TheGrim-888

In the US the top 1% pay more in income tax than the bottom 90% combined. Of course they aren't the only ones paying tax, but the top 1% pay for a very significant percentage of the US budget.

Whatever the actual situation is, and whether it's good or bad, this is the absolute worst form of journalism. It just screams bias; the author injects their own political opinions, they tell the reader what to feel and believe, they twist words and exaggerate in order to sell their political message, it pulls the usual tricks around trying to imply that Trump was directly responsible, and that you should hate Trump like the writer does - this is the complete opposite of any sort of respectable impartial journalism, it's a blatant political hit piece.

In my mind this type of journalism, this article itself, is one of the biggest threads to our country, it's so ironic. Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't have freedom of speech, or that they shouldn't be able to write what they want. I'm just saying it's possible to write horrible, damaging, biased, political hit pieces, and that is what this is.

It's really disheartening. Until recently I lived in Capitol Hill, Seattle, 4 or 5 blocks away from CHAZ/CHOP. I saw with my own eyes what was happening. I saw with my own eyes buildings get set on fire multiple times within a block of my apartment. I saw with my own eyes the riots, looting, violence, nightly political shows of force. Just two days ago they were molotov cocktailing a police precinct. There's even video evidence of all of this.

Yet all I read about on mainstream news is how it's actually mostly peaceful. I see Facebook friends who live 2000 miles away from Seattle re-posting news articles about how there's nothing really going on in Seattle. But I've seen with my own eyes what's going on.

It's really approaching a 1984 level of situation, where we're expected to just believe whatever we're told, even if we obviously see the problems. Where everybody is supposed to just accept what the media is telling us, rather than what we can see is happening. If they want something to disappear (like rioters throwing molotov cocktails) they just don't report on it, and it ceases to exist. But you can bet if a Republican starting throwing molotovs for their political beliefs it'd be front-page CNN for days on end. It's all so political and so manipulative.

I mean, I've been seeing out of my window in downtown Seattle hate groups marching on a nearly nightly basis, the difference with these hate groups being that they burn down vehicles, buildings, and other properties and violently clash with the police in order to forcefully enact their hateful/racist political policies, that hate me because of the color of my skin and the political polices I support. But sure, there was one time an entirely peaceful demonstration by people on the other side of the aisle, that was so hateful! They have to be banned, deplatformed, censored, removed, destroyed. But the people roaming my city, setting fire to the building opposite of mine a few weeks back because the owner is an "evil white capitalist"? They're good to go, no hate there.

The problem is that it's such a slim majority of the people that care. The sad truth is that the vast, vast, majority of people are completely uninformed. A significant percentage of them wouldn't even understand your concerns if you tried to explain it. All they care about is what vehicle has a big shiny entertainment screen, where the salesman has promised a low enough monthly payment. That's it.

99.99% of people buying a car don't care what the drivetrain is, what differentials are in it, what engine is in it, how anything works, nor do they care. I wonder what percentage of buyers know whether the car they just bought is a FWD/RWD/AWD/etc vehicle, or even know the difference.

I think the sad truth is that because of this there's no market pressure to do things right. There's also the problem of regulation and vehicle manufacturers basically being forced into doing stuff like this as time goes by.

If we were a space-faring people with automated robots doing space mining, collecting and processing materials, if there was no shortage of resources and nearly everything was automated - then sure, fine, people can have their utopian space-communism, culture-series, setup where everyone gets free money and can have whatever they want, and do whatever we want.

But we're so many lightyears away from that situation. Our resources are very much limited. If people don't keep producing, we just stagnate and decay. We're nowhere near the point we need to be.

You could make the same argument about the normal flu, pre-covid, which kills many tens of thousands of people in the US every year. The normal flu has killed many multiples the number of people that WWII did. And we never completely locked down the country for the flu. We never explicitly destroyed the economy for the flu.

What about how many people other infectious diseases kill? What about how many people other sources of preventable deaths kill? Why haven't we thrown away our civil liberties in the past, or destroyed our economy, to tackle those problems?

