A purchase shortly followed by one of the biggest bitcoin and market crashes in modern times.

How much did they allegedly “save”…when corrected for their basic mathematical errors?

In the US nobody would want an official single identifier across multiple services and agencies like that, even though our SSN is essentially used that way. People don’t want to be tracked and linked by a single identifier, arguably because it would be abused by commercial and/or government interests, and then there’s the conspiracy nuts that would come up with who knows what reasons, and religious nuts that view a unique identifier as a “mark of the beast” or whatever.

People a fucking weird over here.

Best health care = most profitable health care.

We can add time to your life by charging so much money and limiting access via networks that you avoid care until it’s too late. Or you just choose the cheapest insurance that’s actually useless if you need it. Now that you’ve collapsed from a heart attack and taken a $5k ride in a fancy ambulance to the out-of-network ER that has reduced coverage for non-preapproved procedures we can extend your life via stents and bypasses or other serious measures. You have severely reduced life expectancy, maybe lost your job if the attack disabled you, maybe lose your home, but look how great our medical care was in making sure you didn’t use it until you desperately needed it!

Most every major company tries to build a walled garden. Apple does so via apps and services, services like netflix do by making sure you can’t watch shows on any other service (arr!), or even something as simple as cordless tools that have proprietary batteries and chargers where it gets really expensive to have to buy different batteries.

It has good parts and had a lot of bad parts. It was written centuries ago, so let’s take that framing into consideration. It was a worthwhile endeavor to pursue the good parts while amending the bad, directly or via modern courts. Unfortunately it’s been a backsliding battle against conservatives who selectively interpret it as “originalists”, like they selectively interpret their bible to enhance their power and pocketbook and ignore the parts that are inconvenient or get between them and money, and obstinately refuse change or would actively change it for the worse.

The most ironic part is that the countries that the US fought with in WW2 that had some absolutely awful leadership and governance were outfitted with relatively excellent frameworks to govern with postwar, Germany and Japan, while the US has been crippled with resting on its laurels and mulish refusal to take the lessons learned those endeavors to heart.

The First Amendment is gone.

Trump is openly retaliating against people who criticized him. Our constitution isn’t worth the crumbling paper it’s written on any more.

Right? That country started backsliding democratically a while ago. They’ve suffered from nationalism, populism, and conservatism that landed them essentially a right wing authoritarian. The fact that trump likes Erdogan should be warning enough that all is not well in Turkey.

Barely. Probably equally bad in some cases.

An educated citizenry that actively participates in government is the best solution, but we know that’s almost impossible for multiple reasons.

The richest man on earth who receives tens of billions in taxpayer money, government incentives, and tax breaks to build cars and blow up rockets over the Caribbean. He is a fucking parasite setting our/NASA money on fire. (In addition to straight up getting money from government he also gets money routed through NASA contracts)

The wealthy reduced access to education and increased economic instability for the average person.

They wanted less taxation, so they made taxation evil. Taxation paid for education and could have been used for more. They also made sure things that would stabilize the middle and lower classes were cut or never materialized - free higher education, unions/pensions, and health care.

When you remove economic stability and reduce average income people need to work more and start working younger just to keep food on the table. No time for higher ed.

They created an environment that pitted people against each other where you “get yours” and fuck everyone else, crabs in a bucket, and also have been painting higher education as a bad thing ideologically. They now claim that it doesn’t work economically even though every metric shows higher education raises average lifetime earnings (assuming you don’t pursue a 6-figure education for a low-paying job and/or with poor advancement to higher wage tiers).

AI image?

Big chunk of glass in the upper left corner of the open frame. Sliced the shit out of themselves. Odds are dog pic and bloody window frame are not related images.

No zebra? Guess I’m never writing again.

Sigh.

ITT: conspiracies.

Ffs.

Don’t forget his Chance for Peace speech.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat.

I mean, don’t forget these people were homophobic and racist AF among many other issues, but socially regarding labor and actually giving a fuck about the middle class they are pretty much the peak of it as far as the republican party goes.

I disagree. It’s usually ousted terrible leaders, minority groups, and the educated that are most often forced out.

The more uneducated remain.

I’ve struggled to learn freecad. The flow through the toolset just doesn’t mesh with my brain. I’ve used Maya, 3DSMax, Sketchup, even Blender, but for some reason FreeCAD just doesn’t do it for me. I still hope to figure it out, free is better, and I’m glad it’s out there.

You can get Solidworks for about $50/year for personal use. That’s cheaper than many entertainment streaming services. It’s not the full suite, but IMO it’s enough to be a really good deal for the features you do get.

It’s not lost. The people who wanted to keep it for themselves got to keep it. They know exactly where it is.