But with “fairness” you have to draw the line somewhere or the groups that are able to play against each other would be too small.

Exactly. You shouldn’t draw arbitrary lines to split up groups of athletes such that one of the groups literally has nobody to play with.

I think it’s only understandable if people that went through puperty without testosterone would complain if they would have to compete against more and more people who went through testosterone puperty.

“More and more” people is doing some real heavy lifting here. Every statistic - every statistic - agrees that this is not a common situation at all. We don’t hear the voice of a lot of transgender athletes because there are not a lot of transgender athletes. There’s barely any. And many of them - like many cisgender athletes - aren’t even good athletes.

I think its only understandable if people that went through puberty without growing 3 feet taller would complain if they would have to compete against more and more people who naturally became 7 feet tall from puberty… but more and more people aren’t becoming 7 feet tall. It’s not common. It never will be common.

It’s so uncommon to find a 7 ft tall athlete that when you do, you often find them dominating the local sports teams. They’re allowed to play. Why shouldn’t they? Recruiters follow them around the country. Colleges give them scholarships and national leagues give them millions of dollars.

Their peers - the poor high schoolers that have to play against future national pros and olympic champions - they understandably complain that they don’t have a chance of winning. They are upset when they lose, or never get to touch the ball, or get benched. And yet no national campaign. No public outcry against giantism. No superpower writing half-baked oppressive laws “protecting” short people. Nobody vilified Andre or Shaq for standing out and flexing on everybody.

Why should we treat transgender people differently?

If a person is born with an abnormally large wingspan there are undeniable advantages over everybody that wasn’t.

We don’t limit abnormal body types in sports competitions, we elevate them. Wingspan in swimming, height in basketball, muscle in football, etc. It’s already genetics, there’s nothing inherently “fair” about athletics. Abnormally - but “naturally” - high levels of testosterone literally already give people an advantage in sports.

There’s nothing more or less unfair about giving normal - but “unnatural” - levels of hormone supplementation to people for legitimate medical reason, especially when there’s so few transgender athletes in the first place, and no evidence whatsoever that they are particularly dominating a given sport.

What would a 21st century ‘New Deal’ even look like?

It could look identical to the original. Restore the capital gains and high-income tax rates. Do all the infrastructure investments over again with modern tech (high speed and light rail, renewable energy, desalination, etc)

Fair labor standards 2.0, with 32 hour workweek, guaranteed leave, triple the minimum wage, and medicare for all. The last one should save small business more than enough money and administrative overhead to pay for the rest, but tax incentives for small businesses will help too.

Reinforce the national labor relations and social security acts. Create the political transparency act to overturn citizens united. Throw out the parties and the political bribery entirely if you can, if you can’t, limit and publicize it. Tax 1-5% of all political donations over X dollars, and feed all of it into social security and medicare. All of federal legislature, executive, and judiciary now gets their salary from social security and their healthcare from medicare.

This wouldn’t really save the world, but it should be enough to keep the US going until we find better answers. Obviously there’s no guarantees we could find the political capital to get any of this done, even in the Great Depression 2: electric boogaloo.

No need for the messages to actually be deleted. Marking them for deletion is enough for the law. If the law was enough anymore.

Q1 2025 is almost over and there has been no realistic counterbalance against the crimes and coups. Investors are growing comfortable with the new world order. Like many Americans, the wealthy believe that if the riots haven’t started yet, they never will.

Like many Americans, the wealthy have forgotten how bad the 1930s were. Many think they will “cash in” on a downturn but the truth is the wealthy are just short-sighted idiots. The only difference this time is public access to information and communication. I’m not a time traveller believing that the internet will bring us together, but I do think it was a lot harder to plan a fun outing with your friends before wireless telecommunications.

Corporate profits dropped from $10 billion in 1929 to $1 billion in 1932. You might think “oh they still made profit” but a 90% decrease is devastating to a group like that, and it wasn’t evenly distributed. Many wealthy became decidedly not wealthy. And they still had to live in a world where society had broken down and dust storms hit the United States capitol building.

It took decades for them to rebuild their monopolies, bring down the tax rates, and tear up the market regulations again. Without WW2 and reagonomics the wealthy may never have recovered their power over the world economy. I guess what I’m saying is buckle up for the 30s and 40s everybody. If you happen to get a choice between dishonor and war again, choose the fucking war.

Surely there is eventually a level of stupid that we can agree is just stupid? This is it right here. There’s no plan. No 4D chess. No intentional leak. It’s just a bunch of idiots breaking the law, praying to God, ending lives, and then clapping themselves on the back and sending high five emojis.

Cancelled research into transgenics because it starts with “trans”

Great idea. Hijacking -

Hey, all of you. Stop feeding trolls. They are propagating the truly dystopian lie that the US is actually accomplishing a real energy transition, with or without Musk.

“Cleanest energy economy in the world” (JD Vance, 2024 VP debate, gaslighting the public into thinking Republicans haven’t successfully held us back from clean energy at every possible turn.)

It’s a russian muskbot or unwilling stooge. The brief account history is literally full of republican and russian defense. Don’t let them fill lemmy with stupid arguments. It distracts from the real conversations.

Downvote, and either ignore entirely, or if needed talk around the troll to everyone else listening.

They won’t though.

There’s this constant kneejerk response here and everywhere that “oh we’ve seen it all before” and “they didn’t do anything then, they won’t do anything now”. It’s understandable. It’s relatable. It’s even inevitable. The apathy, the exhaustion, the despair.

But the reason people still get upset is because there are still things to be upset about. New people find new reasons all the time. The reason most of this is so shocking to many is because it actually hasn’t happened before.

None of this has. Not to them. Not here. Not in our lifetimes. So many things are changing that it’s hard to keep up, but many people have enjoyed a geographical, demographical, or economic distance between themselves and their society’s problems.

Social security has always been the “third rail”. It’s killed careers for even approaching the idea of reform. It is - literally, by every single definition - the taxpayer’s dollar. If you want things to change, you need to take advantage of moments like this. Don’t spread apathy.

Spread outrage. Spread the word. Americans are about to be economically kicked in the family jewels at every level. Trade, tariffs, taxes, business regulations, labor protections, health insurance, federal jobs, government contracts, social security…

There will be people who will “accept the hardship”, but there are far more people who will be pissed at seeing politics hit their bank account. Their lives. Their families.

Help them understand why it’s happening. Help them understand why it needs to stop.

I can’t find much except for a weird indiatoday article and the original Xhit: https://nitter.space/elonmusk/status/1904030373899616736#m

I don’t understand the association he’s making between Social Security and the Small Business Administration. At first glance I don’t see any indication the SBA does anything with children outside of funding childcare centers?

It sounds like they check your credit for a small business loan, so they would presumably take your SSN and I guess check it against the database?

But then they check your credit anyway. It’s not like the Social Security database is the safeguard for an unsafe loan. We have identity leaks credit agencies for that. If he had proof of children or ‘immortals’ actually getting these loans in any numbers he would show it. Why can’t a 17 year old run a company anyway? If 20 year olds can dismantle the government…

If an elderly small business owner dies, and the company is still held by his estate… wouldn’t his loan still be attached to his SSN?

And if an underage orphan receives ownership of a small business through estate, would their SSN be attached to these loans, even if the company was operated by a third party regency?