As an analogy, opening my window increases my chance of getting skin cancer by letting more light in. Should I therefore always keep my window closed? Is the increased risk of cancer worth the benefit of having my window open? Should we all be forced to live underground, because that would definitely save a multitude of lives from skin cancer.

Sports events will always increase deaths, even in non-covid times. More people will die from the regular flu and other non-covid disases. More people will die from the increased travelling and accidents from that. More people will die from the extra pollution associated with the extra amount of traveling. More people will die when stressing themselves physically to perform at a high level at the sport event. The same arguments can be made about anything humans do.

Where are these rates coming from? They seem absolutely absurd. Are you suggesting that 17% of the US population is going to have permanent heart damage, and that 3% of the population is going to have a stroke, from contracting covid? That seems completely disconnected from reality.

3.5MM people in the US (at least) have already tested positive. Are you trying to imply that over 100,000 of these people have had a stroke?

More related to the article - isn't the latest IFR estimate from the CDC even less than 1%?

If the complications are a serious problem, as you claim, then I have a few follow up questions:

1) You're making some significant claims, and should therefore have significant data and evidence to back up your claims. Over 3 million people in the US have tested positive for covid. What percentage of them needed to have a limb amputated? That should be easily verifiable. What percentage of them had a blood clot and serious damage? What percentage of them currently have persistent long term damage? If you're making the claim that these things are such a serious problem, you should have data that backs up how common the problem is, and how bad it is.

2) How different are the complications from the normal complications that the flu/pneumonia/etc. can give? Tens of thousands of people get the flu, have complications, and die every year. Tens of thousands of elderly people get the flu, and have long-term damage for the rest of their life. As a society we don't care about that at all. Are you saying covid does more damage, or has more complications? If so, where's the evidence comparing the level of damage/complications?

It's my theory at the moment that this "complication" talk is just another viral "meme" that's mostly driven/spread by people just repeating what other people said, which spreads like wildfire, but never has any actual data backing it up. Of course there are people that have had serious complications. But there's people that have had serious complications from every disease. And it says nothing about how common it is. For example, if 0.00001% of people that get covid have to have a limb amputated, yeah that's horrible, and yeah it'd be great if we could just snap our fingers and make that not happen, but is it really something to focus on?

I'm not sure I agree with the statement that the US has the "worst virus situation".

It has some of the most cases, sure, if you compare it by population though, it's still high, but it's not horrible. The US is #12 for cases per capita, most European countries are between 4,000-6,000 cases per capita, while the US is at 8,500, which is definitely more. But fewer people die per capita than in the UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and some other minor countries.

It isn't like the US has orders of magnitude more infections per capita, and there's more people dying per capita in many other major countries. In such countries you'd have about the same chance of catching the virus, and a greater change of dying, as in the US.

The majority of people that are refusing to wear masks are doing so because they believe the science/data supports that decision. You might disagree with that, and whether the science/data actually supports it is a different discussion, but they aren't just being "childish" and refusing to follow recommendations for no reason.

I think there's obviously political power to gain in making the situation look as bad as possible, so that a group can then use that as a foothold to advance their own political policies. It's unfortunate that the issue is so political already. But you can easily tell when it's happening when people are referring to "society failing" and needing to "reshape society" and saying how horrible it is in the US when it really isn't that bad, etc. You can't advance new politics without a narrative of the old way of things being bad.

I guess you can easily argue that there's political power for me to downplay the situation and make it look as good as possible, in order to prevent new politics from advancing. And that's true. But it's good to at least share both sides of the story.

Just a reminder that none of this is factual or evidence. It COULD be, but just because somebody writes something doesn't make it true.

You are not given any of the context of what happened in these situations. If there's video the video starts when the conflict is already full swing, you're not seeing anything that led up to the situation.

You can read "Police showed up and fired tear gas and agitated the crowd and caused violence", but you're not told WHY they fired tear gas. You're not given the context as to what happened.

Not only are you not given the context, but you're only given one side of the story. I'm sure if you asked the police what happened, their story would be completely different. But you're only being allowed to get the story from one side, and that side is insanely politically motivated to exaggerate, and do everything they can to make the police look bad, because it strengths their political positions.

