Imagine a president who found corruption in his administration and decided “corrupt officials aren’t useful, they should be removed”.

I believe this is how the Klan operated, back in the day

Damn, setting aside the China Bad hysteria, this is pretty big news

China expels second-highest ranking general, 8 others over corruption

According to the ministry, the Central Military Commission (CMC) Discipline Inspection Commission, the PLA’s top anti-corruption body, investigated the officers and found they had violated Party rules and were suspected of serious crimes involving large financial misconduct. The offences were described as having an “extremely serious nature and egregious impact.”

Imagine living in a country where top officials actually get investigated and removed for wrongdoing.

Must be nice.

Plenty of 3rd spaces exist in Texas. You just have to pay to play. The hyper-capitalist dream is alive in the Lone Star State.

I always imagined thats why there were so many drunk people out and about. Because the only habitable place outside of homes were bars if you didn’t have a gym membership.

I gotta wonder how much of the decline of alcoholism in the subsequent generations boils down to affordability.

Gym memberships are way cheaper than bar tabs.

Sure. How do you think I’ve been watching it to begin with?

But ffs, why is it so hard for Apple to figure out how to get those numbers up? Every other company knows how to bundle their shitty products. You’d think they would know how to bundle something halfway decent.

Tiktok’s user base is quite large

875 million to over 950 million daily active users (DAU) globally as of Jan 2026.

It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.

TikTok was the better alternative. That’s half the joke. As soon as it caught on, the plutocrats stepped in and seized control

Not unlike how Facebook bought out and gutted Instagram or JP Morgan took over Reddit and cleaned out all the lefties before taking it public.

That’s before you get into the marketing budget that social media needs to build the kind of massive userbase you’re asking for.

How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely

In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.

The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!

Finally going to separate Utah and Arizona with a hard border.

Not sure how I feel about Nevada 2, though.

Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold.

You also trusted that the supply of gold would not suddenly increase and devalue gold as a commodity. Or that demand for the specie doesn’t collapse because… let’s say, hypothetically, the world’s largest economy stops keeping it as a reserve currency.

The former happened in the second half of the 16th century, in an event known as the Price Revolution.

The latter was part of the Nixon Shock, following the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold.

Incidentally, Nixon exiting the Gold Standard could more rightly be pinned on Charles DeGaulle.

In February 1965, French president Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to redeem U.S. dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. By 1966, non-U.S. central banks held $14 billion in U.S. dollars, while the United States had only $13.2 billion in gold reserves, of which only $3.2 billion was available to cover foreign holdings.

In March 1968, the London Gold Pool collapsed.

In May 1971, West Germany left the Bretton Woods system, unwilling to sell further Deutschmarks for U.S. dollars.[10] In the following three months, the U.S. dollar dropped 7.5% against the Deutschmark, and other nations began to demand redemption of their U.S. dollars for gold.[10] On August 5, 1971, the United States Congress released a report recommending devaluation of the dollar in an effort to protect their currency against “foreign price-gougers”.[10] Also in August, French president Georges Pompidou sent a battleship to New York City to retrieve French gold deposits.[11] On August 9, 1971, as the dollar dropped in value against European currencies, Switzerland left the Bretton Woods system.[10] Pressure intensified on the United States to leave the Bretton Woods system. On August 11, Britain requested $3 billion in gold be moved from Fort Knox to the Federal Reserve in New York.[11] As Paul Volcker, then Undersecretary of the United States Department of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, later put it:

Will they be sued out of existence after their meat substitute mushroom burger left in the sun for too long comes alive an eats 9 customers and and a minivan?

Idk if I’m going to pick a fight with a restaurant chain that can harness that kind of firepower.

It’s not the same principle because it’s always one Big Mac.

Big Macs used to sell for $.50 and now they sell for $8. So one could argue the coins are actually a hedge against inflation.

Incidentally, US Forever Stamps serve a similar purpose.

our money has no value anymore since it was taken off the gold standard

Our money has value because it can be redeemed to pay down US-based debts, particularly tax debts. This is - and has always been - the real value of any currency. Go ask David Graeber for the details. But the TL;DR; is that we use coinage as a form of extortion. “You need to give us stuff to get coins which you can then pay us to avoid the threat of state violence.” Roman soldiers working overseas were paid in coins, while they were charged with collecting these coins as a tax, in order to integrate conquered economies into the Roman Empire. You had to provide goods/services to the soldiers so they could take them off you every taxation period.

Literally, money is a protection racket.

Also, who the fuck wants to eat a Big Mac? That shit’s disgusting.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in December, Trump said within a year he wants interest rates to be “1% and maybe lower than that.”

So you’re not far off.

-13°C weather won’t stop me. I actually like the cold.

They’ve got a bunch of genuinely good content, which is a bit ironic given their dismal subscription numbers.

Apple TV runs circles around Netflix, HBO, and Hulu. But they’ve got a meager 3% of the streaming market share. It’s infuriating.

So we’ve confirmed exactly one person has seen the movie.

Dropping the rate a quarter point isn’t going to produce run away inflation.

But climate change drying up the Colorado River and decimating the US West’s agricultural industry might.

Love to demolish 30 years of accrued institutional knowledge to save a few bucks at a multi-trillion dollar company.

do you have any idea how fucking cold hot is is outside right now?