All of those examples are things they know about through the press and social media. So either they chose not to believe the lying press, or they get the content moderated in such a way that it all sounds acceptable. The latter of course takes having sick values, but not as sick as you would expect based on the info you get about what is happening in the world.

I know this would be the top comment before looking at the comments

Yep, there’s a few episodes made after that

That’s because they’re talking about another one, where someone’s braindamage is countered by a part of their brain being ran on a commercial cloud. Of course, enshittification follows, and her husband resorts to extreme measures to pay for the increasing cost.

In Belgian Dutch, “having success” can mean being (romantically) popular, maybe the meaning is similar here

It’s totally crazy how single polls are considered newsworthy. Aggregate polling had him bottoming out at 39.3 or so, but he’s already moving back up and is over 40% again. E.g. https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin So sure, his ratings are very low right now, but it’s just random chance that a few polls were significantly below 40%.

Frist, campaign funding needs to be capped and be limited to individual donations. But then: there are as many models of democracy as there are democratic countries. It might be useful to compare them and see what model you could work towards. In research, the Nordic states almost always come out on top. So have a look at what they are doing for inspiration.

33%? Does that refer to a single poll? Now that Gallup has bent the knee, I follow the aggregated results at https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin , where he is still close to 40%. But I’ll take any hopium I can get!

Still, I get the sentiment, because for the first time it feels like his support is slipping among the core supporters too.

Do we?

Allowing them for 2 million a pop, in most cases

I tend to agree that developped countries tend to underestimate the fragility of their systems. But then there still are simple facts like if you spend 10% of your income on food, you can afford significant food price hikes. If you spend 70% of income on food, then a small rise is already lethal.

And the Canary islands too. I wonder if there’s precedent from them going extinct in mainland Africa and the naturally returning

I think you’re being overly optimistic about the dying part. Folks here are not exactly a random sample - even if many people see the enshittification of Facebook or Reddit, they will feel unable to leave. Especially for social media there’s a huge network effect - the value of the product is in the fact that “everyone” is there. Or for Google products: there are just so many different problems for the user to solve (if there’s a current solution at all!) before being able to move. So yes, the focusing on quarterly profits extracts value at the cost of everyone else, but it might not be enough to kill the product. Or at least not for quite a long time. For me the root of the problem is that we gave up on countering monopolies. This has always been a grave enemy of “efficient” capitalism, but over the last few decades we kind of stopped efforts to prevent this. It automatically leads to worse service for any client, not just in the digital sector. Worse, it leass to concentration of power in such few hands that any political system shifts into an oligarchy.

I wish the Democrats would have a clear agenda on that. A few fundamental fixes to the system to prevent another decent into lawlessness (thins like elections on a Sunday, no corporate money in politics, strong demonopolisation, especially in media,…). But I haven’t seen anything “radical” from them yet.

That’s actually a quite condescending thing to say. And also not a surprise at all.

This is low-key one of the craziest pieces of recent news to me

Which polls? No the cancelled Gallup ones for sure.

Sheer incompetence? Gives them the chance to propaganda away all the separate instances one at a time, rather than having a single huge pile of evidence once?

I don’t think untrained violent people will respond less violently when the likelihood of violence against them increases. I would say y’all need to build barricades to safeguard neighborhoods, you need masses that can only be mowed down, and need to avoid being easily singled out. Using the car you are sitting in as a barricade is incredibly dangerous because there is a track record of using vehicles as weapons.