Completely agree, but that wasn’t the question. Progress is progress, even if it’s decades late and only a tenth of what it should be.

Medi-Cal is already available to all Californians that meet income requirements?

My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn’t include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that “classical elements” is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It’s okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That’s the whole point of this thread.

First, how dare you accuse me of looking up someone else’s claim before engaging in debate on the internet. I would never…

But seriously, they originally said people are moving to places where companies are building. Someone else responded with something along the lines of “companies are building in red-leaning areas due to poor labor protections”. Without addressing that point, the original guy said Texas is building more green energy than California. With that comment he: side stepped the claim that companies are building where there are fewer labor protections, and talked about a hyper specific example of one section of one industry where one state is creating more output (not more jobs, mind you) than another state. I responded with a claim that state-led conservative governments have not been a shining example of “how to govern in the best interests of your population”.

So now, like an idiot, I’m gonna start googling things so that I can address his point and yours. First him:

Texas generates more green energy than California. He is correct. According to Wikipedia, but according to that same data California produces a higher percentage of green energy than Texas. Neither are in the top position for green energy production, or percentage. Even if they were, green energy production is not a direct correlation to economic prosperity, corporate development, or well employed populations. Better examples might have been standard of living, median income, or new jobs created. Texas beats California in only one category (new jobs created), but neither are in the top spot in any of the three. Are there better metrics? Undoubtedly- like median income divided by cost of living, or job growth of only jobs earning 1.25x annual cost of living by state, but I’m not gonna sit down and do that math, and I wouldn’t want to make an unsubstantiated claim that doesn’t fully paint the picture.

Now, to you:

Their statement is true, but as I’ve just demonstrated, trivially so. I responded with a dismissive remark because they, as well as many others, knew their claim didn’t support their original thesis. We can sit and argue about why they were down voted and I was up voted, but you’re probably correct. Left leaning sites like Lemmy probably didn’t get more critical than “Texas bad, California good” with their voting. Or, maybe, they got down voted for attempting to lie with statistics by proving a point no one was arguing, and did an obviously bad job, which the users on this site critically analyzed and down voted accordingly. We’ll never know.

You, however, came in and disregarded my point, and attempted to discredit my argument without disproving it, based on an appeal to the audience that I’m a partisan hack without the spine to engage in the debate at hand. Ironically, in doing so, you created a comment no better than mine, based on your own position, and a lot less pithy and amusing.

So now the ball is in your court. Are you gonna do hours and hours and jobs research, determine if it’s blue or red states that create more economic prosperity for their occupants, and post your findings, or are you gonna look it up, realize I’m right, and decide to respond in a way that doesn’t actually address what I said?

Do keep in mind the conversation is blue vs red states, not California vs Texas, and it’s overall prosperity, not one or two cherry picked metrics. That was the mistake the original guy made, and if you do the same, I’m probably gonna respond with a single sentence joke dismissing the work you put in as an attempt to mislead.

Yes, because when I think of a state with robust energy infrastructure, I think of Texas…

I mean, Descartes had brain in a vat theories well before the 1980s, and Plato’s allegory of the cave is fundamentally the same. My position was that “the reason we’re talking about it again all of a sudden is because one idiot got on the podcast of another idiot and poorly explained it to the throngs of their uncritical fans”.

Musk said it in Rogan a few weeks ago, and it became a justified belief overnight. It had huge flaws in logic when he said it, and no one who is parroting the talking point today is thinking beyond “the real life Ironman says we live in the matrix”.

An ex and I used to jokingly sing “avocados from Mexico” because that was an advertising jingle, and she definitely ate avocado toast all the time. We broke up in 2013, so it had to be kinda popular before then.

The number of times I shout “your car is supposed to be smarter than that!” As a Tesla does something like, without signaling, whips around me and into oncoming traffic to pass a stopped city bus is staggering.

A coworker of mine was recently bragging about their new electric mustang and its zero to sixty time. “Have you ever gone zero to sixty?” was my only response. Of all the facts and figures, 0-60 has you to be one of the least important when buying a car.

Am I insane? I’ve been seeing avocado toast on menus for years. Granted, I was living in California at the time, but still. I feel like Dunkin donuts introduced avocado toast to their menu like three years ago.

I’m not really a “brunch” guy, but I feel like every breakfast spot I’ve been to since 2015 has done avocado toast.

I don’t think he can afford rusty nails and broken glass at this point…

Competition is the answer, though. The problem is companies ended up competing the wrong way. If I could watch “The Office” on any streaming platform, suddenly they’re all in competition to create a better platform (quicker loads, different pricing models, integration with different devices, etc). By limiting shows to only certain platforms, sure, you’re creating an easy way to differentiate between platforms, but you’re letting the competition stagnate as you just create cable TV with extra steps: minimal choice, minimal ease of use, minimal cost upside.

I was having this same conversation the other day. Have you ever seen that picture where different people involved in the creation of the video game Kirby draw the title character? Two look really good, and the rest are awkward blobs that only look like Kirby because of the power of suggestion.

Anyway, I genuinely think a team of Tesla employees (independent of Musk) were talking about building a truck, and all took turns drawing something while pulling together numbers before the pitch to Musk. As a joke, the design team mocked up the worst sketch in 3D, and Musk accidentally saw the design in the Slack chat history and demanded it.

Either that, or some sort of “have your kid draw the next Tesla” employee contest, and the design teams modeled the funniest ones as actual cars for the company newsletter. Like those companies that’ll turn your kid’s drawings into real life stuffed toys.

tried not being a grumpy godless commie?

You know you’re in Lemmy, right?

Right, but we’re not talking about gun-caused child deaths per capita, we’re talking about the leading cause of child death. If you do the actual math, it’s about 20%.

But of course you know that isn’t as compelling for your argument. Thank you for joining me for another lesson in lying with statistics.

https://usafacts.org/data-projects/child-death

I didn’t suggest Amazon run the process. I just meant “logistics infrastructure exists on a scale unimaginable in 1996”. 600 million COVID doses given out in the US might have been a better comparison. Or 7.2 billion packages by USPS in 2022. There are 708k cops in the US. That’s 2 guns recovered per cop per month to have it done in 90 days.

There is literally no argument in the world where “the logistics make it impossible” is a reasonable claim.

Likewise, “we’ll never get 290 votes” is a lazy and cowardly claim. Yes, it’ll be hard. Yes, it’ll be a fight. Yes, we’ll have some minds that will be impossible to change. But your apparent argument in defense of gun rights seems to be “aww, jeez, it seems pretty tricky” which is truly mind boggling to me.

I mean, you’re throwing out a lot of numbers claiming it is impossible, but we have logistics and resources that Australia didn’t in 1996. If Amazon can deliver 7.7 billion packages a year, and the US can count 150 million votes in a week during election season, we can figure out how to break down 400 million guns over a month, a year, or a decade. It doesn’t have to happen overnight. The “Australian plan” doesn’t have to work here, but getting guns off the street somehow does.

*Nicholasnames

Why don’t we ask him?