This is a dumb comment, to millions even being allowed in school is a privilege. source

People always down vote when I point that out as well lol. Windows mobile was already moving towards icon based UIs pre iPhone, so while the UI was a definite improvement it wasn’t the revolution it’s made out to be. The iPhone 1 had no app store or 3g so was not good for emails and, back in 2007 when flash still mattered, couldn’t access most of the Internet where windows phone could. I’m pretty sure it was successful purely based on the iPods popularity, at least until the iPhone 3gs and app store came out and the iPhone became arguably a better smartphone than those that came before.

Apple was literally founded and initially successful off Steve jobs monetizing Woz’s genius. It is not at all a stretch to claim Steve Jobs never innovated a thing.

In modern apple, of course they are far more likely to buy innovative technologies and fund development or copy competitors. Why would they spend money funding R&D when they can more cheaply buy out worthwhile concepts?

You can be atheist agnostic - you don’t actively participate in religion or worship but believe it is fundamentally unknowable if there is or is not a god, you can also be theistic agnostic (though this is rare in the modern lexicon) which would be where you do participate in religion (or religious practices) but still believe it to be unanswerable. To be gnostic is to believe it is knowable (and perhaps that one does know), it too can be either theist or atheist in nature.

Atheist is literally “not theist” which would include nothing, none, agnostic (the belief that it’s impossible to determine the existence or absence of, in this context, God). It could even be argued that people who believe in God but do not participate in theistic practices (eg lapsed Catholics) are atheists. It does not require or even imply some position against religion.

Which… gets back to cable. A decade or so ago? Pretty much everything WAS in one spot for about a hundred bucks a month. Get premium cable to get most channels and then spend extra for HBO or sports or whatever. And comcast and verizon both had a lot of VODs available too. Many of which didn’t even have ads. And the rest? you DVR it and then fast forward through the ads when they show up (… which is better than hulu). REALLY like movies? Get cinemax too.

You’re projecting an American perspective, but I suspect you’re talking to an Australian.

Cable in Australia has always been considerably more expensive than in the USA, and includes considerably less content. Except for movies, it was also never available adfree. It was changing in the last 5 years when I left the country, but it wasn’t even close to competing with the likes of Netflix on price or service and I don’t think there was any ad free option (despite the dramatically higher cost to consumer) - there was a whole media oligarch conspiracy to sink the national broadband upgrade because they knew they had the market cornered with their monopoly and streaming would disrupt that.

Money isn’t an investment, it’s a currency. Of course it’s a bad investment and investing in forex is barely a better investment than crypto (purely because there’s less risk of a sovereign currency devaluing to 0).

Investing in capital, like stocks, property, equipment etc does not require someone to lose money for the capital owner to profit. If I invest in a stock, each year I’m paid a dividend based on the profits of that organisation - no losers required. I could later sell that stock at the exact price I paid for it and come away with profit from those dividends. What determines whether it’s a good or bad investment, is the ratio of profit to the capital owner compared to cost of the asset. Crypto generates 0 profit, so it has 0 value as a capital investment.

Money has value insofar as governments use it to collect tax - so long as there’s a tax obligation, there’s a mandated demand for that currency and it has some value. Between different currencies, the value is determined based upon the demand for that currency, which is essentially tied to how much business is done in that currency (eg if a country sells goods in its own currency, demand for that currency goes up and so does it’s value).

This is not the same for crypto, there are no governments collecting tax with it so it does not have induced demand. The value of crypto is 100% speculative, which is fine for something that is used as currency, but imo a terrible vehicle for investment.

The reason I asked was because I think there’s a fundamental disagreement between what it actually is that people disagree about.

Your earlier post suggests that your stance on abortion is different than that of the mainstream conservative narrative. This seems normal, based on how every vote on that issue seems to be playing out, there is a disconnect between the ideology that conservative leaders are pushing and what their supporters actually think. The exact same situation is true with affirmation action on the left - voters consistently reject it regardless of party affiliation or self identified political leaning.

I’d hear people identify CRT as being closely related to affirmative action, in that it’s an actual policy that gives out some advantage (or seeks to remove some other existing advantage, if you have a different perspective) vs being some purely academic case study more like what a other response to your response described.

Where I’m going with this is that depending on what you’re describing when you say CRT, it’s very easily possible that your position of opposing it is consistent with a clear majority of people who identify as “left”. The disagreement isn’t about ideology, but about semantics that is being exploited by a political class to drive support.

Ultimately if people want to debate you, you’re not obligated to indulge them. It’s good for discourse to put out your opinion in the way that you have (eg respectfully and without throwing barbs at everyone).

That said, some of your points are hard for me to follow.

I don’t have a perfect knowledge of exactly what’s on the left and right so please forgive me if I put something in the wrong category.

If you can’t articulate the difference, how is it that you came to identify as one? IMO “left vs right” is an intentionally vague and poorly defined concept to keep people angry and identifying with a brand, more than a coherent description of ideology.

I understand that left vs right ideally shouldn’t exist. The same goes for political parties. They do exist so here’s some of my views from both sides.

I don’t agree with critical race theory…

I hear so much about this. What does it mean? Can you give a real world example where someone is trying to implement what you oppose?

Socialism is defined by the elimination of the purely capitalist class, wherin workers own the means of production.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that capital isn’t assigned for investment based upon market demand or that “EvEryoNe gEts pAId tHE SAmE” like others claim. Socialism in a modern economy can (and likely would be) market based, it just means that shareholders would be entirely made up of employees of a company (obviously this would lead to better conditions for workers, lower wages for executives and no dividend payments to people who aren’t working). Taking a more academic definition of capitalism, it’s entirely possible to be both socialist and capitalist. Few people are arguing against capitalism in entirety.

I would say that most “MAGA” or whatever equivalent regressive movement exists anywhere is not at all conservative (MAGA supporters attempted a coupe, which is radical, the opposite of conservative), that’s just branding. In much the same way as the people’s democratic republic of Korea is not democratic, “liberals” in the USA political landscape are usually leftists (typically with a lot of illiberal positions) etc.

It isn’t that these people support capitalism (they are often ignorant of what capitalism even entails, the same way they think communism means anything they disagree with) it’s that they vaguely support existing power and class structures, though again, from what I’ve seen they can rarely coherently describe what they support and what they oppose, outside of a few tailor designed talking points like abortion or transgenderism.