sheikhnbake

> Are you sure about that?

Yes: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

> 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.

> 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).

> Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.

It seems like you're responding just to argue and not in good faith. You keep bringing up the average income disparity as if there are no economic woes in the United States. I'm not debating the massive privilege the US holds as an economic super power due to imperialist foreign policy. Feel free to respond but I won't engage with you further.

> You can't argue with math.

https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/#household-we...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...

There's nothing to manipulate. The majority of the US electorate is politically and literally illiterate. That's why their voting patterns are based almost entirely on the current economic sentiment, not the media.

Biden denied a worsening economic situation for the average American, and the response was Trump winning the election.

Trump has made the economic situation even worse, and his support is tanking. Which is why republican candidates are currently losing in landslides and we're breaking protest records.

> The American working class voted for this

70 million out of ~350 million voted for it.

> American working class is the main beneficiary of this

This is very out of touch with the current economic situation in the United States. It was certainly true for the Boomer generation, but the economic situation and wealth gap disparity has only gotten worse for Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z.

The primary beneficiaries are the rich. As many regime supporters in the working class are finding out the hard way, they are also just resources to be extracted from. ICE agents aren't going to be paid the blood money they were promised. Farmers and manufacturers are getting shafted by tariff policy.

Americans may make ~20x more on average than the rest of the world, but the newer generations still can't afford homes, healthcare, food, etc.

~70 million Americans voted for this out of ~350 million. Trump has a current approval rating of ~38% and approximately 60% of Americans think he's gone too far.

Idk, man. The regime isn't asking my permission and my individual capacity to stop them is pretty limited. The best I can do is make sure my family and community are taken care of while the resistance builds momentum. There are 70 million white supremacists in this country and however this shakes out, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

It's also worth remembering that our economic system has intentionally or not, pacified and domesticated the working class through threat of poverty and state sanctioned violence. Resistance always requires great personal sacrifice, which is why those who do so are heroes. For the rest of the working class, they have to weigh the risks of resisting which includes, death, losing their families, their homes, jobs, etc.

The protests have been consistent since the regime took office. There's been two attempts on his life. Blue states are implementing measures to basically soft secede from the federal government. Republican candidates are losing in landslides and the regimes secret police are being confronted as soon as they're identified. Idk where you get 'complacent' from.

The fact that it was intended to be a living document and has not remained so, I would argue, is partially responsible for our current predicament.

Millenials have been killed by the current admin, and both Gen Z and Millenials have been in the streets across the country consistently since the current admin took office. Not sure what news you're consuming that you would think the way you do.

I would say that the constitution not enshrining a method of enforcement outside the auspices of the executive branch is an inherent failing of the document. Which would then indict its inability to be amended as originally intended over time.

The fact that it was intended to be a living document and has not remained so, I would argue, is partially responsible for our current predicament.

That doesn't account for the ~1,000 employees being gutted from the agency and leaving a maliciously incompetent acting director in place. Both of which are directly caused by the current admin and won't be remedied by Plankey getting a confirmation, possibly for years.

I don't think everyone is being greedy cowards. Our system is designed to domesticate people through threat of poverty or state sanctioned violence.

Resistance is difficult because it typically requires great personal sacrifice. It's hard to protest when you have to work to feed and shelter your family. It's hard to resist law enforcement when your life is the price.

The working class's current inability to resist tyranny isn't an accident.

The fact that this conversation is happening at all is indicative that our current form of government and its founding documents were inadequate in preventing the existing situation.

If the constitution was appropriate, the people would have the explicit legal means of remedying this situation without relying on elections several years after the constitutional crises was underway.

"So on the one hand they're saying government shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand they love having the government put its finger on the scales of the market."

Rather: They don't want the government to impede capitalist interests (greed), so they're using the government to further their corruption and greed

It's cool to see recoverable rocket tech continue to advance

At least parts of this were written with AI

Internal memos have shown that they knew children were becoming addicted and didn't take steps to reduce harm where possible, hence the lawsuit.

I foresee Discord receiving a lot of identification documents from the likes of Ben Dover

If I end up in the massive email history of one of the most vile men in US history, please flush me down the toilet assuming I haven't already heavily invested in the Remington retirement plan

Nah, anyone associating with Epstein can get flushed down the toilet. Maybe it's a generational thing.

Hamdullah

Same for me with buproprion. Night and day difference. Made me wonder how different my life would be if I had been diagnosed appropriately when I was a kid.

I think the line is the same as vapes/cigarettes. It's less about the product itself and more how its advertised and marketed. Internal memos from Meta are pretty damning in that they know they're actively harming kids and not adjusting their product for harm reduction. I imagine TikTok has the same problem, prompting them to settle out early.

We in the US have been so propagandized against China that even relatively progressive people that are completely against the Trump admin think China is an authoritarian hellscape. And while China is obviously not a utopia, I'd be hard pressed to find a metric there that hasn't surpassed our own.

Idk man, i dont keep a list of China's breakthroughs handy. You can find the same results on google that I can.

And I wasn't aware that breakthroughs needed to be nobel laureate worthy at a minimum to still be considered breakthroughs.

Sigh.

The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.

Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.

That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.

It also flies in the face of China's currently accelerating pace of research and breakthroughs by producing insane numbers of STEM majors and PhDs

Every protester and registered democrat has been labelled a domestic terrorist already in both rhetoric and policy.

The true problem is that it happens no matter who is in charge. It's like that old phrase about weapons that are invented are going to be used at some point. The same thing has turned out to be true for intelligence tools. And the worst part is that the tools have become so capable, that malicious intent isn't even required anymore for privacy to be infringed.