1) yeah probably but I wouldn't pretend that I'm presenting objective facts, either.
2) the facts don't back me up?
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenation.com%2Farti...
"USAID Is Not Worth Blindly Defending
Trump and Muskâ(TM)s war against the agency should be opposed on principle. But we canâ(TM)t overlook that USAID has been a destructive arm of American imperialism for decades."
See also: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heritage.org%2Fprogr...
The Biden admin (treated) "...U.S. foreign aid apparatus as a global platform from which to implement overseas a rigidly ideological and domestically divisive agenda to promote abortion, climate action,
âoegender equity,â and âoeracial justice,â"
(https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.congress.gov%2F118%2Fmeeting%2Fhouse%2F116508%2Fdocuments%2FHHRG-118-GO06-20231025-SD004.pdf)
I *fully* agree that Congress SHOULD have destroyed it. This congress has spent most of its time politically wanking and getting little actually done. And yes, I agree that DOGE was largely a failure. Its only successes were killing USAID and driving 250,000 gov't employees off the books. Only about a million more to go.
3) personally, I think the shitheel Republicans in Washington are only slightly less toxic than the Dems. Both their houses are deeply corrupt and have little or nothing to do with their nominal constituencies outside the beltway. I'm convinced that NEITHER party insiders will allow any 3rd party candidate to survive, and will cheerfully collude with their "opposition" to prevent anyone else from stepping up.

Trump is a COLOSSAL narcissist asshole. Then again, he is despised by the insiders of BOTH parties, and I expect at this point only a wealthy narcissist asshole could possibly make it through their gatekeeping to actually be president anymore. I believe that's a large portion of why every demographic (save white women, lol) shifted rightward in 2026.
But like the Jesse Ventura experiment in MN, it turns out that 'outsider colossal narcissist' doesn't magically turn into a competent leader either if he finally does win. He just stays a narcissist and legislates for himself.

In the end, I'd rather have an incompetent boob in charge that the 4th estate actually scrutinizes, than a Biden/Clinton/Obama figure that is just as deeply corrupt, vastly smarter, and has a servile media cheefully licking his balls.

I live in the upper midwest.
I have now seen projections for
- a milder winter than usual
- less snowy winter than usual
- a shorter winter than usual
as well as
- a more severe winter than usual
- more snow than usual
- a longer winter than usual

I think that means you guys have all your bases covered. No matter what the result, now we can confidently say we predicted "how bad it will be"(1, TBD April 2027)

(1) or "how uneventful it was"

This is mostly fearmongering and rage-baiting. Probably not 100%, I'd concede that yes, there's almost certainly some asshole with that plan.

But the fact is that repricing is a MAJOR way for a low margin business to squeeze out some tenths of a percent, but not if they have to do it manually.

Large grocery stores (one of the consistently lowest-margin businesses) in the 1990s would - I am not kidding - have a dozen or more laser printers in the back running full-out printing new price tags for everything. Do you have any idea how much manual labor it took to have stock clerks flipping those to drop the price by 3 cents or raise it by a dime?

Digital tags let grocery stores do these changes enmasse, and look it up:
- they have NOT increased average prices above inflation over 25 years of data
- they have made temporary discounts much more available, allowing groceries to likely reduce food waste by selling things nearly expired with lower prices instead of tossing them out because nobody wanted them.

LOL Elon Musk's politics put him below a LITERAL NAZI?

Sure, this is a completely rational take.

1) he picked a side you didn't like, full stop.
2) he disbanded a gov't agency that had been designed to destabilize foreign governments outside of congressional oversight and was used for at least the last 20 years as a naked leftist slush fund world wide.
3) yes, he put his foot on the scales. Remember why? Because Twitter was a leftist echo chamber.

He's not "doing the wrong things" he's doing things you politically dislike. Sane people understand their opinions don't define reality.

Score 0?

Glad facts matter, /.

