Yep. There was one on the Sunday comics page every week when I was a kid, and I learned how to do it then. I never understood the people who can’t do it, or thought it was fake.

Gotcha, thanks. I must’ve missed that one.

He also thinks that the number of lines of code produced is a relevant measure of productivity, so him not understanding this isn’t super surprising.

I assume it’s a joke about Elon asking for developers to willingly put their code into a predatory but apparently welcoming input for digestion.

I’m Portuguese.

In that case I stand corrected.

in the XX Century until 1974

So, about 3-4 generations before people got fed up, then? I think that actually supports my original point: people don’t suffer economic injustice for longer than a couple of generations (“couple” in this case used more loosely).

PS: I don’t think the destruction due to internal unrest is merely from economic disparities […]

I think we may be in a chicken-and-the-egg problem here, where we disagree about which is the cause and which is the effect, but otherwise we agree.

Anyways, this is just pseudo-Philosophical thinking and, as I said, time will tell.

Yeah, and it seems pretty clear that in any case, it’s going to kind of suck for the people who live here.

I don’t know where you get the idea that that’s what I was saying here. I was talking about Trump supporters, and I don’t think many of them are Democrats.

No, there are at least two other types:

• The uninformed. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people in the US are completely uninformed about any of this. I’ll regularly see posts by people who I think of as more or less intelligent and aware of world events who will nonetheless be completely in the dark about what Trump is up to.

• The propagandized. There are a ton of people for whom the anti-Democrat propaganda has worked, and who will “hold their nose” and vote against the person they’ve been told is a baby-killer or whatever. They don’t support Trump in everything he does, but they’d rather him than someone who wants to put political dissidents in a gulag. They don’t see the irony now, because the propaganda doesn’t tell them about CECOT.

I also am fully willing to believe that there are others who aren’t against or for him, but they definitely aren’t particularly loud.

have you seen any Trump fans start to come around at all?

I have, but it’s not exactly common. And it doesn’t always change their minds entirely.

Greece

Greece was only ever united for a grand total of 15 years. When Alexander died, they returned to being a loose collection of city-states.

Spain

Totally forgot about that particular empire, I admit; but their peak was in the 1700s and their “fall” was, like, a few years before I was born in the 1970s, so I don’t know if they necessarily support your point about a necessary fall and long recovery as such. In fact, lower-class workers in Spanish colonies in the 1800s were eating better than middle-class citizens in France during that time; and far from taking centuries to return to a functional status, it’s basically a world economy again.

Portugal

Did Portugal ever fall? They divested of their colonies, and the monarchy fell, but those two events happened more or less independently of one another. You’re right that Portugal lasted for a long time; but my understanding of the revolution is that there wasn’t a prolonged period of economic pressure on the citizens of Portugal and that the revolution was mostly ideological.

Babylonians […] Persians

Those have about the same trouble as Egypt in figuring out the internal reasons for its fall, in the case of both the Old- and the Neo-Babylonian Empire as well as the Persian empire and Achaemenid empire.

Arabs

Each caliphate only lasted for a few decades, maybe a century or two. I don’t know enough about them to be able to speak intelligently on their internal politics at the time of their fall.

Mayan civilization

That one definitely lasted for about 4,000 years, true, but like Greece they were an interdependent network of city-states rather than a united empire. The Classic Maya civilization declined precipitously due to unknown reasons, and the post-classical civilization was conquered by the Spanish, so there’s no real evidence there that would point toward anything here.

So yeah, common-ish dynamic; but we can’t really divine any historical information to inform our current situation from any of them, for one reason or another. At least I don’t think we can conclude that long-running or wide-ranging empires are or are not regularly destroyed by internal unrest due to economic disparities.

the problem this time around is systemic and “bipartisan” (in that both main parties stopped representing most people and just use different styles Propaganda to herd the sheep or just turn people of from voting altogether)

Definitely. We’re well and truly overdue for the Republicans and Democrats to go the way of the Whigs and the Bull Moose.

if you look around at other nations that were once great, they tend to fall quite a lot and then stagnate for a couple of centuries before they start recovering and none ever gets back to its peak.

I really don’t think we have enough data points to be sure about that. It’s basically just Rome and China. (And Egypt, but iirc we don’t know enough about their internal politics to know why they fell) The US hasn’t reached that kind of peak. But either way, I’m fine with the US never reaching the same heights it once had. If it were to become a regional superpower instead of an international one, but treat its people better, I’d be totally okay with that.

Turkmenistan has barely been totalitarian for a single generation; the Soviet Union broke up in my lifetime. And yes, North Korea has persisted through a little over two generations of Kim family control that seems to show no signs of stopping anytime soon from the outside, but that’s not too far outside of “a couple” of generations. I’d say that the jury is still out on them, too, but even if the DPRK lasts for a century or more, they become an extreme outlier in the face of every other fascist regime in the history of the world.

You’re not wrong, though the US has gone through this sort of thing before in the past. Once the Great Depression wiped away the excesses that came from the post-WWI economic boom, it led directly to Roosevelt’s New Deal; “perhaps the greatest achievement [of which] was to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism.”

Sound familiar?

That’s the most visible example of our previous experience with this, but it’s far from the only one: Rapidly increasing economic inequalities, coupled with the fight over slavery, led to the election of Lincoln; he of course issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but he also signed into law social programs such as the Homestead Act and a land grant program which resulted in the establishment of many lower-income colleges and universities around the country, including several HBCUs. When the extreme disparities of the Gilded Age reached a tipping point in the late 1800s, the Progressive Era began, bringing things like women’s suffrage, environmental protections, and “muckraking” journalism that rooted out corruption. The attempts at state-level fascism in the midst of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s led to the election of Kennedy and to Johnson’s “Great Society,” which brought with it food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, and consumer protections, among many other things.

Buchanan led to Lincoln. Hoover led to Roosevelt. Nixon led to Carter. Bush led to Obama. It’s a pendulum of extremes: rapid progressive change is birthed from times of economic inequality, there’s a steady-state era in which progressive policies lead to rapid growth, but then the rich start to get frustrated with regulation and taxation, and corruption begins to increase once more, leading to increasing inequality; the people get mad, control of the government is wrested back, and the cycle begins anew. The pendulum has been swinging since before the Magna Carta even.

Still, you are right about the big question here: whether or not the country will survive the next swing of the pendulum in its current form, or if a different society will have to be birthed from its ashes.

Then they’re big enough to fight back.

Interesting. Nope. Does it break anything unintentionally, like logins and such?

When I was a high school student, the New Deal was a topic that was covered with great fanfare. It was as a part of the Early 20th-century unit that led up to the second World War. I partially remember because I was a deluded right-winger at the time and thought it was ridiculous that they were making such a big deal out of a government handout program.

You misunderstand me, as the other comment notes. I’m talking about actual change: “The New Deal,” capitalized: the relief, reform, and recovery of the 1930s, not “the new deal,” lowercase, that they just passed.

Indeed. Yikes, our history education is in rough shape.

Historically, humans don’t just suffer in silence for more than a couple of generations.

My wife and I theorize that babies start smiling at around 2-3 months because that’s about the time that new parent adrenaline wears off, and if they didn’t start smiling the human race would’ve been collectively dropped off at the nearest bear’s den.

I use uBO and still sometimes get on-page popups. “Modals” would be the correct word, I’d say.