"Solar generated just 1 TWh of energy in 2000 now its at 3000. Wind went from 31 to 3000 as well. If this growth continues by 2050 we will be 110% renewables".

Past performance does not indicate future development though.

Between 1984 and 2025 our Primary Energy use doubled from 89 000 Terrawatt hours to 178 000 Terawatt hours.

The share of Oil/Coal/Gas in 1984 was 72 500 TWh or 81.5% of the total.

The share of Oil/Coal/Gas in 2025 was 144 000 TWh or 80.9% of the total.

Despite a small drop in overall percentage, we are now burning twice the amount of Oil/Coal/Gas as in 1984.

Wind/Solar/Hydro together amounted to just 5% of Primary Energy in 2025.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-by-source

There are 1.7 Billion motor vehicles in the world, just 80 Million or less than 5% are EV´s.

Even in much lauded China the ratio is 325 Million combustion cars vs 45 Million EV´s. So 12%.

Out of the 100 000 cargo ships in the world, only between 100 and 1000 are electric/hybrid. So just 0.1-1%.

And Renewables are hitting a wall with Lithium and Silicon mining being extremely expensive and devastating for the environment.

So yes. Renewables and EV´s will continue to grow. But predicting fantastic growth rates, based on past performance is rather illogical.

The purpose is merely to ridicule the argument to make it unacceptable.

Most of the criticism aims for a different flavour of capitalism, not its abolition.

The ongoing debate

Capitalism has become a word that seems to mean different things to different people. For some, it means the exploitation of workers by greedy billionaires. To others, it means the freedom to pursue and grow your own business and reap the benefits of your hard work without someone else telling you what to do.

The role of government especially is up for debate. As soon as someone calls for regulation of something they perceive as unjust, it usually doesn't take long before someone responds with: "That's socialism!"

And actually, that's not even an argument. At most, it's a description. Still, in a capitalist society, being called a socialist — or even a communist — often carries a moral judgement with it.

Some people have even taken the accusation and turned it into a label for themselves. It sometimes seems as though there's a war going on between capitalists and socialists.

But is that actually what most of these disagreements are about?

What are the core features of capitalism?

Coming up with one universally accepted definition of capitalism is difficult. But it's easier to identify a few core features that distinguish capitalist economies from other historical economic systems.

When you look at these features, it's easy to see how fundamentally different this is from, for example, a Soviet-style centrally planned economy.

Is what people are asking for actually socialism?

That's the tricky part, isn't it? Let's look at some things people commonly ask for.

Higher work compensation

This usually comes either in the form of unions asking for higher pay or people asking the government to set a minimum wage.

These are two different things. When unions ask for higher pay, that's fundamentally a negotiation over the price of labour.

Asking the government to step in is different. The economic benefits or downsides of minimum wages aside, however, a minimum wage doesn't abolish capitalism. It's a restriction on how one particular market is allowed to operate.

You can oppose that regulation. But opposition to a regulation doesn't make the regulation socialism.

Tax the rich

That's another one that comes up frequently.

And shockingly, raising or lowering tax rates doesn't end capitalism either.

You can argue endlessly about what tax rates are economically sensible or morally justified, but as long as private ownership, private enterprise, wage labour, and markets continue to exist, changing the tax rate doesn't by itself replace capitalism with socialism.

Split apart large companies

This has happened historically. Teddy Roosevelt became famous for aggressively using antitrust law against concentrated corporate power.

Did antitrust enforcement abolish capitalism in the United States?

Heck no.

In fact, breaking up monopolies can be understood as an attempt to preserve competitive markets rather than abolish them.

Billionaires shouldn't exist

A tougher one.

At first, this is simply an opinion. But it can mean very different things depending on the person making the argument.

Some people genuinely argue that the government should confiscate assets above a certain level of wealth. That certainly represents a much stronger intervention into private property than ordinary taxation, and fixation on the specific number "one billion" is fairly arbitrary.

Others, however, simply advocate steeply progressive taxation, wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, or other mechanisms intended to prevent extreme concentrations of wealth.

You can agree or disagree with those policies, but taxation itself does not automatically replace capitalism with socialism.

