been brazen since Citizens United was passed.
The invisible hand of the free market has never existed. The rich have always been kept in check by government interference.
Fuck that and the fuck the ADL. There is no unity to be had with fascists.
It’s all conjecture at this point, but there’s an argument to be made that increased funding (like when Biden quadrupled their budget, as someone else said he did during his term) could have pushed it back as the Darian Gap is a natural choke point that provides much better bang for your buck compared to having to fight it back across what could potentially be the entire continental US in a few years (or less).
If the feral hog population is a vector as well, we could see it explode like a wildfire out towards the east coast, and with climate change who knows how far north they will go. I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of us ever being able to contain it like that again. In 5 years time Canada might be allocating funds towards trying to contain it at the US border.