You're acting like Democrats are as deep in the cult of personality as Republicans are, yet outside of the most corporate liberal circles, Harris and Biden are heavily held in contempt by most of the Left.
No, Harris and Biden are not heavily held in contempt by most of the Left. I'm on the Left and voted for both of them. Indeed, as a Progressive, I was pleasantly surprised by Biden for his withdrawal from Afghanistan, student loan forgiveness, his canceling the Keystone Pipeline, etc.
> Harris and Biden are heavily held in contempt by most of the Left.
To be absolutely frank, I don't consider the Democrat party as "Left" in any (traditional?) sense at all, even though it may include Left and Left-leaning elements.
(But then again I don't consider Starmer's Labour as Left either, and one could argue that Labour is more Left than the Democrats.)
We really should share his writings/speeches more. The sanewashing of his mad ramblings or Truth social posts is omnipresent in media. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere.
None of the good things you described requires the existence of powerful private actors. The internet was created by public funded researchers, it is fundamentally decentralized. Wikipedia is a non-profit, video call could be p2p, etc.
> Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time.
It seems a captain obvious now but it wasn't so at the time. (Or maybe my.braincells.count() < 2)
Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.
When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.
I definitely exaggerated with my "two braincells". Even the french president said about the guy "we need more people like him" (although I wouldn't say he's that smart himself...).
But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...
There are a couple issues with that definition:
- quality is not always correlated with "cheaply made en-masse"
- actual slop, assuming you are talking about the food, is more about preventing food waste although it happens to also be cheap.
I'm being pedantic AF because most people refer to AI slop as "low-quality or careless work". And AI is just a tool so it's possible to spend a lot of time making something of high quality with it. I get the outrage with respect to copyright and artist rights, but it certainly doesn't look like slop to me.
Eeeeh your definition is as good as mine. To me, slop is used to convey the fact that whatever it is applied to was made with quantity/efficiency in mind rather than quality/purpose, like what is fed to pigs. Indeed, ultimately slop could be good by that definition. Lots of people like McDonald's, but I think most people also realize it is slop.
Restaurants will charge what people are able to pay. My office is on the third floor of a century-old parisian building, in the heart of the city. The street is filled with tiny restaurants, some of which serve these "healthy lunch bowls" that the US apparently lacks. Except they're 14€ here (without drinks or desserts), because people have the money to pay for it, and do so. You can relax zoning laws, but no one will price their bowls at $4 in the richest country on Earth, obviously.
I used to be able to get $3 breakfast and $5 lunch (ok, tipping rounds those up, but the base price is there) at nearly any Coney Island in the Detroit metro. It's not about richness or zoning, it's all about population density and disposable income. People in the US are poorer than we used to be, so restaurants only target the rich. US cities are remarkably fluffy and often less dense than suburbs in other countries. It's that simple.
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