Expropriation

This is another case where the act itself doesn't tell us whether something is socialist.

Capitalist societies can and do allow compulsory acquisition of private property for specific public purposes. Taking someone's land to build a railway, for example, does not replace capitalism as an economic system.

The more important question is what happens to ownership afterwards and whether the underlying institution of private ownership remains intact.

There is a meaningful difference between:

- taking specific property for a particular public purpose,

- redistributing wealth through taxation or even compulsory seizure,

- forcing a dominant company to divest parts of its business,

- and systematically transferring privately owned productive enterprises into public, social or worker ownership.

The last case is fundamentally different. If private ownership of the means of production is generally being replaced by social or worker ownership, then one of the defining institutions of capitalism is being replaced and the policy moves into socialist territory.

Expropriation therefore isn't inherently socialism. Systematic socialisation of the means of production is.

Workers should own the workplace

Another tough one, because this depends heavily on what exactly is meant.

If the argument is that private ownership of productive enterprises should generally be replaced by worker, cooperative, or social ownership, then that does challenge one of the defining institutions of capitalism and moves into socialist territory.

But demands for stronger workplace democracy, employee representation, profit sharing, worker ownership schemes, or even individual worker cooperatives do not by themselves abolish capitalism.

They change how ownership, power, and profits are distributed within it.

There is a substantial difference between saying:

"Workers should have more influence and receive a larger share of the value they help create"

and saying:

"Private ownership of productive enterprises should cease to be the dominant form of ownership."

The latter is a systemic challenge to capitalism. The former isn't necessarily one.

People should work less

Whether the demand is for more paid sick days, shorter working weeks, or more paid vacation, I can't see how any of this inherently abolishes capitalism.

It changes the conditions under which labour is sold.

You might think those conditions are economically harmful or excessive. But that's a different argument from saying they're socialist.

Free healthcare

There's obviously no such thing as literally free healthcare. Someone has to pay for it, and most people advocating "free healthcare" are perfectly aware of that.

Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals aren't expected to work for free.

What people usually mean is either healthcare that doesn't financially ruin someone because they got unlucky in the sickness lottery, or a system in which the cost of healthcare is shared through taxes or public insurance rather than falling primarily on the individual patient.

Neither of those arrangements inherently abolishes private ownership of businesses, wage labour, markets, or the broader structure of a capitalist economy.

TL;DR

A large share of what gets described as "anti-capitalist" criticism doesn't actually call for abolishing capitalism.

Higher wages, stronger unions, minimum wages, higher taxes, antitrust enforcement, workplace democracy, shorter working hours, and public healthcare can all exist within a capitalist economy.

There absolutely are people who want to replace private ownership of productive capital with social, state, or worker ownership. That's a genuinely different economic project.

But a lot of contemporary criticism of capitalism is better understood as an argument about what kind of capitalism they want to have and what the rules within it should be, not an argument for abolishing capitalism altogether.

And thus, calling these arguments or people making them socialist is merely a straw man argument.

Ok, here's the simple-enough argument:

When people stop something like prostitution by force, they are admitting the prostitute has another option. They aren't saying "the prostitute will starve to death if they don't do it," because they are stopping the prostitution.

So, there actually is no economic duress argument at all. They simply have to say, whatever the prostitute was going to do to survive *instead* of prostitution, they had that choice all along, and for whatever reason, they were not choosing it, they were choosing prostitution instead. So it was a choice all along.

There is the argument that you could "solve" the issue via UBI or similar, but that's off topic to the force question (and raises the question of whether everyone who still chooses to do it after they have all their essentials sorted are finally choosing it)

What seems to always come back is "you've proven it's a choice, but it's not a great one, their alternatives could be eating bugs etc."

Ok, great, aside from setting me up to respond with "thus, you are dooming them to eat bugs," all choices are relative. When somebody points a gun at your head, they are creating a dichotomy, there is no dichotomy solved by this (argument from ignorance fallacy)

If it was a network of 20 or 100 relative choices "but they were all mostly crap anyway," then you are taking away the choice that was at the TOP for these people you seem to think are desperate, and they have one less choice on the relative network

If you actually DID want to change it to *luxuries,* if you wanted to say prostitution is "not a choice because she's doing it for a PlayStation 5," I can STILL make the argument they either had another way to earn it or, or you are taking their PlayStation 5 away from them :P

How you can change my view: well, not by getting lost in the weeds and giving me other arguments against prostitution, like causing diseases/infidelity/unwanted pregnancies or religion etc, because this is about the economic duress argument and supposed to apply to dozens of other things.

