It’s not about the production cost, its about the opportunity cost.

A quick google search tells me a national ad costs $200k-$1m for a 30s slot. That means 5 seconds of screen time costs $30k-$150k.

When I started dealing drugs, I did it because my friends and I were smoking trash weed and we wanted to secure a good supply of quality product. It worked out well. My car was clean. I didn’t sell much.

A few years later when I turned 23 I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. My life fell apart, I was bedridden, I went through a medical bankruptcy. That is when I began to deal drugs to survive. For a few years I paid my bills by selling weed, ecstasy, adderall, mushrooms, acid from the bed where I spent 95% of my time. My car was dirty.

Was I just a regular person? I dont know

It’s a broad generalization, I’m not suggesting some new law of nature.

I never said anything at all about Afghanistan.

You posted a meme about the current leadership of Afghanistan.

I think it’s terrible the state if affairs.

Then why would you post a meme smugly extolling the virtues of the current state of affairs? You can’t have it both ways.

I think you have to ask: why are people dealing drugs?

Some people sell drugs because they are desperate. These people are dealing with extreme poverty, trauma, mental and physical health issues, etc. Their cars are messy.

Other people sell drugs because of the economic opportunity. In my experience, these people pride themselves on cleanliness, timeliness, and customer service. They have clean cars.

I find this meme to be absolutely vile.

The good people of Afghanistan have been under violent US occupation for decades, and as their final move, the US looted the central banking reserves.

This effectively drained the savings of everyday Afghanis. They no longer have access to their bank accounts. The US stole all the money.

I often wonder, would the good people of Afghanistan be able to overthrow the evil leadership of the Taliban? I wish they could, but overthrowing the Taliban is much less likely when the US has left you in a state of devastation, poverty, and famine.

Then those same western chauvinists can post memes like this, delighting in the Afghan people’s suffering after causing so much of it. Disgusting.

Hiding and denying the anti-Biden news is what got us to this point.

Compare the polls now to 4 years ago: Biden is 10-15% behind where he was when he (barely) won. To win now, Biden needs a miracle.

Our only hope of stopping Trump is to replace Biden ASAP.

Saying “maybe people are the problem” is reductive and unhelpful. But I agree with you broadly, religion is just a system or a tool, it can be used for good or evil.

To judge if religion is a good system or a bad one, we can use a cost benefit analysis. This is what we have been attempting to do in this thread.

But when it comes to sensitive subjects like religion, many people have a tendency to avoid, overlook, and deny the associated costs.

Anti-science, misogyny, etc may be bad independently of religion, but they aren’t independent of religion. Religion is a source of these problems.

You can imagine a hypothetical religion that is simply a “social club” or whatever, but here in the real world religion comes with baggage.

Religion is why my cousin’s children have never seen a doctor in their life. Religion is why my gay friend in high school tried to kill himself. Religious indoctrination has led to lifelong shame and trauma in many of my friends.

And this was just from a “moderate” sect of Christianity- the millions living under fundamentalist religion have it even worse.

What you said is all true, but you are ignoring the negative aspects of religion.

Religious influence, both on their followers and on government, is anti-science, misogynistic, and anti-LGBT.

Religions are funded like pyramid schemes, with the most desperate and vulnerable as their victims.

Religious indoctrination is child abuse.

If we “all agree” and do a moonshot construction plan we could have electricity in 8 years. This is a fantasy, tho.

Best case scenario in the real world is operational in 12 years.

In the capitalist hellscape here in the US, a reasonable expectation would be 18-20 years.

20 years also happens to be the lifespan of our wind turbines. In 20 years, all of the currently running wind turbine blades will be in a landfill and new ones will need to be manufactured to replace them.

No reasonable person is suggesting nuclear as a short-term option. It’s a long term investment.

Are solar and wind really “clean” energy? Everyone in this thread seems to ignore the costs of these methods.

Every modern wind turbine requires 60 gallons of highly synthetic oil to function, and it needs to be changed every 6 months. That’s a lot of fossil fuel use.

Lithium mining for batteries is extremely destructive to the environment.

Production of solar panels burns lots of fuel and produces many heavy metals. Just like with nuclear waste, improper disposal of these toxic elements can be devastating to the environment.

Of course, solar and wind are a big improvement over coal and natural gas. I dont want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, I just want to be realistic about the downfalls of these methods.

I believe, with our current technology, that nuclear is our cleanest and greenest option.

Accurate representation of US veterans.

But that explanation is lost to time.

One translation I read suggested a probable explanation.

Rasputin’s phone advice was the same as many modern quacks: keep the patient away from modern medicine and doctors.

So the hemophiliac prince was no longer given his normal cocktail of drugs, which probably included a new medicine for the time: aspirin.

Stop giving a blood thinner to a hemophiliac and his condition (temporarily) improved. The best explanation for the people at the time was “magic”.

Maybe NYT should question how a Zionist ideologue with no experience was put in charge of this important story, or how her uncorroborated opinion piece got past the editors and sold to the public as real news.

But of course they wont, and the damage is already done. Genocide deniers will be pointing to this discredited article in perpetuity.

Is price the only concern? Seems like too narrow of a focus.

Maybe try sorting by “lifespan”, as nuclear facilities last 3-4x longer.

You could try sorting by “crude oil usage”, as each turbine needs 60 gallons of high synthetic oil to function, each needs an oil change every 6 months.

Would be interesting to sort by “birds killed” or “acres of habitat destroyed”

I’m not saying nuclear is necessarily better, that is a difficult calculation. But we got ourselves into this climate change disaster by short-sightedly “sorting by price”. Perhaps spending more money for a long term investment would be more wise than always going with the cheapest option.

Can you name a successful decolonization project that was nonviolent?