For example, Reddit previously banned the "fat people hate" subreddit, where they sat around and made fun of fat people, while these subreddits, where all they do is sit around and make fun of people based on the color of their skin are allowed to prosper.

If anything, a subreddit dedicated to making fun of people based on the color of their skin is a lot more bannable than making fun of people based on their weight ..

If you haven't noticed, we've spiraled down to the point where group think determines what is real, not facts or logic. If you can convince thousands people to scream that something is racist, then it "becomes" racist, no matter whether it meets any factual concrete definition of what racism is. Once this behavior started, it was then used as justification to change the definition of racism to something it never used to be.

There's already multiple clones of that subreddit, and there will be many more created, and they'll all be allowed to thrive.

The problem is that what hate is, is in the eye of the beholder. People can say Trump wanting to enforce rule of law is hate, I don't think so. People can say Trump wanting to enforce our borders is hate, and I don't think so. You have politically motivated people who think that anything that disagrees with their political viewpoints is hate, and justification to be memoryholed from the internet. I don't agree.

I spent years on that subreddit and never once saw somebody that identified as a Nazi calling for the deaths of Jewish people. I bet you can't find any such examples. Your viewpoints of the world are based on hearsay and propaganda, not facts and logic.

Trump threatens to use law enforcement to restore law and order in areas devastated by rioting, where there's literally political insurrection establishing an autonomous zone - Sites classify this as racist hate speech, it's censored, memory holed, and removed from the internet.

Trump asks the same sites to stop promoting violence, rioting, and the destruction of the country - Classified as hate speech and censorship, and must be memory holed and removed.

Quite the double standards. I can go on facebook, say all white people should die, all cops are evil, shoot the police, etc., and that's perfectly fine and removing it amounts to censorship. But heavens forbid Trump threatens to restore law and order, now THAT's crossing the line.

I fully expect police officers in the United States to be able to give lawful orders to disperse rioters and prevent our cities from looting and destruction.

If you don't want to be told what to do, don't riot, loot, and destroy.

If you're trying to say that our citizens can just burn our cities down, and there's nothing that can be legally done about it, I really don't understand you.

In all the clips you see, they're no longer peaceful protesters. All of the clips cut out all of the context. That's the piece you're missing. Peaceful protests happen every day and the police don't order them to disperse. Police only order them to disperse when they've become a public safety hazard.

"The police can't just tell people what to do"

What world do you live in? I could just go on a murder spree and when police come to arrest me I can just tell them "you can't tell me what to do", and they'll say "shucks, he's right, guess we'll let him on his way".

By the way, you're being doublespeaky when you say "protest is legal". It sure is. But the vast majority of these altercations come from after a group has been declared a riot, a public safety hazard, and ordered to disperse. They're no longer peaceful protesters when the cops have to use force to shut it down.

Correct me if I'm wrong, and I quite possible could be, but from a quick Google search, I'm seeing numbers of anywhere 200Wh/mile to 350Wh/mile for a Tesla. If we're generous and assume only 200Wh/mile, then 40 miles of range translates to an energy consumption of 8,000Wh.

A 100 watt solar panel, producing the full 100 watts, would take 80 hours of perfect sunlight to produce enough power for an extra 40 miles of range.

Assuming best case (unrealistic) conditions, if you get 8 hours of perfect sunlight in day, and your solar panels produce 100% of their rating for all 8 hours, it would take 1000 Watts worth of solar panels to produce that extra 40 miles of distance over 8 hours. It seems kind of unrealistic to fit 1000 Watts of solar on top of a car. And that's an absolute minimum, under best case conditions.

If you had, say, maybe a more realistic 300 watts worth of panels on top, and they got 4 hours of full sunglight, you'd be producing an extra ((300W * 4h) / 200Wh/mile) = 6 miles. And that's still assuming best case condition for power consumption per mile.

[Edit] - And like the other commenter stated, those few extra miles get cut down when you consider the weight of hundreds of watts of solar panels added onto the vehicle.