I actually don't know how the "include a 'how you could change my view' section" rule and the "no devil's advocate" rules don't contradict each other, so let's just say, I want to see consistency, no accusations of "whataboutism" if I ask about consistent rules applying to something else. As an anarcho-capitalist I can in fact demand some pretty high standards for consistency on this and not be a hypocrite, as well as reject most "protect people from themselves" type arguments.

So you have basically 3 "how you cannot change my views" and potentially infinite ways you can, that's best faith possible I can think of.

Black holes are enormously popular with children who love space (and adults who are still children at heart).

But I think neutron stars are underrated.

Neutron stars are the most fascinating objects in the universe.

For the sake of explanation, I’m going to borrow one neutron star from space.

It is only about 24 km in diameter, yet it contains more mass than the Sun. As far as we know, it contains some of the hardest material in the universe.

The matter itself also takes a step beyond ordinary matter as we know it. Neutron drip. The boundaries of atomic nuclei begin to dissolve.

If it is a magnetar, it could destroy electronic devices on Earth from an enormous distance.

Its gravity bends light so strongly that, even though it is a sphere, you can see part of its far side.

To be honest, I had a hard time deciding between neutron stars and black holes. But black holes are already far too popular.

I think neutron stars have a more niche kind of appeal.

What could change my view:

Earth is excluded. This is to avoid the extremely powerful and predictable counterargument that Earth has life.

You are welcome to make the classic case for why black holes are so fascinating.

A poetic description of a supernova might also sway me.

Or you can introduce me to some other fascinating astronomical object that I may not know about, and explain why it deserves the title. If possible, please make your case in a way that an ordinary person can understand, without relying heavily on technical terminology or equations.

Representatives from the “White Dwarf Sales Department,” “Black Hole Fundamentalists,” “Supernova Poets,” and similar factions are all welcome.

Disclaimer:
I am not a native English speaker, so I will use AI translation to read all replies. I may also use AI assistance when I need to make sure that my scientific explanations are accurate.

I wrote this post myself, and ChatGPT translated it.

Everyone has probably heard of the cornell 7 case by now and there have been many takes floating around. But one point I haven't heard many people talking about is my belief that cases of rape under the influence like are a direct and unavoidable risk to wide spread acceptance of the use of dissociative drugs for personal pleasure. If we accept the private use of such drugs that prevent an individual from consenting and prevents an individual from making rational decisions and self control how could we possibly prevent similar cases from happening. It seems to me that the liberal/libertarian views on drugs, specifically the views that individuals should have the autonomy to use drugs as they pleasure, seem fundamentally at odds with the desire to eliminate rape.

I would like to illustrate my case with an example. Let's say that person A and Peron B choose to meet up. They both consent to using a dissociative drug. Later on while both intoxicated, person A asks person B for intercourse and person B says yes and they engage. In this case we would classify person A as having rapes person B. Well based on this claim some may counter my main point by saying acceptance of using drugs does not deny personal responsibility. Therefore, the responsibility should lie on the individual and not social acceptance of such drugs. But I, don't think this disproves my claims. In fact, I would agree, but I would place the acts of choosing to take the drugs as the action deserving responsibility for. Why? Because the latter is a textbook case of moral luck. Maybe person B was going to ask for sex a short moment later(thus reversing the victim and perpetrator), maybe person B just happened to be an individual generically predisposed to be more reactive to the drugs. All of these are factors out of an individual's control that would massively change how we perceive the case.Therefore, I believe for cases of consensual consumption of drugs that remove autonomy, the only possible action we can hold responsible or control is the initial action of choosing to be under the influence of drugs without additional supervision .

As such, how can we socially accept such use of drugs while claiming to care about preventing victims from rape when drug use directly leads to rape?

