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.

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

Turns out that hardboiled detective was the woman’s son this whole time.

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

So crazy that this guy built his career on being Matt Damon adjacent.

The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century?

A bit more than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States

Might as well have been disease.

Animal husbandry is the root cause of a host of common diseases.

And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today.

Traveling by foot across the wilderness into a civilization you know nothing about - not the language nor the customs nor anyone eager to accept you as a foreign migrant?

Trivial, really. They just used Egypt GPS.

It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.

Best example, cars. You cannot buy a good car anymore.

India and China produce whole fleets of “dumb” cars. Tata Motors is at the forefront of these dirt cheap little modular vehicles. Low cost, cheap to repair, very ergonomic. Virtually impossible to get in the US, though.

The joke of American capitalism is that it needs these enormous trade firewalls to keep rival industrialized nations from bankrupting their domestic industry.

Emerson 40" is pretty good.

You can still buy new dumb appliances in 2026.

I’ve seen this claim on and off. I had trouble finding any in the wild the last time I went TV shopping. The handful of “dumb” models I have found (Emerson still has models with built in DVD players, ffs!) tend to be on the smaller side and poorer quality. I’ve got a living room that would kinda dwarf a 40" set. Shy of going to a projector system (which… eh, mounting those things can be a real pain and all the new ones are also riddled with AI) I was stuck with different flavors of “Smart” TV for anything 60"+

Ended up just wiring my computer to the HDMI and using the PC/web browser as my primary interface for watching anything. That’s side-skirted a lot of the AI annoyances. But it’s not perfect.

Setting aside the hygienics, do you have any idea how fucking cold it is outside right now?

“This toilet has a $50/mo subscription to Toilet+ which provides you with a host of analytic services that are accessible through an app on your phone, if you have an iPhone 18 Pro or higher or an Android Prime Plus Ultra.”

“I don’t have those phones and I don’t really need these services. Can I just not purchase the subscription?”

“Yeah, sure. But then the toilet won’t flush.”

Excuse me, that was it