While individuals can find space for weight loss regimes, it really is a society-level problem.

Consider an experiment with two populations of rats. One population gets a normal amount of food, the other gets the same food with a bunch of added sugar. Of course the population with added sugar gets fatter. But, while the average rat may have gained 10% weight or whatever, on an individual level you’ll see a wide range of results - some rats aren’t effected by the increased sugar, some gain a small amount of weight, some gain a lot.

This is basically exactly what we’ve done to ourselves in capitalist society over the past seventy-ish years, taken our previous diet and jacked it up with a ton of sugar (and other additives and a lot of increased volume). But while with the rats it’s easy to see that all you have to do to return the overweight population to normal is to stop adding sugar to their food, with humans we can’t see that because we’ve created a system that blames you for getting sick.

It’s like building a coal power plant in the middle of a neighborhood, and then blaming the residents when they start getting asthma or worse, and holding up the people who won the genetic lottery and don’t get lung disease as the example we should all strive to replicate.

The curtains are blue!

The curtains have a swastika on them.

No! They’re just blue! Not everything is political!

I remember that argument was when I learned that my parents were NIMBYs. It was honestly a shock, they’re lib but I has assumed they would want a playground in the neighborhood considering that at that time there were six kids in the house with absolutely nothing to do inside walking distance.

100% correct, no notes.

I have a theory that part of the function of the “where is your child now?” stuff that really curtailed kids’ freedom in America in the second half of the twentieth century was a reaction to the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam movements. Both were prominently participated in by kids, the anti-war one especially, and when society goes from letting kids have a significant portion of the day to themselves in between school and supper to basically forcing them to go from one controlled location straight to another with no in-between, all of that potential youth-lead political organization falls apart because it doesn’t have anything to support it anymore.

I don’t think it was the primary driver - after all most kids weren’t joining the Students for a Democratic Society - but it is a relevant secondary reason. The primary driver was almost certainly “property values”. I remember one of my only interactions with the HOA where my parents lived concerned plans for a playground being voted down based on the logic that children playing outside would somehow lower everyone nearby’s home value (they also made the equally-bad argument that teens would hang out at the child’s playground to smoke). Multiply this interaction by a million HOAs around the country and eventually even the kids whose parents don’t demand that they come straight home still end up going home anyway because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

People leave their country for a million reasons, but every person who left the Soviet Union got lit up by the propaganda machine so we tend to think that way more people did it than actually did. The Soviets themselves put rules in place to try and prevent certain high-value people from leaving, like nuclear engineers, and this created a lot of friction between a certain class of professional and the state - but taken as a whole Soviet emigration wasn’t much different than, say, American emigration today.

edit: East Germany is a different story, along with German-speaking minorities being expelled from Eastern Europe after World War 2. With the power of hindsight I think it’s safe to say that the East German authorities mishandled the situation and made things worse for a long time before it stabilized, which is why 1/5 of East Germans left the country - but it did stabilize, with emigration dropping precipitously after 1953 with Stalin’s death.

I spent all day reading about early suspensions on carriages and cars - it wasn’t until the 16th century that they figured out you could make the ride smoother by suspending the body of a carriage with leather straps (as opposed to having it be attached directly to the frame), and it wasn’t until the 19th that they figured out that you could make it even smoother with a leaf spring suspension. Leaf springs themselves actually date back to ancient times and can be made of metal or wood depending on what’s available, so it’s just a matter of applying them to a new purpose.

Depending on how far you get sent back, there’s also a lot of very simple improvements you can make to wheels that were technologically possible for a long time before people thought to do it. Make wheels lighter by making them out of thin planks instead of an entire slice of tree trunk, stronger by reinforcing the rim with a metal band, more maneuverable by separating the axle into two sections. Inflatable tires are much harder, but people would use a solid band of rubber or cork around the outside of the wheel to accomplish the same thing before pneumatic tires were figured out.

If you’re doing either of those things, then you’re a stone’s throw away from inventing a bicycle. Just a thought.

Vonnegut had a lot of conflicting ideas, but identified as a socialist. I think he was in the somewhat confused vein of psuedo progressive we see today that is for lefty economics but is anti-political correctness, and the ease that Bergeron maps onto American antocommunist beliefs shows exactly where that particular strain of thought comes from.

I looked up the last one and yep, that Austrian guy was in the SS (and joined its predecessor group in 1933, helping Hitler get into power. No excuses for that POS).

I agree, we should add 10,000 to the CE in order to make the cutoff point the invention of agriculture.

and how Cyberpunk Edgerunners subverts it

That show does literally every single thing he complains about, he just gives it a pass because it’s got above-average production quality and writing.

That’s how you can tell these clowns aren’t doing any actual media analysis, it’s all just surface level reactionary gibberish.

:sicko-yes: me rooting for the advertising bubble to pop and take down all of the largest tech companies with it

:sicko-no: me realizing that the company that will best survive that burst and then expand to fill the power vacuum is Amazon

:strangelove-wow:

I’ve never considered moving to Bakersfield before, but :soviet-hmm:

I’ve definitely seen yellow “donate” buttons on personal websites before, but every one of them was bespoke so once they stopped being maintained they disappeared.

Yeah but weebs don’t like that she looks like an adult.

yeah but then what would we talk about on gaming subs? poor treatment of developers? gambling mechanics designed to exploit the nuerodivergent? mainstream games with plotlines that reinforce harmful beliefs in our culture? it’s easier to just argue about popular games instead.

It’s me but with [redacted] :hentai-free:

I’m pretty sure it’s only used by us to describe people who call themselves anarchists but simp for the Democrats.

De-Stalinization undertaken by Khruschev was basically the starting point for everything going wrong. Not that mistakes weren’t made prior to this, or that the SU wasn’t able to accomplish great things after it, but the trend line across Soviet history where Marxism becomes less important as a guiding ideology and the people and the party leaders’ desires begin to diverge from each other starts descending there. As Xi Jinpeng puts it:

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!

You could alternately see it as an Elon Musk-type figure selling the town of Springfield a gadgetbahn when they could have solved their problem with a regular bus or train for half the price and double the reliability.

…but the average viewer probably interpreted it as being anti public transit.