If I had a nickel. You stupid ignorant fucks can't even read five minutes of text.

Think twice before you announce your fake ass autism.

High time someone called you out on your bullshit.

I can't speak for New York, but down here in Georgia, where I live, these speeding cameras are often operated by private companies rather than the police. The fines people pay generate revenue for those companies, and it's not always clear how much, if any, of that money actually goes to the police or the city.

In many areas, these cameras will issue you a school-zone speeding ticket when it's not even school-zone hours, or cite you for going just one mile per hour over the posted speed limit. I find it difficult to believe these cameras are consistently accurate enough to justify that level of enforcement.

Honestly, I stopped paying these tickets years ago, and literally nothing has happened.

You are 100% correct and I completely agree with school zones and stopping for buses and so on and so forth.

The issue however isn't that people should be going slower in areas where pedestrians are more likely to cross the street is that the enforcement should be on a state level instead of private companies profiting off of this nonsense.

And the cameras need to be extremely tightly regulated; look at what's happening with Flock.

Private companies should have absolutely no ability to charge fines for people driving on public roadways. Moreover, regarding the type of enforcement of one mile over the speed limit, how can the camera possibly be that accurate? It is just using regular old radar.

I am a firm proponent of following traffic laws, just not like this.

But it gives you x3 mult!

Oh, how impressively convenient. Suddenly, you have several doctors available to establish your credibility in an online argument, and apparently I am supposed to accept your claims without question. How remarkably convenient that your medical history becomes relevant precisely when you need it to win an argument with a stranger on the internet.

I have absolutely no reason to believe your claims simply because you make them, and even if every word you said were true, your alleged autism diagnosis changes absolutely nothing about the argument. It does not make your opinions more accurate, your reasoning more sound, or your insults more intelligent. Autism is not an argument-winning credential.

Your argument about the odds of encountering four autistic people online is equally ridiculous. The internet is a self-selecting environment, and people with shared interests and experiences naturally congregate in online communities. The likelihood of encountering autistic people on Reddit or Lemmy is obviously not equivalent to the likelihood of encountering them in a random sample of the general population. That is basic sampling bias.

For context, the CDC's latest published surveillance data identified autism in approximately 1 in 31 eight-year-old children across its 16 monitoring sites in 2022. That is roughly 3.2%, not some astronomical proportion of the population. However, there is no reliable scientific statistic establishing how many people who self-identify as autistic without a formal diagnosis are actually autistic. Anyone pretending otherwise is inventing numbers to support a preconceived conclusion. https://www.cdc.gov/autism/data-research

And here is the truly amusing part: when you cannot make a convincing argument against someone, your immediate instinct is to speculate that they are autistic. You have apparently decided that autism is a convenient explanation for anyone whose opinions you dislike. That says considerably more about your own prejudices and your inability to engage with an argument than it does about the person you are attacking.

People can have unusual personalities, social difficulties, obsessive interests, awkward communication styles, or any number of personal quirks without necessarily meeting the diagnostic criteria for autism. Conversely, autistic people do not all present identically. A diagnosis requires an appropriate clinical assessment, not a collection of stereotypes assembled by someone who thinks they can diagnose strangers through a comment section.

So let me make this exceptionally simple for you: I do not need to establish whether you are autistic, neurotypical, or anything else to evaluate the quality of your argument. Your personality and your medical history are irrelevant to whether your reasoning holds up.

You, on the other hand, seem so desperate to discredit someone who disagrees with you that you have resorted to armchair diagnosis and personal insults. That is not evidence of superior intelligence. It is what people do when they have run out of substantive points to make.

Next time, try addressing the actual argument instead of inventing psychological explanations for the person making it. You might discover that you have something worth contributing after all.

Lol. Of course you're autistic. Who isn't autistic these days?

You probably think you have some kind of personality quirk. That doesn't make you autistic.

And before you get all bent out of shape, just this week alone, I've had three people on this platform and one on Reddit tell me they're autistic. What are the odds that you're number four?

Look, I'm just going to tell you: they weren't autistic, you're not autistic, and neither is the person who replied to you.

You're just a douchebag. Being an asshole and having what others consider unfavorable personality traits doesn't automatically make you autistic.

BioWare died a long time ago. The studio that made the games people fell in love with ceased to exist in any meaningful sense years ago, and everything since has been a slow decline.