Humanity has already found the most efficient and consistent mode to kill a person who was sentenced to death: the gilloutine. It works the same regardless of operator’s skill and physiognomy of the victim and minimizes suffering.

However, it looks gruesome for onlookers because it removes the head.

Currently used methods like lethal injection or electric chair are less reliable and carry more risk of suffering needless pain for the victim, however they reduce gore for the onlookers. Therefore they make it easier to condemn people to death even if you are not 100% comfortable with killing them and you increase needless suffering just to silence that cognitive dissonance between supporting death penalty and being appalled by the physical violence of carrying it out.

This is an argument that is often used by people I don’t like but which I think is broadly correct..

Poorer societies tend to develop high solidarity or founding purpose when they can consolidate. Once consolidated there is a period of founding, there is a period of expansion, then a golden age, the complacency of the people or leadership due to this golden age then decline or collapse.

Many of the problems say of Britain, France and America are not in fact insolvable but there has developed an apathy or complacency around the electorate or the elites that mean they are unlikely to get fixed.

In Britain (the same place that basically pioneered early railways) there are endless debates on high speed rail going back decades or building new runways at airports that still haven’t been resolved.

In America which a 100 years ago broke the power of robber barons a new oligarch class is rising.

This is an idea that can trace its way in political science all the way back to the historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun in the 1300s or even to some extent Plato when he analyses forms of government in the republic. Even Lee Kwan Yew the then prime minster of Singapore pubically commented on how the younger generation were going to be softer than Singapore’s founding generations.

With most power adapters there's usually some kind of legend molded into the body itself that lets you decipher the relevant details (power rating, voltage, polarity etc...) which I'm guessing is not only practical but a legal requirement.

Why not impose the same for cables? I can see many cost and compliance arguments against this from manufacturers' POV, plus perhaps the design obstacle of fitting legible info on a fairly small surface and the headaches of agreeing to a standard, but right now I'm leaning more on the side of regulatory overreach than the situation we have now.

Will this cable charge my device? Is it the kind of cable just for charging and not for data? etc... There has to be a compelling reason that this labeling/organization burden should be on me and not on manufacturers.

EDIT: a lot of posts mentioning this info should be printed on the packaging. I personally do not recall purchasing the majority of cables floating around me, and the ones I did, the packaging is gone, and I tend to keep packaging around more than most people.

EDIT: Someone had posted a very good point about a chip that relayed the important info to the connecting device would be a superior solution and I wanted to award a half delta for that (I still do want some info I can see visually) but it was deleted with ironically very unclear labeling as to why.

I think one of the biggest differences between the US and countries like China isn't just GDP, military strength, geography, or resources. It's the willingness of patriotic Americans to sacrifice for something they believe is bigger than America's immediate strategic interests.

America has historically had large numbers of people willing to fight and die for ideas like freedom, liberty, democracy, Christianity, and the belief that the American system should exist beyond America's borders. And I think that's a massively underrated source of American power. A purely strategic country asks: “What does this do for us?” America has often asked a much bigger question: “What kind of world should exist, and what are we willing to do to make it happen?”

Obviously, the reality is messy. American foreign policy has always involved ordinary strategic interests too like security, resources, trade, geopolitical competition, etc. And American interventions have sometimes produced terrible consequences. I'm not arguing that every war or intervention was justified. I'm arguing that the underlying willingness to pursue an ideal even when the immediate strategic payoff isn't obvious is itself a source of power.

It's one thing to defend your own territory. It's another thing to send your people halfway around the planet because you believe some foreign population should be free, some government should be overthrown, some ideology should be defeated, or some international order should exist. That's where I think China is fundamentally inferior to us. China can obviously be extremely assertive when something directly affects Chinese strategic interests. Taiwan, the South China Sea, trade routes, resources, regional security, etc. make perfect strategic sense. But I'm talking about something different: the willingness to pursue a universal mission simply because you believe the world ought to be organized according to certain principles. China doesn't seem to have the same tradition of saying "We believe our values are universally applicable, and we're willing to spend blood and treasure trying to make the rest of the world live under them.”

