Force these shitters to make their products healthier for all age groups.

There’s a lot of nuance here, but in general I agree. Hank (of vlogbrothers and SciShow fame), summed this problem up brilliantly. To paraphrase: social media is engagement based, not quality based. Upvote/like content on all you want, but misinformation, propaganda, rage bait, and doom-scrolling fodder will dominate any platform where the only valued metric is eyeball time.

So, the top-down solution would be to somehow strictly define how for-profit ranked media feeds and news aggregators are allowed to operate. Unintended consequences of such a law aside, I think it’s possible to legally define a “well-behaved” social media site, but it won’t be easy.

Real question: how is anyone supposed to implement this without eliminating anonymity for those services?

A hypothetical neutral reserve currency would be a fiat-style monetary system. It would also require some kind of central bank and governance over it. It’s not impossible to achieve, but the politics around such a thing would be impressive to behold.

Also, I doubt the US would embrace either before seeing the dollar crash. It would take too much power away from the Federal Reserve, and by extension, global leverage.

For those with enough wealth, it’s a win-win. Either the dollar stays strong and you continue to trade assets/stocks/bonds accordingly, or it craters and you invest in cost-competitive labor on par with India and China.

In the latter case, while foreign goods are priced out of reach, a booming manufacturing sector will come in and “save the day” in states with poor worker protections/rights. The real magic trick is making sure you (the 1%) are in the room when the decisions are made to hold or fold before the general public knows anything about it.

You should know that there is data that backs you up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875377/#sec5-nutrients-14-00739

And also on the self-medicated front: nicotine is effective too. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8741955/

What this makes me wonder is how much of the population is self-medicated in this way but doesn’t know it?

Extreme anxiety.

For the longest time, I couldn’t recruit enough concentration to get homework or big projects done until it was this huge looming threat. Frequently, that would involve an all-nighter since it was something due the next day. Other times, it meant cranking out last night’s math assignment in home room mere minutes before it was due. It turns out that adrenaline and other stress hormones are great at shoving all the ADHD noise out of the way, however temporarily.

They’ve distanced themselves from the optics, but not the principles. They think that by not flying swastikas everywhere that somehow that’s different enough to pass.

Yes, but only for the mere moments before it becomes porridge.

It’s the sugars in those vegetables. It turns the pot into a bacterial growth medium. Given enough time, something is going to survive that environment. Maybe it’ll be probiotic, but most likely, it won’t.

where it was often necessary to render unruly guests blind.

(emphasis mine)

Blind?!

Fuck that.

I strongly dislike how the argument hinges on the very movable goalpost of “illegal” drugs. It has this awful moralizing “protect the kids while we destroy privacy”, vibe to it.

At first I though this would require an end-run on HIPAA, but all they really need to do is re-schedule a bunch of therapeutic drugs. Or ignore the FDA entirely and just enforce a ban by edict (somehow) through a different agency. I don’t think we’ve ever seen federal agencies openly disagree like that before, but I think it’s possible. Also: big pharma may have something to say about all this.

Like a lot of the nonsense coming from this cabinet, it’ll test the crap out of state’s rights.

Fine, then it’s not a political party outright, and instead a lobby. Or a trade association. Or a big bunch of very angry like-minded voters. The point is that such a group could exert leverage within the DNC coalition as a voting block. We already have these for other interest groups. DNC membership is really only useful for voting in primaries to most people anyway - it doesn’t have to signify allegiance or kow-towing to party power.

Why not both? It’s easier to force your way under and into that tent/coalition with an organized front to do the talking. A political party that has well defined goals and objectives, while speaking for a big group, is bound to be better at working within a broader coalition than what we have now.

Best I can do:

Welcome to the top of the sigmoid curve.

If you were wondering what 1999 felt like WRT to the internet, well, here we are. The Matrix was still fresh in everyone’s mind and a lot of online tech innovation kinda plateaued, followed by some “market adjustments.”

I was gonna say. It’s this exactly. Plus a nice feature of Fediverse stuff is that it can scale down to hobby levels if needed. Venture funded commercial services abhor this and will compromise all kinds of things (e.g. morals, ethics) to keep going at whatever scale they’re at.

This gives me hope. It’s like we’re all finally learning how to moderate forums in this ridiculous climate.

Perfection.

I have been sexually harassed as a man in public transportation too and while i recognize it’s not as bad for me as it is for women, because it only happened a few times, it always happened by forcing me to be smushed against a ton of people.

Let me just say: I am sorry you went through that. This is awful and indeed unacceptable. Thank you for pointing out that assault is not an entirely gendered issue, and that segregation sends everyone down a slippery slope where we fail to stop it in the first place.

Clearly. I’m also prepared to pay the handsome sum of $0. Where is my cabinet position?