I don’t need to guess. I know from having been to China and having talked to people.

It’s mostly a combination of 3 things:

1. Tons of infrastructure. If you decide to start manufacturing some random thing you can easily get all the stuff you need to get started.
2. Regulations are generally very favorable to small startups and businesses. This is partly why so much of the stuff on Temu is crap.
3. A huge population. That’s the main source of ultra cheap labor. Farmers in rural China can still make as little as $1.90 per day. All a factory owner needs to offer is more than that and they’ll have a line of applicants.

The thing is that it’s not PURE crap.

It’s kind of like going to a flea market. Most of it is crap and you can still find some decent and good stuff that’s way cheaper than it should be.

I think a lot of this is that Republicans used to follow what used to be the recommendations of the most prominent main-stream economists. We can judge that as foolish in hindsight, but, “let the economics experts handle the economy” is a fairly reasonable policy.

2 big things changed. Republicans push more and more policies that economists consider dumb and economists have updated their models and recommendations based on new research. Even those old free market economists were not fans of tariffs and trade wars. It’s pretty hard to find an actual economist (like with a PhD from a respected econ school) who thinks wanton deregulation is a good idea.

At the same time, Democrats still hold on to a few ideas that economists all agree are dumb. There’s tons of evidence that things like rent control and home purchase credits make housing problems worse.

Democrats tend to support better economic policies than Republicans do but they support enough bad ones that it’s easy for Republicans to argue that the old status quo is correct.

That was also part of Trump’s platform. You can generally take whatever bad thing is happening at the moment and blame it on whoever is in charge in the moment. The only time that doesn’t work is when most people agree that things are going well.

I sincerely hope that Democrats do care.

Like it or not, MAGA can currently take that attitude. They control the SC, both chambers of Congress, and the White House. If they decide to say, “Fsck it. We’ll ignore the Demorcrats,” they’ll still have all the process in place to enact their agenda.

MAGA doesn’t need to analyze what went wrong during the election. They got everything they wanted.

For at least the next 2 years, Democrats will be able to do nothing that Republicans don’t approve of. The law says that they get to set the standards.

If Democrats want any chance of checking that power or reversing it at the next election, we are the ones who need to adapt.

There’s an “ancient Chinese saying”, “卧 薪 尝 胆”. You don’t do it because it’s fun or because you obliged to, you do it so you can win next time.

That would be true if every one of those answers didn’t also strongly support AOC, Democrats, or Bernie.

That’s the whole point of this exercise. A bunch of deep red voters citing Fox is expected and doesn’t tell us anything new. When a bunch of deep vlue voters do that, something is going on.

We normally expect AOC and Bernie supporters to be very Blue. If Fox is resonating with those voters we should really be asking ourselves, “Why?”
Why is it that some Democrats hear Fox News and immediately judge them as naked propaganda while other Democrats give them consideration?

edit: grammar

Women’s Suffrage (and additional rights) and the Civil Rights movement both had many successes. They also used many tactics and strategies besides protests and that makes it hard to attribute their success to protests. That’s why I looked at the 10 largest protests in the US on Wikipedia. There’s obviously some subjectivity to which protests are the most salient but it’s fair to assume that a large number of those should actually be the most important protests. The fact that we didn’t see progress as a response to any of the biggest protests suggests that they don’t have much of an impact.

I view the Firefly situation a bit differently too. We actually wanted them to bring Firefly back as a show. As near as I can tell Joss made the movie (which I agree was and still is awesome) because he loved the story and wanted to finish it. He may have been uplifted by the support of the fans but he didn’t give in to anyone’s demands. Fans kept badgering him to pick the series up after the movie and argued that the success of the movie proved that the series would make money but he told us that wasn’t possible because too many of the actors where on other projects. I have to admit that Summer Glau made a pretty good terminator.

Ghandi is an interesting case. He also used many tactics and strategies beyond protest and he was dealing with a very different situation. Their oppressor was thousands of miles away and got a bit tied up with bigger problems. There is also a strong academic consensus that he likely delayed Indian independence.

It’s cute that you can call me names.

Can you also articulate positive changes that have resulted from the 10 biggest protest?

The sexual revolution was the product of many changes. Cheap and effective ontraception was one of them, legal abortion was not. Roe v Wade wasn’t until after the sexual revolution had already happened. Ante hoc ergo non propter hoc.

Maybe the point of the protest is to bring awareness to the public?

Maybe. How useful is “awareness”?

When I look at the biggest protests in the US there’s plenty of awareness about around all the biggest protests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstrations_in_the_United_States_by_size

Going down that list, it’s hard to find evidence that the awareness got us anywhere.

1. George Floyd - We keep saying his name. Has there been any change in police violence or accountability?
2. Earth day - We’ve been talking about this forever and we keep breaking records on extreme weather events.
3. 2017 Women’s March - We just elected the chief pussy grabber.
4. March for Our Lives - Guns are still everywhere.
5. 2018 Women’s March - See number 3.
6. RickyRenunicia - I have to pass on this one. I have no idea what the state of corruption in PR is.
7. Great American Boycott - Democrats switched to agreeing with Republicans on immigration.
8. LGB - You can reasonably argue that sexuality related rights have improved. It’s not clear that this protest was a particular catalyst for that. If we want to pin things on a single event, Stonewall probably had a bigger impact.
9. Anti Nuclear - More countries than ever believe they need nukes to survive. We’re now unironically talking about the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
10. Million Man March - See number 1

I could go on, but the track record for the 10 biggest protests isn’t great.

When we swap out sex ed for abstinence only we don’t get less sex. We get a surge in teen pregnancies.

I’m sure that a few, very dedicated, women are doing this.

It’s unlikely to be widespread. Sex is one of the most powerful drives humans have. We generally have a terrible track record of trying to convince people to avoid or even delay sex. Even when people believe that their eternal soul is on the line they keep having sex. That’s exactly why all the “abstinence only” policies fails so spectacularly.

There are cases where voluntarily giving up something important has led to change. Hunger strikes are the prime example of this. They can have the affect of drawing attention to a matter and raising sympathy.

I just read that law and it’s far from clear that it requires any aid to Israel at all.

Section 1 just defines the title.
Section 2 provides a statement of findings.
Section 3 covers US policy towards Israel. This is the closest I could find to something requiring assistance. Policy statements don’t bind the president. At best they serve as guidelines for future legislation.
Section 4 talks about actively defending Israel but brackets the whole thing in “should”. That has a specific legal definition that includes, “but it’s not required.”
Section 5 simply extends some deadlines that were going to expire.
Section 6 mandates some reports.
Section 7 defines terms.

The language in the Leahy Act is considerably stronger and more explicit. “No assistance shall be furnished under this chapter…”

Fun fact, there’s a 2008

What law is that? I keep hearing about it but I can’t find that law.

I did find several that prohibit the US from providing aid to countries that commit human rights violations but nothing that requires the US to give anyone any military hardware.

Floyd baby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox735RShneA

In other news, exponents make things big.

Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000

Were you thinking of the “fairness doctrine”?

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-doctrine

It happens regularly.

I’d also add that I find everyday stories from real people to be vastly more engaging that the completely unbelievable stories I see on TV.

Do you consider yourself these people’s friend?
If you’re completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.

But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it’s not zero.

I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War