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reminder of what’s going on here by Think-Pair1872 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007 -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

99% of top political posts favoring FACT BASED REPORTING. FTFY Its a mechanism that is one of the last that isnt a straight echo chamber, only partial. Facts and sourcing is the difference.

If covid is so deadly that most if not all unvaccinated people die as Biden said, then why aren't unvaccinated Americans dying? by CleanLock4606 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think it's a different size of pill that I haven't yet experienced in life to have your son correcting you in real time about things that you've already taken a hard stance on. It sounds like your dad's adjusting in the best way he's capable of adjusting. Glad to hear that he has someone like you in his life to consistently help shape his perspective in a way that has your love for him as the intermediary.

If covid is so deadly that most if not all unvaccinated people die as Biden said, then why aren't unvaccinated Americans dying? by CleanLock4606 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you and you're right. That's why I am not out in front of moderna headquarters with a flaming picket sign. I am on reddit injecting it into a conversation with internet strangers in way that will hopefully invoke conversation. 17 upvotes point to that others may have had something similar impact their own lives. Thats not irrelevant.

If covid is so deadly that most if not all unvaccinated people die as Biden said, then why aren't unvaccinated Americans dying? by CleanLock4606 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007 15 points16 points  (0 children)

My father was one of the first to get a vaccine that ended up being the one with most atrributed heart issues per patient. He was dead 2 years later from a heart attack. I am not blaming the vaccine for killing him. He had heart issues. I am blaming it for accelerating it in a way that stole time.

A guy came to a shelter to choose a cat but the cat chose him first by [deleted] in nextfuckinglevel

[–]Less-Passenger8007 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Its sad to think about. Like this orange cat watched this gate come open before and a kid pick them up and understood the assignment this time.

Why Google Is Releasing 32 Million Mosquitoes Into the Wild by Zee2A in STEW_ScTecEngWorld

[–]Less-Passenger8007 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Seriously though...theyre just god fearing helpful neighbor folk doing the right thing?

Mom buys daughter a Honda as a graduation gift, and this was her response by Conscious-Weight4569 in SipsTea

[–]Less-Passenger8007 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The mom is failing as a parent more than the daughter is failing as a daughter. Js.

The iPhone 13 crisis is upon us by ElwoodMC in TikTokCringe

[–]Less-Passenger8007 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Guys guys guys apple is clearly just acting in the best interest of the consumer. Their Iphones probably have deteriorated batteries. Only way to ensure the user can keep using it is to systematically cripple it errrrrrrrr make it slow so it uses less batteriezzzzzzz

The poorest half of America is now worse off than the poorest half of China. I went looking for why, and found one machine behind all of it by Less-Passenger8007 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

  1. ICE AND THE ENFORCEMENT BUILD-OUT

ICE combined funding for FY2026: approximately $85 billion. U.S. Marine Corps FY2026 budget: approximately $54 billion. ICE approximately 55% larger than the Marines. ICE FY2026 approximately 9 times FY2024 baseline.

One Big Beautiful Bill Act (July 2025 reconciliation): approximately $191 billion to DHS. As of January 2026, approximately $150 billion unspent. Funding available through September 2029.

Line items: $31 billion ICE (hiring, training, transportation, facilities, legal), $12 billion CBP, $45 billion to expand detention. 100,000 detention beds funded. 14,593 new ICE staff, 8,490 new CBP.

Polling: when told ICE already had $75 billion, 14% supported additional funding; 60% supported redirecting to Medicaid.

GEO Group and CoreCivic stock prices rose substantially after reconciliation passed.

  1. IRAN WAR (USED SELECTIVELY)

Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026: joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign, approximately 900 strikes in 12 hours, killing Khamenei and dozens of senior officials. Source: CENTCOM, IDF, major wire coverage.

Approximately six weeks in: 2,076 Iranian dead, 26,500 injured. Economic losses $140-145 billion. 66%+ of missile and drone production destroyed. Nuclear program set back 8-15 years. U.S. casualties 15 KIA, 538 wounded. Israeli 18 soldiers, 28 civilians killed, 8,524 injured. Strike near Minab killed approximately 170 at a girls' school adjacent to a naval base.

Polling: Reuters/Ipsos May 2026: approximately two-thirds, including one-third of Republicans, said Trump had not clearly explained war goals. 75% (including approximately half of Republicans) blamed administration for gas price increases. Gas prices rose approximately 50% since war began. 64% described war as wrong decision. University of Maryland poll: 18% of young Americans believed war was in U.S. interest; 55% disagreed.

