That seems high, because I think the literacy rate today is lower. I guess it depends on how you define literacy, though.

Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1)

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

No one’s going to rally around creepy Mike Johnson’s corpse. No one cares about the guy Luigi (allegedly) shot.

A long time ago I read some post that stuck with me.

It said that some people love their country the way a child loves their parent. They’re perfect and smart and strong and can beat up your parent. They don’t have any flaws, and can do no wrong. They’re the best ever.

Other people love their country the way an adult loves a peer. They see the potential, the good, but also the flaws. They want what’s best for both of them, even if it’s uncomfortable and difficult. And ultimately, if the relationship becomes abusive, they won’t just take it.

Conservatives often are the first one, but I think they are generally more immature. Fearful, tribal, angry.

Loving your country in the second way can be okay, I think. It can be a vehicle for improvement. People have wanted to improve their living spaces and communities for longer than we’ve had recorded history. It doesn’t have to be toxic or zero-sum.

This is like the SS in 1920s germany, right?

The right would immediately use that to disenfranchise blacks, queers, and women. “You need a degree from an accredited college to vote, and coincidentally women only schools don’t count, nor do historically black ones”

We can’t just kill all the conservatives but if you could somehow prevent them from accessing power, we’d be better off.

Fine needs to be much bigger. All the decision makers that approved it need to be removed and barred from working in the industry

That’s one of the boxes we could use, but I think it hasn’t worked. There’s 2 more, and I don’t have a lot of faith in the jury box in this system.

Technically correct, the best kind of correct

That’s such a non sequitur I don’t even know what you’re trying to communicate

Sometimes I wonder about if the US had stayed a colony longer. Slavery probably would have ended sooner. Probably have a better government structure.

If calculators routinely gave the wrong answer this would be more compelling.

Nitpick: It’s probably not the devs so much as the capitalist owners and management collaborators. I’d guess most of the people making the games would be happy to have someone play their game at all. It’s not like they typically get a cut of the profits (again: capitalism)

People are emotional creatures.

Someone was joking in another thread, but maybe we should seriously consider just taking socialism and calling it, like, americanism.

I’m pretty sure you could really make a dent in the housing crisis, transit problems, food insecurity, any other real life problem of your choosing, with that kind of money. The fact that they blew it on “the metaverse” should be a crime

He probably read Snow Crash (or maybe an AI summary, because he is a soulless husk) and thought it was super cool. It’s a dystopia. The book is not aspirational.

Who would vote for musk? I thought conservatives hated him because he said mean things about trump. Most everyone else hates him for a variety of reasons (is a billionaire, is a nazi, whatever the fuck doge was). Does he still have fans? That vote? In the US?

It’s another manifestation of separate rules for the rich and everyone else.

I’ve been happy with Bandcamp, though they got sold so they’re no longer independent.

But the model is you can stream for free however many times the artist has it set to, and then you’re expected to buy it. Once you buy it, its yours DRM-free forever.

So if you buy an album or two a month, it costs similar to a subscription but you build up a library. After a while, you might find there are months you don’t buy anything, but just listen to what you already bought.

How am I ignoring that conversation is two way? I specifically mentioned it’s a bad job when one person engages and the other half-asses it with one word responses.

I don’t see what small talk being off-putting has to do with anything. I don’t know if I even consider talking about your interests small talk, but okay. How else do you expect it to work?

And agian, what are government moderators?

Oh, sorry. I meant the moderators of lemmy.world. If you say anything too spicy, your comment gets removed