They have spent the better part of the last decade failing to deliver games that live up to their legacy, with several releases failing to meet financial expectations. Instead of focusing on compelling writing, memorable characters, and meaningful player choice, they increasingly prioritized ideological messaging and what many people see as forced wokeness at the expense of good storytelling.

At some point, a parent company has to look at the numbers. If a studio consistently fails to deliver commercially successful products, there is little financial justification for continuing to fund it indefinitely.

The unfortunate reality is that BioWare's reputation carried it long after its ability to deliver on that reputation had faded. The closure isn't the death of the BioWare people remember. That studio was already gone. This is simply the final chapter of a decline that began years ago.

I also want to make something clear: I have absolutely no issue with politics or progressive themes in video games. Politics has always been part of the medium, and there's nothing inherently wrong with exploring social issues or incorporating different perspectives into a story. My problem is when those themes take precedence over the actual narrative and the established identity of the intellectual property. When the political messaging becomes more important than the world, characters, and story that made people care about the franchise in the first place, it destroys immersion. And in my opinion, that is precisely where BioWare went wrong.

I would say that's true about Sony and its ecosystem.

Xbox, on the other hand, isn't doing so hot. I'd argue that Microsoft could potentially be heading toward a serious decline in the console market. When a consumer base is pushed hard enough, eventually people start pushing back.

That's why we're seeing PlayStation and Nintendo Switch consoles being jailbroken. It may be a sign that some consumers are tired of being restricted and exploited by the platforms they use.

Xbox has a particularly serious problem: if Microsoft fails to deliver games and experiences that make its ecosystem worthwhile, people will simply move to PlayStation or Nintendo to play video games. They aren't necessarily going to care about Xbox as an entertainment ecosystem if the gaming experience itself isn't compelling.

Microsoft needs to remember that people buy gaming consoles to play games, not to buy into an ecosystem.

Because it is not true.

Scarcity can absolutely be artificially created. Just look at the diamond industry. But I suspect that is not the kind of scarcity this meme is referring to.

There is a reason the 1% exists, and scarcity is certainly part of the equation. We live on a planet with finite resources, and there are people who seek to accumulate and hoard those resources, along with the wealth and power that come with controlling them.

However, the 60-hour workweek referenced in this meme is not an inevitable consequence of scarcity. It is a consequence of how our economic system prioritizes corporate profits, investor returns, and perpetual growth over the well-being of workers.

A company can be profitable and still be considered a failure if it does not generate enough profit to satisfy investors. Revenue growth is not enough. Profit margins must increase. Returns must keep climbing. And when the pursuit of ever-increasing profits takes precedence over everything else, workers are expected to sacrifice more of their time and energy to sustain it.

That is the real rot: an economic system that treats the failure to maximize profits as though it were the same thing as losing money.

Scarcity is real, but it does not explain or justify every form of inequality. The concentration of wealth and power is also a consequence of who controls resources, how ownership is structured, and what our economic institutions reward.

Until we address both the limits of our finite resources and the systems that allow wealth and power to become increasingly concentrated, we will continue to see extreme inequality. The problem is not simply that there isn't enough to go around. It's also that the people who control the most are incentivized to keep accumulating more.

It most certainly does. It demonstrates just how gargantuan these protests were. They resulted in the most costly protest-related property damage in American history.

And no, it is not misinformation. It is an objectively verifiable fact.

If people cannot comprehend the significance of $2 billion, there is not much I can do about that. That is a failure of our educational system, which is an entirely different issue in and of itself.

But downplaying the damage is disingenuous at best and outright pandering at worst.

I wonder if XBox realizes that their player base isn't locked into their ecosystem...

And they are certainly far from the only option.

Lol it's the actual name of the game.

Apparently I wasn't lazy enough to do some leg work to figure it out (I actually knew about this game and was able to identify it by the name but that's beyond the point.)

You're the reason why Netflix has to take into account people doom scrolling on their phones while they watch their media.

It probably took less time for me to search, upload and write this message than it took you to type up that rancid pile of shit.

So for everyone concerned: shut the fuck up.

It is actually and you don't understand the context. It's the largest loss in insurance history. How do you find that to be a meaningless metric.

And again. The point of my response was to illustrate the misinformation. As much as you want to downplay it 2 billion is a noteworthy and significant loss.

