The worst thing ever to happen to Nate silver was guessing a few elections. I suspect he wanders around his house in a wizard cloak making predictions

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

At least what worked for me was a simple thought exercise.

If what I’m experiencing is so unbearable I’d rather be dead, what have I got to lose trying to get some help. If it doesn’t work I can still kill myself, it’s not like trying to get help and failing would make me immortal.

Silly as it sounds, when I thought about it this way the idea of getting help didn’t seem so scary anymore.

Read this next thing with the sincerity and care I intend it to be delivered with, seek mental health services.

For years I thought it was just normal to constantly be worried about things. To be worried about them to the point of finding solace in the idea that I could just kill myself if too many bad things happen.

Luckily the people around me cared about me enough to have me get some help. I have an anxiety disorder, now I have the support I need and am properly managing it and feel so much better.

It’s hard, when you are feeling this way it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was told for years to do something about it, but that’s for crazy people, I only need help if there’s really a problem but I’m normal, I don’t have problems. All that time wasted because I didn’t want to admit I needed help.

Everyone’s path is different, everyone’s results are different, but there are helpers out there. You might get a lot of advice, well meaning and even helpful advice, but the best thing you can do is talk to a professional.

Take care

All six of his supporters await the news

This old video by thoughtslime perfectly explains this and when I saw it years ago it really opened my eyes to what bothered me about your average liberal.

https://youtu.be/dsasDeI0VRg

I’ve always thought it was so weird how Iran will only go to war after c/News approves, but they have a revenge flag so who am I to question their methods

It is interesting to consider that in the vastness of space that something like a single restaurant might be viewed similarly to a glass of water in the US.

Sure the government could come in and declare eminent domain on my glass of water, but it’s value is so low as to be effectively a nonissue.

In a future where there are tons of planets and tons of replicators, perhaps the idea of personal property has just been extended to include things like a restaurant or a vineyard.

If you use the definition that private property is the private ownership over the means of production, it could be reasoned that something like Sisko’s is not necessarily a means of production but more akin to personal property. If someone on earth wants some creole food they can use any number of replicators to produce and enjoy that. Sisko’s and Picard’s vineyard might be similar to how we would look upon historical preservation. Some people could choose to spend their lives making things the old fashioned way because they enjoy it and people enjoy experiencing it.

The economy of Star Trek is interesting, but I think there are plenty of times when the utility of storytelling ends up mucking with the clarity of the message. One example I was just thinking about the other day was the introduction of the borg queen.

I get why it’s nice for there to be a borg queen, she can embody a more nuanced thinking part of the borg collective and the audience can much more readily understand the idea of a queen ruling over her subjects (whether that be like the rulers of humanity or like the queen bee as they sometimes say). But it also kind of sucks. The borg are such a fascinating species, a collective hive mind acting to attain perfection, more a force of nature than any of the other species we encounter.

While the borg queen is a compelling character and is acted wonderfully, I can’t feel a bit sad that it’s so normal and pedestrian. It turns the borg from this almost incomprehensible force into something so regular, a bunch of drones carrying out the will of the queen. While expedient to the storytelling, I like the idea of what the borg are pre-borg-queen more than what they become post-borg-queen.

I think with the economy a similar thing happens in storylines. There are many scenes that make it clear that humanity doesn’t have money anymore, but when you are telling a story and you want to have some stakes and obstacles, money is soooooo useful. Money makes it trivial to have an obstacle, or shit we need some latinum. Money makes it trivial to introduce stakes.

Star Trek had to try to thread this needle of presenting a post scarcity society while also making a dramatic engaging show for people living in a capitalist society. Scarcity is at the heart of a lot of drama, if you can just replicate your way out of every problem it’s not a very interesting show. It also leads to a thing that once you spot it’s hard not to spot, so much of the tension is aided by the “oh no we can’t replicate that” McGuffin. It plays out in a lot of episodes because otherwise every episode would be 5 minutes of “there’s an outbreak of tallarian flu on Corso V, we emailed them the recipe for the medicine and told them to replicate it.” Then the credits roll.

Privatizing our space program was a great idea, everything neoliberalism touches turns to gold!

Fucking morons

And once everyone is gay and there are no more children the wealthy elites… well they don’t really know why they don’t want anymore children. Some of them mutter things about stupid sexy children… oh no…

I spent about 2 decades trying. The idea that if you offer this up then you’ll get some groundswell of support just isn’t realistic in America.

We are a nation of people sold hyperindividualism and the goodness of capitalism and greed from birth. People routinely vote against their own interests in every forum imaginable. I tried to organize the people I work with to demand a pittance of compensation for what amounts to mandatory uncompensated work and the overwhelming reply was people going “I don’t know, it’s not so bad, I don’t want to rock the boat”

America is a nation where if you stay in the good graces of the capitalists you can have a somewhat nice life and if you don’t then enjoy the fucking gutter. In the late stage capitalism the exploitation and propaganda is so all consuming that most people spend the vast majority of their hours slaving away and then with what little time they have left they numb themselves with social media, booze, and drugs. The capitalists designed a system to break people’s spirits, to convince them they could do nothing to change them, and instill in their hearts the idea that maintaining it is law & order and these maniacs fucking crave that like none other.

In the absence of being able to make any meaningful change to the conditions they find themselves in they dedicate themselves to othering and hating the others, blaming them for their lousy lot in life because the capital class tells them to. They grab for whatever semblance of control they can find, becoming petty dictators at work and home and their HOA boards. They turn their rage at a system that crushes their dreams on the service workers around them.

This is not a land of solidarity.

If you think that a movement would be some clarion call that would awake these people from their slumber and suddenly the ranks would swell with people ready to right the injustices they suffer. I’ve got some bad fucking news for you. You can ask these fucking morons if it’s fair that they spend all day making the products, delivering the products, generating all the value, and the ceo gets paid more in that day then they will make in a year and they stare back at you and earnestly say “yes, his skill set is in greater demand”

The capital class played the long game, they crushed every speck of solidarity, they filled every bit of media and education with their propaganda, they have waged a half century long project to break the people and they have succeeded.

This is not to say that the ship can’t be turned, but it won’t happen overnight. It is naive to think that some well articulated alternative can undo multiple generations of intensive indoctrination. This is what defeat in a class war looks like, we might be able to make it out of this, but it won’t be easy.

Don’t mess with Texas pew pew pew

Business douche privatizes energy system and leaves people sweltering after a tropical storm

Ok I guess you can mess with Texas now, as long as you ain’t the gubmint

It will shock Alex Cole to find out “BUT HER EMAILS” led to electoral defeat. Fucking Dems love losing it seems

She is truly awful, her take in her own field is extremely dumb but it’s her takes in other fields that are even worse. Like a lot of science YouTubers she doesn’t stay in her lane, she thinks the fact someone gave her a phd for her ridiculous idea of superdeterminism gives her license to opine about other field she knows fuck all about.

If you can find any video of hers from a field you have first hand knowledge about her takes are wrong, and not just wrong, but that special kind of wrong where you completely misunderstand the basics of something and then extrapolate out from there the stupidest fucking conclusions imaginable.

What benefits? Even if they put her to the top of the ticket she’ll just lose, she’s somehow even more unpopular.

Damn this cash4gold place is lit af, economy must be doing great - super smart liberals

It gives you the defaults for the body type and then allows you to change them if desired. I can’t imagine getting worked up over it, in like a billion hours of gameplay there’s 5 seconds easily missed where they acknowledge pronouns exist, the horror.