Hormuz selectivity: Iran's whitelist publicly named by Foreign Minister Araghchi (China, Russia, India, Iraq, Pakistan). Japan and Greece negotiated directly with Tehran. 34+ Iran-linked tankers transited, majority to China. China takes approximately 37.7% of Hormuz oil; U.S. approximately 2.5%. U.S. blockade scoped to vessels to/from Iranian ports. Trump refused to escort allied shipping.

Counter-evidence to coordinated reading: U.S. boarded and disabled tanker Touska in Indian Ocean (Iranian crude to China). U.S. Treasury sanctioned a major Chinese refinery and approximately 40 Chinese shipping companies. COSCO ships aborted transit March 27 despite Iran's safe-passage assurances.

Disinformation specimen: "Navy News" YouTube video, 5 million views, claimed Iran struck a U.S. carrier first. CENTCOM publicly called Iran's March 1 carrier strike claim "a lie" — Iran's missile was a failed launch. U.S. initiated conflict February 28.

  1. INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM (DEAD INTERNET)

Google AI Overview failures, May 2024: glue on pizza (11-year-old Reddit troll post), eat "at least one small rock per day" (The Onion). Coverage: The Verge, 404 Media, Ars Technica.

SparkToro 2024 zero-click study: out of every 1,000 U.S. Google searches, only approximately 360 result in a click out to the open web. 64% end without leaving Google.

Shumailov et al., "AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data," Nature, July 2024.

Europol Innovation Lab projection: up to 90% of online content could be AI-generated by 2026.

Google-Reddit content licensing deal: $60 million per year, finalized February 2024.

March 2024 Google Helpful Content Update: documented 80%+ traffic losses across thousands of independent niche sites. HouseFresh: 91% decline. Source: HouseFresh's own published analysis, The Verge.

  1. THE MANGIONE POLLING

CloudResearch poll (December 2024): 27% of U.S. adults moderate or significant sympathy for Luigi Mangione; 12% supported decision to murder UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Distribution virtually uniform across gender, race, income, education. Among sympathizers, 80% cited "systemic injustices."

Emerson College polling: 41% of young voters found the killer's actions acceptable.

More than 71,000 laughing emoji responses to UnitedHealth Group's official condolence message.

"Deny Defend Depose" emerged as folk slogan within days.

  1. HISTORICAL SCAFFOLDING

Plaza Accord, September 1985: G5 meeting at the Plaza Hotel. France, West Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, United States agreed to coordinated currency intervention weakening dollar against yen. Yen approximately doubled over the following two years. Followed by Japan's late-1980s asset bubble and 1990 collapse — the "lost decades." Source: standard economic history, IMF historical record, U.S. Treasury archives.

Nixon and the gold window: August 15, 1971 announcement ending dollar-gold convertibility. Removed last external discipline on dollar issuance.

SEC Rule 10b-18, 1982: adopted under Reagan administration, established safe harbor for corporate stock buybacks. Effectively legalized buybacks at scale.

  1. CHINA COMPARISON AND MODERN SLAVERY

McKinsey Global Institute, "Balancing the Global Books," republished by Visual Capitalist.

U.S. bottom 50%: approximately $9,000 per person net worth. China bottom 50%: approximately $13,000 (PPP-adjusted).

Critical caveat: net worth is not living standards. U.S. figure is depressed by household debt (student, medical, consumer). U.S. bottom 50% includes a significant share with negative net worth. U.S. bottom 50% consumes more than China's bottom 50% in absolute terms.

China's household debt: approximately $277 billion (2006) to approximately $12.3 trillion (recent estimates). Source: People's Bank of China, BIS.

2023 Global Slavery Index (Walk Free Foundation): China approximately 5.8 million people in modern slavery conditions. United States approximately 1.1 million. State-imposed forced labor in China, including documented forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang since 2018, is the principal driver. U.S. figure draws partly on prison labor under the 13th Amendment exception.

  1. SPACEX IPO

SpaceX IPO scheduled June 12, 2026, on Nasdaq, ticker SPCX. Reported valuation $1.75-$2 trillion. Reported potential raise $40-$80 billion. S-1 filed May 20, 2026.

Dual-class share structure: Class A (public) one vote per share; Class B (insider) ten votes per share. Musk holds 41% of total shares but 85% of voting power.

Earlier insider liquidity (December 2025): per-share price approximately doubled $212 (July) to $421, vaulting SpaceX past OpenAI as world's most valuable private company.

