twig
Yeah OK this is dumb.
Average household income in the US (I'm assuming that's where you are) are 75k before taxes, after taxes is 58k.
Rent is a national average of 2100 monthly, so, roughly 25k annually. The average american household spends 270 weekly on groceries. That's 14k annually. The average american household spends 12k on transportation annually. The average american household spends about 10k on medical costs.
So -3K is what you're left with on average.
Accounting for only necessities, the averages mean that people can't afford to exist, let alone pay a down payment on an average house. 5% of the national average of 495,000 for a house is 24,750. If we're going off of averages is about 30k more than Americans make per household per year. And again in this case, since the average leaves us with a deficit of 3k just accounting for necessities, extending the timeline for savings doesn't do any favors.
So the CEO of Loblaws (the parent company that owns most of the grocery chains/stores in Canada) has very explicitly been engaged in price-fixing of groceries.
These people are stealing from us. It is correct to steal from them.
Fwiw I fully support your reasoning that TikTok in particular should be viewed as a source of particularly insidious propaganda at this moment. I've been tracking this for years and it seems very obvious to me.
However... when you're talking about Instagram you're talking about the company that offered the tools used in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Disinformation on Meta is not new, and quite suspiciously, Meta is shutting down CrowdTangle (a tool developed by Meta for tracking disinformation) just months before the US federal election. https://www.wired.com/story/meta-kills-crucial-transparency-tool-worst-possible-time/
Fuck TikTok, and also fuck Meta. I can be happy that tiktok might be banned and also despise Meta
I legit can't imagine ever being indifferent to birds
On private roads in Canada, the mining giant Teck is starting to use autonomous transport trucks.
To me this is less frightening for public safety and more for reasons related to climate change, since this kind of industrial expansion will be less contingent on worker availability.
Mind you, the whole push toward driverless vehicles seems insanely redundant as a concept, since driverless tech in the form of high-speed rail has been around for decades in an infinitely more efficient way than could ever be offered by personal vehicles.
My main problem with strict dietary rhetoric is that it doesn't acknowledge the benefit of people eating vegan (or whatever) sometimes. Like it's a good thing to get nutrition from diverse sources and there's carryover benefit to the planet when doing this.
I'm not a vegan, but I eat a lot of plant-based meals and when I eat meat, because I eat less of it, it's generally local and ethically-raised. Militant vegans will often turn people from making decisions like this, and I think that's a shame.
I was a vegan for years. And I was careful about trying to get my nutrients. But I needed to eat so much more and I was lowkey tired all the time. When I started eating some meat again I felt ashamed of myself for not living up to the rhetoric. But it's just silly to treat this as an all or nothing type thing. A person eating beans and rice one day and a small amount of beef in a stir fry the next is... not the same as a person eating fried chicken every day, and I don't appreciate when anyone implies it is.
Yeah OK that's fair.
Jobs didn't know shit. He made a bunch of predictions, some of them right, some of them not at all right. He just took credit for other peoples' work, mostly Wozniak's. The man was every bit the piece of shit Elon is.
Worth listening to the 3-part series on Jobs from Behind the Bastards: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-156343561/