The math is not right. Percentages don’t multiply like that.

A change from 0.25 to 7.25 over 71 years means an annual increase of about 5%. That 5% annual change, starting with $7.25 15 years ago, would take us to around $15 today.

Wars tend to involve civilians getting hurt, because yeah, it’s cheaper and easier to disregard international law.

I wouldn’t generalize that to evil always winning vs good, though. Human life is complicated, and mean, but progress gets made anyway. There’s a reason most people dislike war.

Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.

Huh, okay. Good on you for being consistent.

I find the banning of individual users to be highly necessary, to prevent spam of porn/nazi shit/general assholery. Instead of everyone having to spend a long time forming their own blocklist, they can sign up for an instance with a mod team that they trust to do it for them. Defederation is a useful tool towards that end, because (for example) Exploding Heads is an instance that explicitly allows racism and such, so a well-moderated instance will defederate with them rather than having to ban hundreds or thousands of individual trolls who sign up over there because they like racism.

Are you also against the idea of banning individual users for the content they post?

This question is analogous to “why hasn’t anarcho-communism yet worked on a wide scale?” Which is a question with many, many facets to it. You’d have to ask a lot of questions separately.

If I were to try, though, I think the simple answer is “people who work in X area usually do not own the means of production and as such cannot redirect the end product to horizontalist organizations.” Most people can’t just quit their jobs to join a mutual aid group because, without being able to contribute things, the biggest thing a mutual aid group can pass around is time, and most mutual aid groups that exist irl are focused on doing tasks like “picking up prescriptions for others,” and cannot replace participation in the capitalist economy.

Nevermind how most governments don’t want horizontalist non-capitalist organizations to gain enough power to provide a viable alternative to living under capitalism.

I’ve never heard of bribes being used to bypass a driver’s test, at least where I’ve grown up (Washington, US). If you tried to open a conversation like “where do I go if I want to bribe you?” I imagine that people would just assume it’s a joke.

A big part of this can be the family people grew up in. I have a few friends who interrupt constantly because that’s just how their family has conversations.

no, since the misleadingly-true fact is still that congestion wastes gas - congestion is cars spending gas on going nowhere, so the gas is wasted

My bad, I didn’t know HRT was a term used outside of transgender healthcare. Thank you for the info!

explanation, since this one might be more confusing than most:

Traffic congestion does indeed waste gas. However, any place worth driving to is going to have congestion–driving without congestion is easy, fast, and comfortable, so people generally won’t take other options until roads become congested. Thus, congestion actually reduces gas usage overall, because it is only once areas become congested that people stop driving places.

Trying to avoid congestion, on the other hand, usually involves expanding roads, something which increases driving, and makes other forms of transportation less useful/comfortable, thus increasing gas usage overall.

Every year, traffic congestion wastes billions of gallons of gas.

HRT is short for Hormone Replacement Therapy, a treatment many transgender people use to feel more aligned with their gender identity. It’s been proven to increase mental health, and has a low regret rate. However, it is correlated with higher mortality because trans people overall have a higher mortality rate and HRT is primarily used by trans people.

A more extreme example of the same thing would be “People on chemotherapy have a higher chance of dying from cancer than people not on chemotherapy.” It’s true, but only because people without cancer don’t tend to enter chemotherapy.

People on HRT have a significantly higher mortality rate than people not on HRT

Dihydrogen Monoxide, commonly used in laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies, is also present in Subway sandwiches