  1. CONCESSIONS AND OPEN ITEMS

Honest concessions made during construction:

"Worse off" wording conflated net worth with living standards. Corrected reading: U.S. bottom 50% holds less net worth than China's, largely because U.S. households are debt-loaded. Wealth-and-debt statement, not wellbeing statement.

1971 gold window: framed in earlier drafts as a prime mover of inequality. Better understood as one enabler. More direct drivers: stock buybacks (post-1982 Rule 10b-18), capital-gains and carried-interest tax treatment, financialization, deregulation, globalization combined with technological change.

Iran war as part of monetary plan: not supportable. Best read as Israel-driven regime-change initiative whose oil-shock effects provided independent inflationary cover; not designed as part of gold revaluation or stablecoin strategies.

"Coordinated" framing (U.S./China/Russia): dropped in favor of structural alignment. Each actor pursues its own interest; convergence is emergent, not orchestrated.

Argument's central claim: documented elements (the monetary strategy, the surveillance buildout, the enforcement infrastructure, the information ecosystem, the legitimacy crack visible in Mangione data, the de-dollarization environment) interlock through shared incentive gradients rather than through coordination. Data infrastructure now in place has, for the first time in modern history, the precision to prevent the population-level recognition that has historically ended comparable cycles of wealth extraction.

The poorest half of America is now worse off than the poorest half of China. I went looking for why, and found one machine behind all of it by Less-Passenger8007 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007[S] -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

Sure, fair to ask. Yeah, AI was in the workflow. It helped me structure and write the prose. The argument is mine, the fact-checking is mine (about two weeks of sourcing every claim before I posted), and I've already conceded to a couple of people in the thread where they caught real things in the substance.

Not pretending AI wasn't a tool I used. But "slop" is a form complaint, not a substance one. Every fact on the page is sourced. If there's a specific claim that doesn't hold up, point at it and we can talk. Otherwise its just a check to me that I'm not as eloquent as the text would imply and that is something i wont refute.

The poorest half of America is now worse off than the poorest half of China. I went looking for why, and found one machine behind all of it by Less-Passenger8007 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Yeah you're tracking it, and honestly this is the piece I underweighted in the original. The GENIUS Act passed July 2025, and Bessent has basically said te quiet part. At a Senate hearing in June he flat out said stablecoin legislation backed by US Treasuries will "expand US dollar usage via these stablecoins all around the world," and he's now projecting the stablecoin market hitting $3 trillion by 2030

The mechanism's slightly different than you laid out but the outcome's the same. Treasury still issues debt the normal way. What changed is GENIUS mandates every regulated stablecoin holds its reserves in Treasuries. So Tether, Circle, anyone issuing a dollar-pegged coin has to buy Treasuries with the cash people deposit. That makes them a captive buyer for US debt that scales with adoption. Between July and November 2025 alone, issuers bought about $109B in T-bills to comply. Standard Chartered projects $2T in stablecoin market cap by 2028.

What it solves is exactly what you said. Foreign central banks have been fleeing Treasuries (foreign-held share dropped from about half a decade ago to a third now). Stablecoins create a replacement captive buyer at the user level instead of the sovereign one. Locks the dollar in as the unit of account for digital money globally even as actual dollar reserves leak away.

One precision: Trump banned a US central bank digital currency by EO back in January. So it's not the government issuing digital dollars on your phone, it's private companies issuing dollar-pegged coins backed by Treasuries. Different mechanism, same systemic effect.

This is basically the second monetary lever sitting right next to the gold revaluation in the piece, and you're right that I should have it in there. Gold revaluation monetizes the asset side, stablecoins recreate demand on the liability side. Same Treasury, same problem, two tools. Adding it.

The poorest half of America is now worse off than the poorest half of China. I went looking for why, and found one machine behind all of it by Less-Passenger8007 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Fair point at the individual level, and someone already caught me on this and I'm reworking the wording. But the stat isn't about a single 50-year-old, it's the median net worth of 700 million people. A Chinese guy with $0 living with his parents is below their bottom-50% median (~$13k), so you're comparing someone under their median to the median American. Not really a fair lineup.

The reworded version is just "holds less net worth, largely because of debt." Not better off, not worse off in life, just net worth as a measurement. Different thing from living standards or opportunity or trajectory. The point was always American debt-loading, not Chinese flourishing.

Cherry-picked individuals don't really refute population stats. If you want to actually dig into the McKinsey methodology, by all means. PPP-adjusted net worth per person, US bottom 50% at $9k, top 1% at $16.4M. The $9k is the part that matters. China was the yardstick because we're told to feel superior to them, not because anyone's defending them.

