Spyke

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The American democratic republic has died. It was 236 years old.

Aside from this being a little fucking melodramatic and defeatist, the thing that really bothers me is the implicit assumption that if only we'd all just vote blue no matter who we wouldn't have this problem, like the Democratic Party hasn't been kowtowing to and enabling those same oligarchs to undermine our democracy. It's like they're standing in the rubble of a bombing and saying, 'This is happening because you chose the short fuse on the bomb, if only you had chosen the long fuse we wouldn't have noticed this happening quite so quickly wouldn't be having this problem!'

Don't get me wrong, boom tomorrow is definitely better than boom today, but it's important to not forget that there was never not going to be a boom.

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If I could steal a car by downloading it over the internet without depriving the original owner of it and with similarly low risk of getting caught/prosecuted for it I would absolutely steal a car. I wouldn't steal a font tho, that's just beyond the pale. :P

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What feels illegal but isn't?

Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don't need and didn't even want until the ad sold us on it? It's fucking wild.

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Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?

You are going crazy. I've been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn't a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it's probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.

reddit

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1 day ban for quoting the former CEO of a Costco

Yeah, I got a 7-day ban for saying Luigi Mangione probably shouldn't go to prison for what he did because they said I was inciting violence. They lifted it on appeal, but not before hitting me with a perma-ban for some bullshit about circumventing the ban with other accounts (I've had exactly one account on reddit in the ~14 years I've been there), so I decided they were getting a bit too fashy for my taste and started looking for greener pastures.

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Fabric softener is a scam

'Most millennials aren't buying enough of our shit and that's a HUGE PROBLEM that all of you definitely care about!'

That's some pretty useful advice in the comments tho. But also I'm 52 years old and have literally never used fabric softener in my life and have no idea what it's supposed to be for other than making companies like Proctor & Gamble even more money.

Also, another handy tip: 'lather, rinse, repeat' is bullshit, unless you have really thick or really oily hair and don't wash regularly, you don't need to wash it twice, the shampoo company just wants you to buy more. Same with fill marks in a washing machine, unless you're doing a huge load there's no reason to fill it all the way up.

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"It could break us": Valley farmer says Chinese tariffs have crushed the alfalfa export market

Ehh.. I have little sympathy for these farmers who switched from growing food crops (thus contributing to the rise in food prices) to generally very water-intensive cash crops for export and kept getting subsidies meant to ensure a ready supply of food for the populace. This situation was plenty fucked long before Trump put his dick in it, it should not be surprising that he'd make it worse.

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How do you explain the principal of "you cannot prove a negative" to someone that is very weak at abstractions like this?

By simple analogy. You can prove that there are white crows by finding a single white crow, but to prove that there are no white crows you must conduct an exhaustive search of every corner of the earth and never find a single one and somehow be absolutely certain that you didn't miss one somewhere.
The only way to be absolutely certain that you didn't miss something is to be able to look everywhere all at once, otherwise a white crow might evade your notice, and that's impossible.

As such all you can say is there probably aren't any white crows because we have lots of experience seeing crows and there has been no evidence of one yet.

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Trump unveiling 2028 campaign hats: ‘Soft launching a fascist dictatorship is insane’

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Except it's not being able to be elected, because he's served two terms and that limitation isn't just a law, it's an amendment. I don't care how much of congress they control, changing it will require a new amendment and that's just exceedingly unlikely to happen, much less happen before the end of his current term. So if he can't change the rules, attempting to stay in power anyway is absolutely fascist dictatorship material.

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I see the point you're aiming at, but it's not little companies discovering new drugs it's giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then 'swoop in' to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.

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Sounds logical to me

How you know this is legit: if he'd been talking about any dating app other than grindr step 6 would look like 'wait 6 weeks to get a match, get ghosted, get depressed, go to bed mumbling about 'who needs sex anyway?'.