But, I think we need a banner to gather under, don’t we?

Your typical American family hasn’t a clue… They know “socialist bad”…

This is why the specific banner probably doesn’t matter very much. The association “socialist → bad” just comes from a long-running campaign by Western Capitalists to make sure that the peasants make that association. It basically goes,

1. The USSR is bad, and
2. they are socialists, and therefore
3. socialism is bad.

And that’s enough for most people. It’s easy to highlight a country’s flaws and convince someone that the country is bad, so 1 took hold, for reasons both reasonable and unreasonable. And 2 is free because they have socialism in the name. And 3 is a common logical fallacy, but it works, because it turns out people aren’t very rational.

If we picked up the “Proletariat” banner instead, the same thing would happen.

1. The USSR is bad, and
2. they implemented some of Karl Marx’s ideas, and so
3. Karl Marx is bad, and so
4. the proletariat are bad.

It’s not a marketing problem. It’s a problem with who gets to control all of the marketing narratives.

For anyone struggling with food prices, first, I empathize. I’ve been there. It fucking sucks. Second, when desperate, I put together a plan much like the following, and it helped me get through some hard times.

USA prices 2026-09-16

26 oz salt: $1, 0 calories, 0 protein

200 lb dry beans: $120, 300000 Cal, 20000g protein

200 lb rice: $50 $100, 330000 Cal, 2400g protein

360 tablets multivitamin: $37.50

Annual cost: $258.50 Daily calories: 1726 (suitable for a sedentary person.) Daily protein: 61 g

You can get even higher protein and lower cost if you have access to bulk soybeans. Multiply by whatever values you like to hit your calorie or protein needs.

You don’t have to eat JUST this. But if this is the majority of your meals, you have enough to survive, and in the US, you’ll actually be healthier than most of the people around you.

EDIT: updated the numbers because I’m an idiot who forgot that you need 4, 50lb bags to get to 200lb, rather than 2.

If tiktok never pushed this then Clancy would have went to prison and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation

Her lawyer was discussing the parameters of an insanity plea back in March. This was long before the case blew up on social media.

It’s entirely feasible that she would have gotten an insanity ruling without social media influence.

Did anyone do studies on the homework and exam scores of people using compilers vs people not using compilers?

Did anyone establish that people who used compilers are measurably dumber than the people who didn’t?

No?

Well then obviously it’s not the same situation, now is it?

It’s like you didn’t read the article.

You shouldn’t have to take a class for an operating system…

…So we should use android? Maybe chromeos?

Invalid inference.

Imagine there are no taxes and no welfare programs. Spending resources on the welfare of others is entirely voluntary.

Let’s say 20% of the population does this. What happens? The 20% of the population which is the most altruistic has fewer resources, some of which was goven to the 80% least altruistic people.

If you do this repeatedly, ahat happens? The least altruistic people end up with the vast majority of resources. This is bad.

What do we do instead? We establish a governmental welfare program, and we make everyone contribute to it, regardless of whether they’re altruistic or not.

I’m immune to propaganda because I’m smart.

That’s not how that works. A smart person would recognize that there are degrees of smartness and degrees of immunity. Even if we accept that smarter people are less susceptible to propaganda, there is no threshold of smartness that grants immunity to propaganda.

The most important service one can provide to a kind-of-smart person is to tell them when they’ve said something stupid. I’m happy to provide this service. Please rate 5 stars.

Well, there’s fairphone. And farmers markets.

Honestly, most of the things people buy are things they don’t even need… housing, cars, and insurance excluded.

Bottled Water by Nestle? ❌

Learning to love the taste of your local tap water? ✅

No, they don’t. The same lack of insight and self-reflection that might contribute to being fervently religious, also contributes to them not understanding how anything that they do could be wrong.

An individual instance may be driven by some ideology… but as a decentralized collective of instances, there isn’t one governing ideology. It’d be super funny to have a pro-capitalism one… and it’s anyone’s right to create it or contribute to it if they want to.

Surely one of these instances allows videos of cats.

Now that’s what I call Ethos!

the second sentence tries to reaffirm your thesis that all balding, middle aged white guys are MAGA supporters.

Well, no. Technically it’s a statement that balding mediocre, middle aged white guys are the ones you would most expect to be MAGA supporters.

Does it make sense how the words they used correspond to the meaning of the statement? And does it make sense how when you add extra words to the statement, it means something different from what they said?

The best existing phrase I have is, “Dropping your guard.”

It doesn’t necessarily imply anything about why you dropped your guard, and only slightly implies that the bad thing happened while your guard was down.

We could coin a new phrase here by brainstorming. I’ll start:

Fumbled the shield

Sure, until the next platform changes their block function as well. Changing the rules to something that is objectively less safe is a bad thing, even if people are free to leave.

Edit for clarity.

Yes, eat more than one kind of thing, obviously.

I think most of us are on-board with police body cameras. The fundamental difference is that they are recording things in the presence of the police, and that they have the measurable benefit of holding the police accountable to their actions (sometimes).

Rats are good people

The problem is that inflation is still kind of high, so if you don’t spend it, it’s losing 3.4% of its value each year.

Unless you can convince your employer to pay you in Euros, Bitcoin, gold, or silver, you either have to spend USD or sacrifice 3.4% of its value every year.

$60 per kilo

That’s not bad for a prototype! With lab-growth meat, the initial cost was $2.3 million / kg. It’s come down since then because of process and scale improvements, but when it starts off that high, it’s going to be a while for it to become affordable.

A quick non-AI figure is $0.60 per kilo to recycle plastic… so we just need improvement by a factor of 100 which is quite realistic.