You're comparing a $2 billion insurance loss to the entire American GDP?

Jesus. Way to lose all context.

Yes, of course. What's $2 billion compared to $32 TRILLION-ILLION-ILLION? Are you kidding me?!

What exactly were you expecting from the protests? For people to scoop up the entire country and toss it in the fucking bin?

I even made a point of comparing that $2 billion to Elon Musk's net worth. Compared to that, it's a tiny loss.

But comparing a $2 billion loss from the BLM protests to the entire American economy is a completely useless comparison. It's like saying the distance to the Sun is tiny compared to the distance to the next galaxy. Technically true, but utterly meaningless without context.

The American economy generates trillions of dollars in economic activity every year. Of course $2 billion is going to look insignificant when you compare it to a number that massive. That doesn't tell us anything meaningful about the actual scale of the losses.

Christ. Calling a $2 billion loss negligible because it's a tiny fraction of America's GDP doesn't prove your point. It just demonstrates that you know how to divide two numbers without understanding what the comparison actually tells you.

Context matters. Scale matters. And a loss doesn't stop being significant just because you can find a bigger number to compare it to.

I love how there are multiple comments downplaying the $2 billion number.

It just goes to show how brainwashed people really are when it comes to numbers like $2 billion.

Of course, compare that number to Elon Musk’s wealth, and $2 billion doesn’t seem like all that much. Compare it to what I have, however, and the difference is almost incomprehensible. I make $80,000 a year. Even if I saved every single dollar I earned, it would take me 25,000 years to accumulate $2 billion. Let that sink in for a moment.

$2 billion in insured property damage is an absolutely massive amount of damage caused by the BLM riots. However, that still doesn't change the point I'm making, which is that the meme is misinformation.

Your argument is that memes don't tell the whole story and never can. That's a completely different argument, and it doesn't address my point.

My point is that the meme is deliberately presenting a misleading picture of what happened. The fact that the damage amounted to $2 billion is directly relevant to that discussion.

The meme implies that the BLM riots caused relatively little property damage. They did not. The estimated insured property damage was approximately $2 billion.

Downplaying that figure to make the damage appear insignificant is textbook misinformation, particularly when it's being used to push a very specific political narrative.

And let's be clear about something: my personal opinions on BLM and the riots are probably very different from what most people here assume. In fact, the person I originally responded to would probably disagree with a good deal of what I have to say about both BLM and the riots themselves.

But that's beside the point.

I am specifically and intentionally calling out the propaganda and misinformation presented in this meme. Nothing more, nothing less.

You don't have to agree with my opinions about BLM to acknowledge that a meme misrepresenting the scale of property damage is misleading. Those are two entirely separate issues, and conflating them is exactly how political misinformation gets a free pass.

The 2020 BLM protests were hardly some small, isolated incident involving a little property damage. The unrest caused more than $2 billion in insured property losses across the United States, making it the costliest civil-disorder event in U.S. insurance history at the time. The unrest spread across more than 20 states and affected communities nationwide. Whatever your political position, pretending the damage was trivial or that this was some minor, localized event is simply ignoring the facts. That doesn't mean every protester was violent or that every demonstration was destructive, but the scale and financial cost of the unrest were substantial.

Despite the scale of the 2020 BLM protests, the long-term results were mixed at best. They generated enormous public attention and prompted some policy changes, but they did not fundamentally transform the American political system or eliminate the racial inequalities that motivated the movement. In many respects, the country remains deeply divided, and racial hostility has become increasingly visible in our political discourse. Under the current administration, rhetoric surrounding race and immigration has only intensified those divisions. For all the protests, all the disruption, and all the money lost to property damage, the question remains: how much has actually changed for the better?

This is exactly why memes like this are counterproductive. Rather than encourage an honest discussion about what happened, what it cost, and what the consequences were, they reduce complicated events to simplistic narratives designed to provoke anger and deepen divisions. Presenting misleading information to reinforce an existing political bias is propaganda, regardless of which side does it. It is the same kind of divisive political messaging that the current administration routinely uses to mobilize its supporters and discredit its opponents. When we substitute outrage and misinformation for facts, we make meaningful discussion impossible. That is a significant part of how we arrived at our current political climate, and continuing to circulate this material without questioning its accuracy only makes the problem worse.

You mean more than it is now? They'll build more concentration camps for brown people?