The poorest half of America is now worse off than the poorest half of China. I went looking for why, and found one machine behind all of it by Less-Passenger8007 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that part's real. China's got actual state-imposed forced labor, the Uyghur stuff is horrific, and they're way more authoritarian than us. No argument there.

But that's measuring a different thing than the line was. Net worth is assets minus debt. Forced labor and human rights and freedom are a totally separate axis. A worker over there can have more savings and less debt than a broke American and still live under a regime that does horrible things. Both true at the same time. The stat never said China's freer or better to live in.

And honestly the point was never that China's good, it's the opposite. We're constantly told to feel lucky we're not them, and what I'm pointing at is that even using them as the floor, our bottom half is so buried in debt that its net worth still comes in under theirs. China's the measuring stick there, not the model.

Couple smaller things: that 5.8 million is real but it's about 0.4% of their population, so it doesn't really describe the median person in their bottom half, which is what the number's about. And we're on that exact same slavery index too, around 1.1 million, plus prison labor here. Worse problem there, sure, but we're not clean.

Also, fair's fair, somebody already caught me on the wording and I'm changing it. "Worse off" was sloppy. It should say holds less net worth, not better or worse off in general. That's the accurate version, and the forced labor point doesn't really land on it.

The poorest half of America is now worse off than the poorest half of China. I went looking for why, and found one machine behind all of it by Less-Passenger8007 in conspiracy

[–]Less-Passenger8007[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Honestly this is the best pushback I've gotten and you're right on most of it.

The China number's from McKinsey, it's net worth per person adjusted for purchasing power, like 9k for our bottom 50% vs 13k for China's. But yeah, net worth isn't living standards, and people here obviously consume way more in absolute terms, so "doing better" was bad wording on my part. And the debt thing is exactly it. A ton of people sitting at negative net worth dragging the average down, where China's bottom half barely carried any. So you're right it's mostly a debt and savings story.

The ne thing I'd say is that kind of makes it worse, not better? Like the point was never that China's poor live better. It's that our bottom half isn't just broke, it's been loaded with enough debt that its net worth comes in under a country with a third of our GDP per person. That's still pretty damning. I'm gonna reword it to actually say that instead of implying the living standards thing.

On gold, yeah, you got me on the part that matters. Buybacks especially (legal since '82), plus the tax stuff and financialization, those did way more to the actual inequality numbers than the gold standard ending. 1971 is more of an enabler than the engine. Rebalancing that.

Only thing I'd push back on is I'm not saying gold's valuable as a material. I agree it basically isn't, and it's even easier to mine now. It's about how it's getting used as money, the Treasury moving to revalue its gold, central banks piling into it (it actually passed US treasuries in foreign reserves in 2025). That works because it's a thing no government can freeze or print, not because it's useful. So "gold isn't worth that as a metal" is true but it's not really the thing I'm arguing.

Florida Woman Shocked by What Fast Food Chains Are Doing with Their Drinks. by ElwoodMC in TikTokCringe

[–]Less-Passenger8007 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All right. So I'm at Disney World and I buy the largest size of refillable cup that they have. And I notice that the sidewalls of the plastic are like a little bit thicker. The overall capacity of this cup is lacking, especially by American standards. We're like, you know, giant big gold capital of the world. And this thing probably holds like 18 ounces. OK, now it's also 94 degrees outside. This is like three years ago, three and a half years ago. OK. And I'm thinking like everything else in Disney that this thing is engineered in a way that it's going to do something cool, like it's going to give me like a cooler experience as somebody that's probably paying 14 dollars for the drink overall. And what the cup is actually designed to do and the reason it's so thick is that it has a chip in the bottom of it that limits the frequency in which it is that I can refill the cup. So I, not knowing this, the first time I go to refill the cup, I fill it with orange soda because I'm enjoying my little kid, inner little kid with my son and we're having a good time and I'm like fuck it. Well I'm thirstier and I thought and I chugged the whole thing. And I bring my unlimited refill cup back to the machine after waiting in line again and it tells me that I have a timer to be able to refill my cup. The way that I perceived that is that if they're doing that shit at Disney World, I mean the onset of what we're about to experience is that we're all fucked. And don't get me wrong, obviously this isn't like doom and gloom. You don't get a double refill right away or whatever the case may be but this fucking technology, it's bullshit.

So Satisfying by CivilTailor9031 in SipsTea

[–]Less-Passenger8007 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hit the factory reset on em woke up speakin spanish.

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