Honestly, I understand your point here, but it makes me think about how strong my urge is to be polite and how it's caused me to backtrack in arguments at times I really shouldn't have. Politeness is a very strong and important virtue, it's a good thing, but they do use it as a weapon against us far too often.
I was just thinking... If I was going to plan a sight seeing vacation, I'd much rather go see Mar-a-lago than the white house right now. It means a lot more to me at the moment. I don't know if it's even possible, but it's just odd to realize how my feelings have changed when it comes to that. I apologize, I know there's a lot of important history in the White House, but the way I feel is the way I feel right now.
I do like that here they separate and show total upvotes and total downvotes, though. I'm still confused about what a short is at all, tbh. Seems like a bet that the stock will go down. They, somehow, make money if it goes down, and lose money if it goes up, and if it goes up big, they're fucked. The rest is still soupy to me. I do get the short squeeze thing overall, though, and it seems more about hitting who is shorting the stock than the stock itself.
It's the inter-net. Sadly, the whole thing was built from the ground up as a means to control large numbers of people. It's built into the system. Losing ICANN was devastating. We aren't winning some of these fights, because we can't. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. That's why public opinion is so important, but they also control the mass media. It needs to be fixed, but those were - probably - 2nd term goals.
Trumps biggest mistake. He needed to surround himself with frens, he surrounded himself with enemies. Maybe it's a decent business strategy, but in politics I think it didn't go well. You can't appease politicians to win them to your side and keep them there.
Nice idea, but at the same time... Not sure. I mean, when something becomes funded by a third party, they are required to do things to keep that funding. Which leads to bias. I get the argument that maintaining the bias in our favor is a good thing, but it never seems to work out that way long term. Free market is the best way, the problem is that we have government funded alternatives that don't compete fairly.
I would be in favor of, for example, giving parents money to pay for their child to go to school, instead of giving money directly to the schools. Then, competitive schools could set themselves up and charge what they should charge, and parents could choose which school they spend that government school money on. Or even a voucher. Something like that.