volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@rberger

Too few people consider that when a person is surprised by the course of events, it means that person either didn't know what they were talking about or had really poor judgment.

Either way, that the person was surprised is not in itself news. It's only an indicator that the person is unreliable.

We really need to do a better job of calling out surprise and then discounting the future statements of the people who, it turned out, didn't know what was going on.

@JFallows

@AnthonyFStevens but an awful lot of people who talk actually can't!

Again, this is the example of growing wings when jumping out of the airplane. Some things are flat out impossible, and it's important not miss those.

But again, I think you're wrong, but even IF you're right, the Zionists you refer to won't be removed. I'm personally pretty skeptical that Hamas will be removed either, no matter how much blood is shed in the attempt to get there.

So with those two in doubt, we're 80% farther from peace than you're imagining.

We need to respond to that reality and figure out what the best way forward is, given that.

Otherwise we're talking about solutions that only apply to a fantasy world that doesn't actually exist.

Where would we like to fly once we grow wings? Well, since we're not going to grow wings it's not a very useful question.

@magitweeter how do you figure?

Fossil fuels will be obsolete when a better option out competes them.

I don't know how you make a, what, a person that's better than rich? How do you outcompete a rich person?

A fundamental quirk there is that the rich status is itself indicator of relative competition.

@Vincarsi

@Vincarsi I'd first stop and realize that making rich people obsolete is a tearing down when it's healthier to focus on building up.

But that dovetails with what you're saying, as stopping to enjoy MrBeast is building up.

We should focus on the positive and not the negative.

@swamphox masks are about mitigating risk, not eliminating it.

That she tested positive doesn't really say anything about any reasonable claim on this topic.

@taylorlorenz just responding to the headline, which not both?

An awful lot of narcissists manage to monetize their dysfunction, even in traditional media and politics.

@maniajack no.

It's a check on the power of the executive branch, keeping it in line with the democratic process instead of giving it a blank check to act as it wishes.

And that is especially important because occasionally someone like Trump will be elected, and we need to make sure his power is limited.

@sc_griffith it's more finance than economics.

The money has to come from somewhere, and that has nothing to do with supply demand graphs. It's not so complicated.

No matter anything else, the company would have to recoup the cost for those tests from somewhere since it can't print its own money to cover it.

We can go into some of the complications that you bring up, though they are a bit beside the point.

For example, if the company could reduce total payouts because people get sick less, then why isn't it doing it? Is it intentionally raising its own costs of doing business? That seems unlikely.

@sc_griffith where do you think insurance companies get the money that they pay in claims?

They don't have their own mints, so that money has to come from somewhere, and in the end it comes from their customers.

@burner what? The evidence is pretty public, eyewitness accounts confirmed by multiple independent witnesses and lots of footage available from various independent sources.

It's almost like this person is declaring that the evidence is not available as a way of convincing people not to go looking for it.

@sc_griffith you'd be paying for them either way, whether directly or through your insurance premiums though.

And if you pay for them through insurance premiums then the company would take a cut to afford their overhead.

So this is just you cutting out the middleman.

@godsouza I don't think they're dancing around it so much as refusing to buy into that falsehood.

It's like saying the state department is dancing around dealing with the earth being flat. No, it's just that the earth isn't flat.

@resuna

No I saw it, like I said above, parliamentary systems bring in their own problems so adding transferable votes to a parliamentary system won't fix this.

@cinnarose @1dalm @brianklaas

@silvereagle i don't think it was snatching defeat from victory as much as giving it a shot and realizing it was a lost cause all along.

They were facing intractable social problems contentwise, so they couldn't go back, but they were facing intractable technical problems should they try to expand into ActivityPub.

It sounds like they worked on both fronts for a good while but eventually had to admit that the platform had been without a future all along.

@TonyStark well the problem is that a lot of press outfits are misleading their readers about risks, and yes, that's the media's fault.

So many outlets are publishing so many clickbaity, sensationalized claims about things that simply have no basis in how the US government actually operates.

And so the public ends up divided between those who believe the reports and those who know better.

@lauren that's not how the US government works.

Congress doesn't shut down government. Rather government shuts down if our representatives don't agree that it should continue.

This distinction is vital as it underlies the basic design of the separation of powers in the US design.

No, GOP isn't lining up to shut down government. They simply don't have that power.

@AnthonyFStevens firstly, I think you're just flat out wrong that it's achievable. Everything I see says it's not achievable at all, much less very achievable.

But even assuming you're correct:
the "unfettered US support for the Zionists" isn't going anywhere.

So first I think you're wrong based on history, but even if you're right, it's still unachievable even under your own model.

Reality is that many wonderful things in the world are simply physically impossible.

We can't grow those wings, no matter how nice it would be.