In the Bible, God supposedly created the world and everything in the universe in six days, resting on the seventh. Taken as a literal historical account, this creation narrative falls apart under the weight of modern scientific evidence. Evolution, geology, astronomy, and cosmology contradict the biblical account on multiple fundamental levels. The problem is that the Bible makes extraordinary claims without providing a meaningful mechanism or evidence to support them. Its explanation essentially boils down to, “God did it. Don't worry about how. Just trust me.” That might satisfy someone who already believes, but it is not a scientific explanation, nor is it a substitute for evidence.

The theological problem is even more fundamental. If God is supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and incapable of error, then Scripture must be infallible for those who insist that it represents God's literal and perfect word. Any demonstrable contradiction between a literal interpretation of Scripture and reality creates a serious problem for that position. Evolution is particularly threatening to biblical literalism because it is supported by an enormous body of evidence from genetics, paleontology, comparative anatomy, and observed biological processes. Rather than reconsidering their interpretation, some religious apologists attempt to discredit the science itself. The motivation is not always financial or malicious; many sincerely believe what they argue. However, religious institutions and influential individuals can have powerful financial, political, and social incentives to preserve doctrines that might otherwise lose their credibility.

This is where organized religion begins to resemble a grift. At its worst, the structure is remarkably familiar: a small number of people at the top accumulate wealth, influence, and authority by promoting claims that cannot be independently verified, while the people below them are expected to accept those claims through faith. The followers provide the money, labor, political support, and unquestioning loyalty, while the leaders enjoy the benefits. It is a system in which doubt can be portrayed as moral failure, skepticism as spiritual weakness, and demands for evidence as a threat to one's salvation. Such a structure can make itself remarkably resistant to criticism because it teaches its followers to distrust the very methods that might expose its claims as false.

This does not mean every religious person is dishonest or that every religious leader is consciously perpetrating a fraud. Many believers are sincere, compassionate people, and some religious institutions provide genuine community support and charitable assistance. The distinction is between personal faith and the deliberate exploitation of that faith. Nevertheless, Abrahamic religious traditions, particularly when their doctrines are treated as unquestionable literal truth, can create systems of authority that protect themselves at the expense of independent thought. When an institution's credibility depends on its teachings being immune to correction, scientific discoveries become threats rather than opportunities to understand the world more accurately.

Evolution and psychology are especially relevant because they challenge traditional assumptions about humanity's place in the universe, our origins, our behavior, and our morality. Evolution explains the development of life through natural processes without requiring a supernatural designer. Psychology and the cognitive sciences investigate how human minds function, including why people develop religious beliefs, seek authority, fear death, and remain committed to ideas despite contradictory evidence. Neither discipline disproves every possible conception of God, but both undermine specific religious claims when those claims conflict with empirical evidence. That distinction matters: a belief that can accommodate any possible outcome cannot be presented as a scientific explanation merely because it has been reinterpreted to survive criticism.

Sexuality, sin, and witchcraft also feature prominently in religious narratives, often serving as mechanisms for regulating behavior, defining social boundaries, and identifying enemies or outsiders. By attaching moral significance to ordinary human desires and portraying certain forms of knowledge or behavior as spiritually dangerous, religious authorities can exercise considerable influence over private lives. Fear, shame, promises of salvation, and the threat of supernatural punishment can all become instruments of social control.

Ultimately, the central issue is not whether every religious person is a fraud or whether science has answered every question. It is whether extraordinary claims should be exempt from scrutiny simply because they are presented as sacred. They should not. If a religious claim contradicts reliable evidence, it is the claim that must be reconsidered, not the evidence that must be distorted to protect it. And when people profit financially or politically from convincing others that questioning them is forbidden, skepticism is not an attack on faith. It is a necessary defense against exploitation.

Here's the part I don't understand.

In 2025, approximately 22 million Americans received subsidies through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace to help pay for their health insurance. That's millions of working Americans who depend on these subsidies to afford coverage.

So who exactly is this statement supposed to appeal to? A significant number of Trump's own constituents rely on healthcare.gov to purchase their health insurance. Without those subsidies, many of them are going to face the same financial reality I would.

Without my subsidy, my health insurance would cost approximately $1,800 a month. That's $21,600 a year just to have health insurance, before paying a single dollar in deductibles or copays.

That's absolute insanity.