And have you EVER once seen it change them?
Yes. My parents stopped being Republican in 2016 after Trump won the first time; they voted for Clinton, the first Dem they'd ever voted for, because of the hypocrisy of the Republican party as a whole.
Either fight, or don't. Your choice. But get out of the way of people that want to.
China is slowly getting better. By that I mean that the average living situation in China now is better than is was 50 years ago. Poverty and illiteracy used to be an enormous problem in China, and that's been getting significantly better (although the changes that have decreased poverty have also cause some significant social upheaval). But the first few years, with the Great Leap Forward, that was pretty rough.
On the other hand, China is only nominally communist now. I'd say that it's a single-party capitalist country at this point.
Lots of people are moving--or trying to move--because property insurance has gotten so expensive, and you can't have a mortgage without also having property insurance. But DeSantis and Trump both close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears when anyone mentions "climate change".
Mostly just pointing out the hypocrisy of them claiming that they don't censor employees, etc., when what they really mean is that you're not going to get fired for using the N-word in a conference call, or if you refuse to get vaccinated.
IMO, hypocrisy should always be pointed out.
Actual communism, classless stateless
I have such mixed feelings. Anarchism and stateless communism can, and does, work pretty well in relatively small communities. But it's hard to scale effectively. Leninism/Stalinism/Maoism/etc. is a form of communism (-ish) that solves the scaling issue, but at the cost of a deep repression of individual rights. Without some form of a state, it's incredibly hard to get a society moving in the same direction.
Both a state, and statelessness, have pitfalls.
Seems like a Rohloff hub would be even more efficient, and also give you a perfectly even step between gear ratios. ...At the cost of a few thousand dollars and about a pound of weight.
You know what would really do that? What would ACTUALLY do that?
Single-payer healthcare, AKA socialized medicine. Then you have the gov't negotiating the price for ALL drugs for EVERYONE. That is exactly how every other first-world country does it, and that's the reason why they all pay lower prices. Until 2022, with the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare wasn't allowed to negotiate, and the IRA only allows the gov't to negotiate some very high-dollar drugs.
And executive order does abso-fucking-lutely nothing. EOs can--at best--only directly affect gov't agencies. You can't use an EO to force a private corporation to give you better prices.
I'm a former body piercer (from, like, 25 years ago, but still). My suggestion would be waiting until you are no longer getting any discharge from the piercing site. After one month you should still be cleaning off dried lymph and serum from around your piercings. Until there has been nothing to clean off for at least a week straight, I would not recommend changing jewelry. While the fistula-the 'tube' of skin going through your earlobe--is forming, it's very delicate, and will be easily damaged by changing jewelry.
How long that takes is going to depend on your body; some people will heal very quickly, other very slowly. I don't recall that my ear lobes took more than a few months to fully heal. I have two piercings that I've had for decades now that still aren't fully healed, and probably never will.
As far as cleaning goes, saline or plain water and mild hand soap are your best bets. Alcohol, iodine, Hibiclens, hydrogen peroxide, etc. are all disinfectants, and will harm the piercing as it's trying to heal. (Hydrogen peroxide is no longer recommended for cleaning wounds, period.)
I don't know what that acronym means, I'm sorry.
Sure. And capitalists in the west are still doing it, only much, much more openly.
I don't think that either capitalism or communism is the answer, assuming that there's only one, and that it has to be 'pure', but I also don't know what is. I can see large, gaping pitfalls with almost every system that's been proposed and tried so far when you talk about a society of 200M+ people.
I'm fascinated by Norse culture, norms, and apparel (especially apparel, which makes sense, since I have a BFA in fashion that I don't use at all). I have Icelandic galdrastaffir that date to about the late 1700s/early 1800s that people sometimes mistake as being associated with vikings and white supremacy; they're actually symbols for a form of low magic that was largely suppressed by the Lutherans. (The viking age ended about 700 years before the first recorded instances of these galdrastaffir; they are absolutely not viking.)
Wayne LaPierre, formerly of the NRA, said it best: they're jack-booted thugs.