Favorite = read receipt, boost = like. It's not an absolute rule but it's in the ballpark.

Then you haven't been to China. It's a shorthand gesture there. The character for ten is 十 so I'm not sure if the gesture informed the character or the other way around. What is noteworthy is just that both cultures ended up with a cross to denote ten.

Are social media the root of all problems? No. Do they have a significant influence? Yes.

You mentioned spineless billionaires who eff around. There are instances of real harm. There is bullying (everywhere), there are schemes to make groups depressed (teenage girls on Insta), there is a lack of moderators that lead to genocide (Myanmar). These things deserve to be looked at by legislators when the sycophants don't do it by themselves.

Social media addiction is a thing as well. Addictions in young people are bad. Parents should be on the front line of this. But that does not absolve social media companies from taking measures to curb certain excesses. Tobacco companies are not allowed to advertize to toddlers either.

So saying they're just a tool, like, say, a hammer is insincere. You can use a hammer to cause real harm. You can deploy social media to cause real harm.

One of the greatest issues of social media is scale. People on the fringes of society who would be largely outcast in their communities can group and organize with much more ease. In the past, this was limited to the pub in three sheets to the wind discussions. Now you get sh!t like Q Anon, flatearthers, vax nuts, etc. - stuff that common sense in smaller communities would have moderated or stamped out now gets mass appeal. They seem much bigger as an online presence than they often are. But they get dedicated believers to start shooting.

The introduction of the internet has been compared to the introduction of the printing press in Europe. Both events caused a quantum leap in the dissemination of information with profound influences on society. After the printing press we got a century and a half of conflicts and wars. We'll be well off if all we get here is a century of people typing in caps lock at each other.

We limit things in society. The availability of nicotine products, alcohol, the ability to drive, the availability of weaponry, antitrust laws, environmental protections, etc. I think we will not get past regulating social media somehow. By which I mean I don't know how either.

One thing that is certain will benefit society is investing in education, teaching media savvy-ness to young children and all adults if possible, giving them the tools to sort the relevant from the distorted. We are largely unprepared for this and I include myself here having grown up with papers and landlines. But education is the saddest item in any budget, as the costs are high and the results take a generation to bear fruit.

Trump wants to dismantle the DOE...

The pyramids at Giza used to be smooth on the outside so people took pieces of them and built something else. I think they're in a category with places like Angkor Wat. The sites' importance decreased (religions changed, trade shifted, natural disasters, etc.) and it was easy for nature to cover them in sand or jungle and, poof, out of sight, out of mind.

It is very likely that they weren't in fact totally forgotten. There probably was local knowledge about them that led white men with too much time and money, thinking themselves superior and as preservers of culture, to "discover" them. Tourism was for the elites and there wasn't any money yet in preserving these old sites.

I agree. I didn't mean to imply all of the remainder would be pro just one of the candidates. My guess is that it's still enough to make up a silent majority. Which sounds great but no one can prove anyways.

I'm inclined to give American voters a limited raincheck on not bothering to show up. Voting is often a booklet of ballots on various issues and elections for office. It takes forever to fill it in. That explains the long, slow-moving lines outside pulling stations, much rarer occurrences in other democracies. And that's only the people who are able to come on a workday (and didn't have the foresight or were unable to get mail-ins). That's after a registration process that can have Kafkaesque features in many states. So I would forgive the single mother who didn't have time to do this between working her two low paid jobs. It's part of a subtle but deliberate disenfranchisement. We'll add that one to the list of grievances as well.

Not being asked a version of this question every other day or so.

Being asked anyway.

Was it all building to this?

All those wrinkles tell the story of his recalcitrant first officers who refused to go to a four-shift rotation.

Lovely artwork, big fan.

Can the other developed nations mount a credible pandemic response without the resources of the USA?

Yes. Just to show you an example from the other end of the developmental spectrum: even North Korea made it through COVID virtually without any resources.

You speak English. There is an at least partially English speaking country to your North. There are more English speaking ones scattered around the world. Most cutting edge research in anything will eventually end up in an English version if it was from somewhere-elsistan originally. The US is/was not the only country with something like the CDC. If you google their counterparts I would not be surprised if you found a warning about a measles outbreak in Texas. The research will be done elsewhere; the US may only lose its leadership position in the field.

BTW I would call the US response to COVID-19 just as shambolic as any other country's. The only difference was maybe they could throw more money at the problem. And that they could do again.

No country will be fully prepared. Ever. We don't know what the next pandemic will be, we don't know when it will happen. The lab coats will have an idea but it's too vague to build policy around that in a world, where there continues to be no glory in prevention. Stockpiles will perish, emergency plans will gather dust, and we will all be shocked and surprised again.

Humanity was sort of lucky that two Turkish scientists were quick to realize they could use a DNA something something method, that was not held in the highest regard in scientific circles before COVID hit, to make a vaccine in record time. They did that in Europe.

If we take "old allies" not so much as old friends but more as "previously allied with:" Japan was on the side of the allies in WW1 but was axis in round 2. Nazi-Germany invaded the USSR in spite of their peace pact. Napoleon and tsar Alexander of Russia were on somewhat friendly terms before Alex clandestinely rejoined the coalition against the French.

I think you maybe be extrapolating here from too tiny a dataset. Type "tongue out selfie" into the search engine of your choice and be amazed at how many people have written dissertations on the subject. The simplified take is it started with teenage girls and spread from there.