It took me until the early 2020s to realize that men even have body washes in the first place.

Keep in mind that I abandoned broadcast TV around 2001 or 2002, so I completely cut all commercials out of my life.

Then when the first adblocker became available for Phoenix (later Firebird, then Firefox) around 2004, I was all over that like white on rice. So since 2004 the only ads I have had to suffer were when I set up a new system whose browsers needed configuring, and later once my browser protections became too strict and I needed a “naked” web browser for user-hostile sites that tied spyware and near-malware into site-critical functionality.

So I have been “out of the advertising loop” for a very long time, and always saw bodywash as a female thing. I quite literally never “got the memo” that body washes came for men.

And I’m not likely to get any, either. And not for any stupidly sexist reasons - after five decades on this rock, I am just habituated on bars of soap. I just don’t like the showering/soaping-up experience without bar soap.

Something like host over half of all Americans cannot read above a 5th grade level. Almost a third are functionally illiterate.

It’s not that they don’t have critical thinking skills. It’s that the entire lower-90% have been so badly nerfed that it is increasingly difficult for anyone in that cohort to get to a point where they can educate themselves without copious assistance.

And that’s exactly how Republicans prefer the population - uneducated, illiterate, ignorant and gullible. The better with which to scam them for their votes.

Not after the first snowfall, they won’t.

Haiku OS stumbles into the room, gags at the PearsonVue stench, beats a hasty retreat

That’s funny, but watch out - somewhere, some conservative is reading that and taking it to be exactly as you wrote it. Before long Republicans will be passing laws banning bidets and even forcing them to be ripped out of homes because of “bidet wokeness”.

I would add a /s, but with the way America is crumbling ever-further into ridiculousness, satire is becoming real at ever-increasing rates. Even The Onion is constantly getting upstaged by reality these days.

This is certainly the pattern that is actively emerging.

The fact that “AI” hallucinates so extensively and gratuitously just means that the only way it can benefit software development is as a gaggle of coked-up juniors making a senior incapable of working on their own stuff because they’re constantly in janitorial mode.

Don’t have the link, but in America at least, the prevalence of partisanship has been in lockstep with economic inequality.

As in, the greater the economic inequality, the greater that people have voted in Republicans that refused to cooperate with democrats on things like bills and initiatives, and who were further and further to the right. It’s also why those states with the biggest economic gaps between poor and wealthy also have the most batshite-crazy Republican governors and other elected members.

So it’s not resources that are encouraging fascism - it’s a failure to tax the Parasite Class appropriately such that wealth trickles back down to the working class. Because with obscene wealth comes obscene opportunities to tilt the political landscape in ways that encourages corporatism (the original name for fascism) and greases the system towards even more wealth accumulation by the Parasite Class. And now with almost all social services getting dismantled by DOGE, it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse in America.

Yes, ignorance and stupidly account for a majority of Republican voters who are not multi-millionaires many times over. But poor people are too busy surviving to have any energy to think critically. So many of them just reach out for those exceedingly simple answers to complex problems that also promise to solve all of their problems, but never actually do.

You describe capitalism as a finite system

No, I did not. Capitalism demands infinite growth. This planet is a finite system

and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.

I don’t imply. I simply state a known fact. Anyone with even a passing exposure to economics and resource extraction would be very familiar with this fact.

For example, 100 years ago, the energy within a barrel of oil could extract an additional 300 barrels of oil from the ground. These days, despite technology that has made the process massively more efficient, we get barely 10 barrels of oil out of the ground for that same amount of energy expended.

These days same goes for almost every other resource you could possibly shake a stick at, from minerals such as steel and copper, over harvested materials such as fish and wood, and all the way down to agriculture, where the topsoil that almost all of our crops depend on will be completely depleted within the next 60 years, and will be depleted in most agricultural regions within the next 20-40.

Capitalism is a cancer, and it’s killing the planet.

Inside capitalism, people aren’t having children because captialism isn’t giving them the economic capability to do so.

The west’s population boom in the 50s to 80s only occurred because a single wage earner could, with a high school education and a wage just a little over minimum wage, be able to own a decent home, have a non-working SAH spouse, several kids, two cars in the driveway, and still have enough left over for a decent holiday once a year as well as save generously for retirement.

This all got stolen from these latest generations. What 90+% of the population was once capable of achieving is now only (largely) available to less than 20% of GenZ. A large proportion have given up on retirement, home ownership, or children. And this is WITH degrees and extensive career experience.

If you want to solve population crashes, start with income inequality: start taxing the wealthy and bring back a 90+% top tax rate. Get this money back into the hands of people who actually generate that wealth, and families will follow.

Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.

Good news! Trump is not only rolling back environmental regulations, but dismantling them entirely. Which means pretty soon, you will have no legal recourse whatsoever to any toxic waste that leaches onto your property.

And yes, my business would very much be a “light commercial” business.

People should be able to build what they want, where they want

I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.

and also need anti-cartel laws

Bring it on. Maximum 5 “homes” allowed per person, 7 for any family unit, children under 25 ineligible for ownership except as a post-death inheritance.

Anything above those limits is landlording-as-a-business, and combined with laws that make ANY business ownership of residential properly illegal, would force landlords to actually work for a living by getting day jobs.

Plus, have an extended “speculation tax” that hits any place being sold with a 100% tax on the first 2 years of owner-occupancy, with a straight-line decline to 0% in the eighth year. Any home being sold where the owner has never lived in it for a minimum of 2 years? 100% tax on the sale of the house straight out of the gate, with all proceeds going to a fund for first-time home owners. Exemptions, of course, for military deployment or death or a few other issues that cannot be leveraged for fraud.

In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.

But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.

Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.

Just wait until the conservatives get into power. Why else do you think that PeePee is looking at America and furiously taking how-to notes? The entire party is no different from the Republicans.

Hence my second paragraph. Nothing wrong about a web page, just make it pinnable to the home screen. Doable with any website, but it helps a lot for usability if links to do so are explicitly available on the website.

Let’s hope the mobile apps become real mobile apps instead of web page wrappers.

I can understand if you build a site that allows itself to be pinned to your device as if it were an app. That’s a great way to get a product onto devices before you have time+effort to build a native app.

It’s quite another thing to have an actual app with a highly visible GUI wrapper whose only purpose is to connect to and display a specific website.

Like, c’mon.

You only target journalists when your enemy is the truth.

I have always taken the metaphorical red pill when given a chance. I would rather live in pain and suffering knowing the truth, than living in ignorance and happiness.

And I don’t mind being ugly. I’m a misanthrope anyhow. Being ugly just means you are more likely to be left alone.

No, I refuse to look away from facts and reality. I read the science before the IPCC gets to it and “politically massages” it into useless pablum. I listen to those who actually do climate science as a day job… and most of them have started calling themselves “climate pathologists” and are refusing to bring children into this world, because to intentionally bring children into such a future would be to inflict malicious cruelty onto those children.