Controversial opinion: The point of college is NOT to prepare students to be “work ready” if that makes sense. The point of college is to give you the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to learn, grow, and make decisions on your own as an adult professional. Whatever technical knowledge carries over to your job is just a bonus.

I’m willing to bet that it’s the latter almost every time. MAGA’s hatred for electric cars and sustainability is truly unhinged.

Okay, but it’s rarely hated for that. The hate fests always revolve around this weird assumption that this car is driven exclusively by incels and MAGA types, but that’s simply not true. Like sure its ugly and a bad product, but it’s not exactly unique in that aspect there’s a lot of other cars like that.

I never understood this weird hate boner that Reddit and Lemmy users have for cybertrucks specifically. It can’t be a moral position because they’re fine with regular Teslas, just not this one. It also can’t be about the ugly design because they’re fine with other ugly cars.

The thing is that I’ve seen a few of these out in the wild, and they’re almost always driven either by Indian tech bros or white finance bros. I’ve never seen any right wing types drive these like so many people here seem to think. In fact, the right wing types have this weird vendetta against all electric cars and they intentionally go for the gas guzzling pickup trucks. Which this hate boner even more baffling. It’s like people are mad for the sake of it.

The childless circles have this preconceived stereotype that life stops the moment you have kids for the next 20 years. What they don’t understand is that life doesn’t stop when you have kids, having kids is a part of life. Creating your own children, raising them, and watching them is in of itself a joy even if it is hard work. Parenting isn’t misery and having kids doesn’t mean you don’t have time to enjoy what you like.

Unfortunately a lot of times it’s not a joke. These people genuinely think they’re superior to parents, and a lot of them genuinely hate kids and those who chose to have them. It’s a rotten mindset to it’s core that built on hatred of preconceived stereotypes. It’s something that’s irrational in both logic and the emotions that it evokes. It’s literally a new form of bigotry.

People like you should be the default. You made your choice and you respect other people who made theirs. You understand other people have their own reasons that are different than yours. That’s normal, that’s healthy. It means you’re secure enough in the decisions you’ve made to not go around trying to justify it to yourself by pretending you’re better than other people. As much as I would like to believe that people like you are the silent majority, I’m finding that more and more difficult to believe with just how prevalent these smug childless people are becoming in society.

These virtual assistants are entirely a sham to artifically drive up stock value. This is how it works:

• Company A is big tech that invested billions of dollars building up a LLM model that nobody asked for to increase it’s stock value
• Company A incorporates its AI model into all of its products even if nobody wants them to, once again, artificially increase the stock price
• When company A runs out of places in its own products to shove the AI, it moves over to company B where it does everything in its power to convince them get the AI and incorporate it into everything
• Company B sees company A’s sham and wants in, and so it buys the AI and smears its feces on all its products to artificially inflate its own stock price.
• When Company B is exhausted, company A moves on to company C, D, E, and so on and so forth.

In the end all the companies, or more specifically, all the executives, win in the short term by making billions upon billions by artificially increasing stock prices and thus creating a bubble. They’re the only winners. Regular employees at these companies still get treated like shit, consumers are getting much worse products, and the economy is doomed to another recession due to their actions… but that won’t stop them because they know the people won’t do shit, the government is in their pockets and won’t stop them, and if a recession does really happen, they’re confident they’ll get bailed out.

Yes, the sahih hadiths explicitly state that mohammad married Alisha when she was 6 and consummated the marriage when she was 9.

This marriage was justified in the quran via a verse 65:4, which virtually all the credible islamic tafsirs agree that it justifies child marriage and pedophilia.

Pedophilia has always been a part of Christianity. Mary was 13 when she gave birth to Jesus. Joesph was in his 70s. It’s the basis of the religion. At least Christianity tries to hide it by pretending that she was virgin and her child was actually from god. That’s better than, say, islam, where mohammad just outright marries Aisha when was 6 years old and pretended that allah told him its halal.

I think two of the three sources you give don’t really pass my standard for reliable

You know what? That is fair criticism, and I acknowledge it. My sources are not as good as they should have been and that’s my fault.

I did some actual digging this time, and I did find a real academic source. The source is a 2006 academic book called Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia that written Svetlana Stephenson, who’s a Sociologist professor at the London Metropolitan University who specializes in studying Russian society.

Although it’s a good read, I’m not going to ask you to read a 170 page book for an online argument. Instead, I’ll give the relevant excerpt from page 95:

The true extent of homelessness in Soviet times remains unknown, but it has been claimed that there were about six million vagrants in the Soviet Union in 1989 (Starikov, 1991), while studies conducted in the late 1980s place the number of homeless people west of the Urals at two to two and a half million (Alexeeva, 1993). This estimate is based on the number of people detained by the militia for vagrancy and ‘parasitic way of life’. As the militia registered the person each time he or she was brought into the militia station, this statistic is very unreliable.1

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255728652_Crossing_the_Line_Vagrancy_Homelessness_and_Social_Displacement_in_Russia

If we use these figures as a rough estimate, we get an idea of the extent of homeless in the Soviet Union. The Soviet population in 1989, as per the1989 Soviet Census, was 286 million. If we use the 6 million figure for the whole country then that means that the homeless were 2.1% of the population. If we use the most conservative number here, which is the 2 million west of the Urals, that would obviously be a severe undercount as that excludes the Russian heartland, however that figure does seem to be more reliable so let’s pretend that it’s the figure for the whole country. If that’s the case then the homeless would still be around 0.7% of the population.

Now, I did my own digging for the US figures as well. According to the Alliance Housing Council, the homeless population in 1988 was somewhere between 1.3 and 2 million. The US population as per the 1990 census was 248.7 million. That means that the homeless make up 0.5%-0.8% of the population at the time. Keep in mind this figures come from an extrapolation of official figures that came out in 1984, and they made the assumption that the homeless population would grow 20% every year. So this is likely an over count, but I still think it’s more accurate than the official figures.

Source: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/1092/chapter/2#3

So going by these figures, I think we can safely assume that the Soviet Union not only had a homelessness problem, but it had both a higher rate and a higher number than the US at the time.

These figures I am more likely to trust, because the research climate for social sciences in the US was a bit freeer than in the USSR.

A bit is really understating it. There was an absolute canyon in the levels of freedom found in the US vs the Soviet Union. At the time the US was arguably the freest country in the world while the USSR was the least free. The USSR had no freedom of the press, speech, expression, assembly, information, nothing. The one and only source of data was the government, and they refused to report the actual numbers because they feared them. The fact that we’re in the dark about it now should be proof that such a gap was substantial.

That’s dumbest argument imaginable. Drugs are considered illegal, drug addicts access to free rehab in most countries… does that mean nobody uses drugs? Because that’s your argument. The Soviet Union had homelessness. Just because they made it illegal, that didn’t make the problem magically go away, and just because they denied it that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Since the Soviet Union pretended that homelessness didn’t exist, they never officially published figures on it, however most experts both today and back then agreed that the homeless population was in the hundreds of thousands. Most conservative estimates put the figure at around 150k-200k, while some put the figures as high as 2 million.

The Soviet Population was 266 million in 1980 and 286 million in 1989. In both cases, if we go around the absolutely most conservative estimates of 150k, that’s around 0.05% of the population.

https://www.rbth.com/history/332657-homeless-people-ussr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Soviet_census https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/ehome.html

I see this meme getting reposted here every week, and it’s the same nonsense every time. The fact that the people in the Soviet Union had both depressing architecture and homelessness renders the point in the meme both false and meaningless.

People here understand that the Soviet Union had a homeless population too, right? They actually had a higher rate than the US in the 1980s.