It’s the only conclusion that makes sense.

It’s Apartheid South Africa all over again. They’ve got an unlimited license to be pieces of shit because they’ve got a bunch of incredibly wealthy, racist friends willing to prop them up indefinitely.

Don’t get me wrong. After all of this high drama, it would be extremely funny if Luigi Mangione can prove he was in Rochester on the day of the shooting.

So, you’re saying for thousands of years nobody knows about Pluto. Then a handful of people suddenly start obsessively monitoring the night sky and enumerating every object they can see in a big journal. More and more of them start building bigger and bigger telescopes, blowing enormous sums of money on this seemingly pointless hobby. They’re spending the most productive years of their lives sleeping through day so they can wake up in the middle of the night and count celestial objects. And then you’re telling me Pluto caused Autism?

I think you’ve placed the cart before the horse.

Okay, but hear me out. What if we can turn thousands’ of people’s gambling addictions into some of those weird click-bait news-ish stories you see at the bottom of overly-monetized websites?

Love how we’ve fully monetized kids doing stupid shit for attention. This has been a revenue stream we’ve left untapped for far too long.

Longer engagement times on videos are rewarded with higher priority in the Feed and more advertising revenues.

These videos are responding to the economic incentives created by the social media industry. Nothing you - personally - do will change this because you - personally aren’t the target audience.

It’s tiresome to see any kind of “X% of people don’t know Y” with no citation.

You can just say anything and people will believe worse.

Also no real analysis or diagnosis or probing of the info. Just a bland “heh, people are stupid aren’t they?” doomerism.

still think the “elite” is Harris/Wal

Wait, a Midwestern governor and a Vice President aren’t “elite”? What on earth qualifies?

So should we give credit to people like Marconi and Tesla for inventing what we know today as the cell phone?

For the telephone, certainly. And for a host of other radio-based technology. You should probably include Michael Faraday and James Maxwell.

But Kupriyanovich holds the patent on wireless telephones, specifically.

https://lemmy.world/comment/14125460

Leonid Kupriyanovich, a Moscow engineer, developed a series of experimental pocket-sized radios in the 1950s and 1960s:

• In 1957, Kupriyanovich patented a wireless phone device that weighed about 3 kg.
• In 1961, he presented a portable phone that weighed 70 grams and could fit in the palm of your hand.
• Kupriyanovich’s radiotelephones shared a common base station, which we now call a cell tower.
• Kupriyanovich’s “Altay” radio-based cell network was used by emergency services and remained popular after the fall of the Soviet Union.

However, the Soviet bureaucracy prioritized using early cell phone research to develop car phones for the Soviet upper ranks instead of mass producing cell phones for the general public.

https://psmag.com/features/cellphone-revolutionary-objects/

The issue is he cartel. Telling people “I overpaid for a blood diamond” and flashing them your big rock does nothing to undermine the cartel in the long run.

Russia…

…is a cell phone?

The Soviets did invent them.

the 2035 biist™ implant

Not compatible with any 2034 or 2036 appliances. Please see your local neurosurgeon for an upgrade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

That said, part of the problem with lab-grown diamonds is that they’re not competing against a rare commodity. They’re competing against a powerful vertically integrated cartel. There isn’t any real diamond shortage, just a supply-side monopoly. There isn’t a natural high demand for diamonds, just a market saturated with aggressive advertising. There isn’t a wholesale diamond exchange judging the rocks objectively on their quality, just a series of elaborate marketing gimmicks and scammy sales goons trying to upsell you.

Diamonds have always been a racket. The one blessing of manufactured diamonds is that they’re no longer a racket putting market pressure on industrial grade diamond equipment. But the jewelry exists to separate gullible superficial status-fixated people from their money. Ethics was never part of the equation.

do you have a source on the USA troops or remotely operated equipment firing into Gaza?

Not without a security clearance.

almost nobody, and I did specify that earlier, is going to get out of their chair, fly to Israel, and pull the trigger

Why would you need to fly to Israel when you can pilot a drone bomber from Langley?

Obviously the circumstances matter and if the kid is struggling because they’re lazy or a drug addict

Trying to explain to a guy with chronic back pain that the relief he’s seeking is self-indulgent and the time he’s spending plotting the death of a CEO could be better spent building a new kind of online gambling website.

That is their money.

In 2022, 65% of people ages 65 to 74 had debt, up from 50% in 1989. In 2022, 53% of households headed by someone 75 or older had debt, compared to 32% in 1992.

In fairness, this article is pure bait. It neglected the rising cost of living for people on fixed incomes and treats these draw downs on savings as a frivolity, rather than a consequence of inflation on senior care and medical needs.

But liquidating household assets via instruments like reverse mortgages and loans against large savings accounts and pensions can mean saddling your children and grandchildren with big debts even after you’re gone.