In the US, cops are legally allowed to just ignore you.

There was a case in Colorado I believe where an estranged husband kidnapped his kids from their mom. The mom went to the police but they kept brushing her off. After while the dad showed up to the station with a gun, promptly got killed, and then the kids were discovered dead in his car.

It went to the courts, and courts came back with “yeah they don’t HAVE to help you.” Of course this is overly simplified, but there’s case law in at least part of the country now that allows cops to ignore anyone at their discretion because they’re on dinner break or just not feeling it.

Also in the US, cops can tear your car up on a minor traffic stop because they “smelled” something. If they search your vehicle for whatever reason, they can decide they want to throw all you stuff out on the road, cut open your upholstery, take door panels off, etc. And if they don’t find anything? “Have a good day sir, get your shit off the road it’s a public safety hazard.” Then drive off leaving you to pick up their mess. And yes it has happened, and no not just once.

There was a case in New York where a guy was going around stabbing people. Cops posted up looking for him of course. Guy on the subway got stabbed nearly to death, a bystander tried to help the victim and took the criminal off-guard. Cops came in from the operators cab and subdued the criminal. They were watching the whole thing from the operators window and didn’t help the victim until they saw an opening created by the bystander. Literally watching a guy on his way to getting stabbed to death and only decided to intervene when they felt like it.

Also the Uvalde school shooting. Just hanging out in hallways while kids get shot, waiting for the danger to clear.

Also George Floyd but at least some amount of justice has been served there. But I’m highly skeptical it would have came to that if the case wasn’t as well-known as it was. Shit happens all the time. They have a term they love to bust out for minorities who are acting out of line. “Excited Delirium”: look it up.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. They “can” help, but totally not a requirement.

Umm… eBay was around before amazon and was largely successful. So no, he isn’t a ground-breaker, nor am I suggesting eBay was either. And yeah you can talk about differences between their platforms but my point still stands.

All of these types “stand on the shoulders of giants” as they say. Except the giant is the taxpayer money that created the fertile ground that allowed their wealth in the first place. (E.g. the internet) And when they’re sufficiently successful, they love pulling up that ladder you and I and everyone else paid for.

Private profits, public losses. Same as it ever was.

I’ll take a crack.

It doesn’t take 20 years to build a building, even a large housing project. If you’re including the planning, financing, management, and value engineering stuff - yeah it takes longer than the actual physical building, but no where near 20 years in total. Unless someone who would say as much is being disingenuos and including all time from concept to completion, combined among all individuals involved.

Also, in previous comments you said they spent a billion a year. Then, in a follow-up comment you said “if they save their money for 10 years”. So I’m wondering if you imagine building a housing project costs 10 billion?

Sounds like if the they are actually garnering a billion a year, building housing should be totally workable.

Cases of bone spurs are skyrocketing

America’s darling Jeff Bezos exploited a flaw in his book suppliers policies to gain an unfair edge on competitors in the early days of Amazon. Best business man ever: give him the key to the city and a dick-shaped rocket ship.

He also got rich daddy and rich friend money to get money for his totally original and non-derivative idea of “selling things online”. Maybe that’s where this guy went wrong? No rich daddy?

WOW, what will the incredible Elon come up with next!? Dude comes up with all the great stuff we should have invented like ~50-100 years ago.

/s

Would you apply this same logic of your own country or is it just because it’s far away and maybe you don’t care so much for brown people?

US sells/provides/uses so many armaments around the world that it’s laughable to think Russia doesn’t already have their hands on at least a vast chunk of our “tech”. Surely trying to reverse-engineer what they can, as I’m sure any country does to foreign equipment.

Usually it’s the manufacture process of tech that is the “secret sauce”.

“Stop the price-gouging…”, the unspoken bit after is “… they’re starting to catch on”

Capital is king, and Joe kneels at the throne at the end of the day.

That might be the stated intent, but it seems plain that once the leaders are in positions of power and authority, they abuse their power. This is why, as fallible as is democracy, it is superior.

Do you think that socialism/communism is not a democratic system?

The pitfalls of our current systems preclude us getting to the point of utilizing space to any meaningful extent. Better to forgo the hypothetical Star Trek romanticized fiction and just fix what we have here; then maybe we can think about that stuff.

At this stage, the mere mention of any such possibility is a distraction from the gravity of the situations we face. It’s a mere tool to keep the apple cart going, while people are literally dying from our own collective hubris.

Show me where activitypub actively tracks how much time you’ve spent looking at content, what content makes you stop scrolling, factors that contribute to you interacting in content, or any demographic information about you, etc.

Privacy is given up on the fediverse when you choose to post such information, (e.g. “I live in Ohio”) not actively harvested as a means to craft ads for your eyeballs and sell to whoever has money.

Your comment is akin to “oh you don’t like eating spoiled yogurt? And yet, you eat bananas… Curious.”

You could try to find content you enjoy on a community instead of just browsing All… It’s a big topic right now so of course you’re gonna see a lot of that when you’re scanning everything.

I’ve seen plenty of posts that are original, or are at least as original as they would be on Reddit.