Nice attempt at "only one siding". Oh look, it's Comrade amimojo /shock.

Shockingly he actual facts are different than you present!

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fsingu...
(from https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com...):
Results (left-wing/centrist/right-wing)
OpenAI - 80 / 17/ 3
Anthropic - 43 / 57 / 0
xAI - 40 / 27 / 33 -- this is the one amimojo claims is right wing, which should tell you something
Google 7 / 93 / 0

There it is.

" The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials,"

Gee it must be horrible to have an implacable sleepless faceless entity hoovering your data without asking...

Are you so stupid you still think you have any credibility?
My entire thread has been about people exactly like you. Windbags who can't stop raging that everything is political and it's always "the guys you hate" to blame.
Literally.
Every.
Post.

Your quote:
"...Reagan first shit up education in California and then went on to do it nationally. It's a less well-known fact, but still a fact, that it was done for the purpose of getting rapeublicans (which hilariously autocorrected to "trollbags") elected by avoiding an "educated proletariat"...:

I said you were retarded for instantly making it political.

And btw:
"...Reagan first shit up education in California and then went on to do it nationally. It's a less well-known fact, but still a fact, that it was done for the purpose of getting rapeublicans (which hilariously autocorrected to "trollbags") elected by avoiding an "educated proletariat"...:

Was that you, oh soul of non-biased centrism?
Or is "that's not politics, that's just facts" for you? Clearly not even slightly partisan?

100% bullshit.
This is indeed the world in 2026, but that has not always been the world. It doesn't HAVE to be like this.

It used to be two people could sit down and talk about almost anything without it turning into politics.
Not everything is the fault of the libtards.
Not everything is the fault of the MAGA legions.

Your (and frankly, all of social media's) obsession with slavishly consuming the bullshit binary is unhealthy.

Of course subjects CAN have political relevance, but they don't have to. We can talk about local students struggling to pass basic performance benchmarks. My "blaming the fucking teachers' unions and their DEI woke agena" is no more productive than you saying "it's the fucking Great Orange Satan". Both are ways to AVOID substantive change by scaling the argument beyond what either of us can meaningfully change; they're both excuses for accomplishing nothing but getting a righteous frisson of rage and maybe a little extra hate.

There we go. I appreciate your contribution 100% proving my point.

Like throwing chum in the water to sharks. It doesn't matter the subject, it's always political, isn't it?

It doesn't surprise anyone, you can already see this forum is full of the usual suspects spouting their long-established stances.

"Oh no they're going to do it now" Really? That's the best you've got?

So you're going to pretend you don't know about Soviet weapons deployed in space basically as long as either of us has been alive?

Or are we pretending there's no Chinese space weapons program?

How naive are you, or just disingenuous?

There's a weird confluence here of the capability of basically everyone having access to more information than ever, and the most constant nonsense gaslighting at the same time.

One can - instantly, really - ask about something incredibly obscure like Fermat's last theorem and depending on how much one is willing to accept someone else's summary, their own comprehension, and appetite for falling down a rabbit hole of REALLY detailed explanation, context, history, personalities, and everything involved, one can - likewise instantly - get not only the basic information but pretty nearly any gradation of explanation that wanted. And I can even get that wherever I happen to be - a library, a classroom, but also a bus or sitting on the shitter.

Objectively, that's a COOL THING.
Really, it is an amazing accomplishment for humanity generally.

Simultaneously, though we have more or less constant gaslighting over even the most stupid/obvious of facts. In the US it's often political, whether from the president & his government, or the opposition. Every single thing now has political weight in which the moment it's presented, the side-weighting are applied and if it's my side I'm for it, if it's the other side I'm against it, and by god there will never be reconciliation on even the most basic of facts.

I'd ask how we got here, but I expect all I'd see are politically-weighted answers anyway.

My point is just to highlight the constant irony of the availability of infinite information coinciding with the apparently-collective abandonment of any fixed concept of reality.