merc

Getting out appropriately would have been reversing to the place where it entered the flex-posted area, not simply smashing through them.

Remove Teslas from that and now what are the stats?

As usual, anything Musk touches turns to shit, including self-driving cars.

We used to have that adage about how anonymity made people worse on the internet

Many of us have been saying that's untrue ever since people started claiming it was real.

All you need to do is go to Facebook to see people being horrible under their own names.

If you compare it with Gold

Which you shouldn't do because gold is a very volatile commodity. It went down from 2012 to 2018, then up from 2018 to 2024, then it went up extremely quickly since 2024. Gold is just something people put money in based on FOMO, or based on fears of stock market crashes, or based on other "vibes".

In addition, a lot of the world's gold is simply held in the form of jewelry in India. It's not even used as a direct "investment", it's just a pretty, shiny metal.

the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold [Standard]

You'll never guess why that happened... although if you look at the name of the standard, it might give you a clue.

which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s

In the US. You know, essentially the only industrialized country that escaped from WWII with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, and was, as a result, supplying the entire world while everyone else was rebuilding.

The UK was another victor in WWII along with the US, but their workers weren't living in luxury. Rationing of meat ended in 1954 in the UK, nearly 10 years after the war. If you want to know what it was like in the UK in the post-war period, just look at stories of the early lives of the members of the Beatles.

In the US, the post war period not only followed the war, but also the great depression. The great depression ended with the New Deal, which shifted a lot of power from the rich to the workers. Workers from 1945 to the 1970s or so greatly benefited from those policies.

So, this 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker's salary wasn't typical. It was probably the best off that workers were in the world since European workers who survived the black plague -- and all it took was a devastating world war that destroyed the infrastructure of most of the world's developed countries, other than the USA, plus a devastating depression lasting a decade that forced the government to institute programs that gave workers benefits.

(Oh yeah, and it only applied to white Americans.)

It does provide nearly unlimited access to knowledge. But, the Internet user needs to bring their own ability distinguish knowledge from strongly held ignorant opinions.

If you're an eye surgeon you can probably use the Internet to find out the newest techniques in eye surgery. You probably have enough knowledge of your own to spot fraudulent things, and to know where the real information can be found and how it can be vetted. OTOH, if you're an eye surgeon, you might know nothing about farming, so you might not be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you're not careful you might come away believing some crazy farming-related conspiracies.

In the past there were gatekeepers. That sounds like a bad thing. In some ways it was. But, at least Walter Cronkite wasn't allowed to go on a rant about the chemicals turning the frogs gay.

You ate at the onion.

Yes, then (as expected) the companies passed on the cost to their customers.

If there were a competitive marketplace, retailers would be offering refunds to their customers or putting on huge deals so that annoyed customers didn't switch to a rival retailer.

But, when Amazon has some massive chunk of the market, what happens if they piss off a customer? What are they going to do, go to the mall? The mall closed a long time ago.

Blondies? Pound cakes? Cheesecakes? Honestly, none of those appeal to me. They all seem like such bland treats.

Vanilla is a good flavour enhancer. I love it as an addition to something like a chocolate mousse or an egg nog. But, on its own it's as exciting as white rice, or spaghetti without sauce.

The disease caused the decease.

Oof. The first few seasons were good, but it was pretty weak long before it hit season 8, let alone its final season 11.

If it takes multiple billions of dollars to create a product that is useful for a niche group of pen and paper RPG players, that product is probably not going to succeed.

But, also, if Facebook didn't have such an unassailable monopoly on social networking, small, focused social networks that targeted a niche group of people might have a chance of surviving.