This strongly reminds me of the Rimworld community.

Like, Rimworld ALLOWS you to do slavery, organ harvesting, cannibalism, and all sorts of wild shit within its systems, and the young-male fans of the game talk that up a lot.

...but the reality is that most people set up a nice little farm and spend most of their time making art and decorating their base and playing matchmaker.

This is a myth. There IS a test, called the "Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)", which is a competency test to see what jobs you would be suited for, but that is NOT an IQ test.

Sure, if you score badly on that test you will LIKELY have a low score on an IQ test, probably because something like 40% of American adults are illiterate or have low-literacy and that would impact your ability to do any test.

But the military does not IQ test.

They were told the risks of pinning their entire political strategy and identity on one septuagenarian gameshow host, and did it anyway

See, that's the thing. The 10 factors in the ranking include 1) Entrepreneurship, 2) "Open for Business", 3) "Movers", 4) Power, and 5) "Agility", or a place that is 'efficient in its actions, adopt and accept modern solutions'

So, like, half the factors are "how badly do you screw the environment and average non-capital-class citizen"

And in case you think I might be wrong about what they mean by "Movers", the top 5 are the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and India.

Of COURSE our country, which is composed a bunch of oil, gas, and mining corps in a trenchcoat shaking hands with a couple of oligipolistic banks and telecoms will score well.

You, an average person? Probably homeless after you offended the wrong rich person.

If you're rich though, you are immune to consequences.

Exactly, articles like this are just confusing the meaning of class.

What makes you a member of "the working class" is that you are forced to sell your labour to survive. Fullstop. A tradesperson, and a lawyer, and a burgerflipper are all in the same class from that point of view.

As soon as your accumulated capital becomes large enough that you earn your income only as a result of your capital, then you are no longer working class, and that's when your interests diverge from the average worker and average homebuyer or renter.

A landlord with no other job, the major shareholders of a profitable business, a wealthy heir, those people make their money by siphoning value off of other people's work without actually needing to spend their time on work.

Long story short: I have no problem with a 50 year old plumber with a large family who legitimately uses that 4500 sqft house.

My issue is with Karen who used dad's money to buy 8 properties to airBnB them and insists she get special treatment because her business risks didn't pan out.

You seen the takes from Authright and AnCaps lately? Trying to get rid of single-party divorces, pro child-marriage, pro 'enforced monogamy'.

He's like the third guy to do this in a year, big money doesn't want you to know about it

Sure... But it's a DIFFERENT TEST, on a different population of people, with the goal of measuring military-specific factors.

My friend, the first thing you need to know about shitty people is that they tend not to be open about how shitty they are. If you share your beliefs with someone manipulative, they will usually hid their real opinions from you.

Exactly, and because of the revenue-neutral nature of the Carbon pricing, this hurts all Canadians, and especially hurts the Canadians that are poor and/or care about being efficient and conserving resources.

"Exempli Gratia" literally translates to "Example Given", so I'd say yes, it does stand for that?

It's not all that uncommon for workplaces to require a specific OS

Unless you're going to tell me that Itch has a dynamic library filtering setting, family-sharing, the ability to have local machines on the network speed up my downloads, and the ability to dynamically remap controller profiles per-game, then yeah, steam is more user-friendly.

The goal of the anti-LGBT relious nuts is to force people into straight marriages because that's all that matters to religious zealots.

They know that if kids practice safe sex they won't get pregnant and 'shot gun marriage' rates will go down.

They know that if kids discover their gender or sexual identity is non-cis, non-het, or non-monogamous that they might not wind up having a traditional marriage.

The know that people who only have 1 partner in their lifetime are much, much less likely to successfully leave an abusive partner, meaning there's a higher rate of divorce if people learn that having multiple partners in your life is normal and okay.

They know that kids who are educated about healthy sex and consent in relationships are less likely to go along with a child marriage or an assigned marriage.

They know that removing sex ed means more teen pregnancy, more intimate partner abuse, and more child-rape. For religious people whose only goal is to get young women into marriages, those are good things.

Example: An actual elected official in the state of Missouri defending his stance that "Parents Rights" includes the ability to marry off their kids to adults at age 12, because "Do you know any kids that have been married at age 12, I do, and guess what, they're still married". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6UJ-uCrgc

These people legitimately believe that it's morally correct to kidnap a 12 year old girl and force her to be entirely subserviant to, and dependent on, some pedophile husband who controls everything they do, because them being trapped in that awful situation means that there's one more marriage in the world.

Shouldn't the black king be on a white square and the queen on her own colour?

Ehh. This is an issue of a whitelist vs blacklist approach, it's not that nuts that the government would want to allow newer tech to be used by work devices as a default.

The military is very different and much more strict about this, the average civil servant is less sensitive.

This is just the neoliberal way, we're decades deep into the idea that all solutions to any problem must involve directing public funds into private hands, usually those of the wealthy.

At this point, the concept of allowing public-sector employees to use publicly-owned equipment to take publicly-owned materials and provide necessary services for the public who vote for and fund the government is tantamount to heresy. In their minds, money should only go one way, from the government, to a select few private hands. We have at least three generations of bureaucrats and politicians whose minds are so warped by this practice that they cannot conceive of any way to help people or really implement any policy without giving some private business a chance to run a profit off of it.

Think about it, try to come up with anything government has directly built since 1990. Not talking about subcontracted, or with "funding provided as a private/public partnership", that the government has directly built and run. Used to be that the government would actually employ people to do things like GO Transit, or Ontario Place, or the LCBO, but that era is long, long passed.

Now do the reverse, think about all the things that used to be publicly owned but have now been given away to some billionaire. Air Canada, Petro Canada, Potash Corp, Highway 407, Telus, Hydro One. The list is huge, and a lot of these are very profitable. Imagine if we still owned them? Imagine what we could do re: climate change if we still owned Petro Canada and Hydro One? Or what our internet services might look like if we owned Telus? We gave away billions of dollars of value and significant strategic assets, mortgaging our future.

In addition to the direct costs of all the money that could have been put back into the budget (or the cost savings provided to the average taxpayer by not requiring that these companies take massive profit margins), we are also losing government capabilities: think about all the people, all the equipment, all the buildings and services that used to be directly delivered but now are parasitized by rent-seeking private companies looking to extract as much value as they can from us before we die. Think about old-age homes, hospital services, corporate landlords that hold the lease on former government buildings, contractors paid instead of municipal works departments.

The government won't act because it would mean admitting that the neoliberal ideology that's made a small number of people very rich was wrong.

This video covers the UK, but it's all similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58t-YH7DURk

FuckCars is not about BEING carfree, it's about realizing that you're FORCED to have a car, to pay $10,000 per year to own that car, to breathe in the pollution from the roads, to risk your life on the road, and how bad that sucks.

That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn't use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn't use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).

During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come.

But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14+ hours a day and have become full netizens. If companies want to keep growing, they can't rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.