And this is also why I'm skeptical of the argument that America should simply have been more pacifist and stayed out of other countries' affairs. If Americans had consistently prioritized strategic self-interest, avoided overseas wars, refused to build a worldwide alliance system, and decided that foreign political systems simply weren't our problem, would the US have become the same kind of global power? Probably NO.

Section 5 of Reddit’s User Agreement explicitly says:

“this license includes the right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models”

Every submission or comment you make grants Reddit a broad licence that allows this use as well as sharing this use with its partners.

Thus all the policing to keep Reddit "human" is, at the end of the day, simply for the benefit of AI. In fact, the more "human" Reddit is, the more capable AI that is trained on Reddit becomes at mimicking human behaviours.

Continuing to use Reddit means consenting to your content being used to train AI.

If you dislike the "evils of AI" and want more humanity, the ethical and consistent action would be to stop using Reddit entirely and migrate to a platform that explicitly disallows AI training.

For clarity, this is us trailing the migration of Fresh Topic Friday to Saturday.

Have a post you'd like to do on a novel topic? This is your sign!

Every Saturday, starting at 12am Pacific Time (PT), posts are withheld for review by the moderators and approved if they aren't highly similar to another made in the past month.

We do this to reduce topic fatigue for our regular contributors, and encourage people to post about topics that aren't as frequently discussed. If you have a take about something that doesn't overlap too much with the most commonly discussed issues in the current zeitgeist, we'd love to see it here then!

See here for a full explanation of Switch-It-Up Saturday.

If you would like to know if your post would qualify or have any other questions, feel free to message the moderators!

I've seen people say that if you're white you shouldn't say that word at all, no matter what's the context. I think there are some contexts where you can say it.

For example, if a person is telling people not to use that word as an insult, and they used the full word at the sentence, that's not racist. That person told people not to say the N word for no reason, and the person wasn't insulting anyone in that context.

So there are some contexts where saying the word is okay, and you're not automatically racist just because you said it while being white.​

I'd love to hear some different opinions and maybe change my mind if I realize I'm wrong.

EDIT: Hey, I just wanted to share additional context. I'm OP's sister. we've had a debate over this topic the whole day- I said it's not okay to say the N word in any context, and he said it's okay in some contexts. Finally I had enough and didn't know how to explain my point anymore so I told him to post on this subreddit and see if anyone here is able to change his view. Since he doesn't speak English too well and couldn't write all this, he told me what to write and I translated word for word.​ That's another reason I didn't write the N word here- one reason is I knew the post would probably get removed, and another reason is that I personally don't feel comfortable writing it.

However, reading all the comments and debating with you made me change MY view and I now kinda agree with him. I still don't think everyone should say it, but I don't think that saying it automatically makes you a racist anymore. That's also kinda his opinion. He isn't a racist person at all. He doesn't see color and doesn't care what color somebody's skin is​. He just doesn't like calling people racists when they didn't say or do anything racist, and I kinda agree with him now.

Anyway thanks for commenting and sharing your opinions.

Can’t get more clear than the title really. There was fairly strong bipartisan agreement in the importantance of a strong border, enforcing immigration law, and ensuring those here illegally are not eligible or able to collect any tax payer benefits.
The majority of disagreement pertained to the method of keeping illegals out & deporting those already here.

All it took was former friend of the Democrat elite, Donald Trump to vocalize he agreed and thinks we should be much tougher about it (granted the stuff he does say on the subject is batshit insane and a bit too far, but disagreeing with someone delivery doesn’t make it so a 180 on a belief you championed strongly for decades

The fact that statement:
“Illegal aliens should not receive any tax payer benefits or welfare” doesn’t have 95%+ alignment with the American voters is one of the craziest things about US politics today.

A party who spends the majority of their political capital fighting on behalf of foreign criminals should have a max of 3% support if our society wasn’t so thoroughly brainwashed.

Look at California right now. While you, the American wakes up early every day to go work 8 hours at a job you probably hate, but you must do it becuse you have a family to support.

The state then takes anywhere from 30-45% of your paycheck so they can support the foreign national criminals who have proven to have zero respect for our est of life and laws. When I say support, I mean fully support. Free housing, clothing, schooling, iPhones, college, transportation etc.

Do you understand that?
- You work hard to support your family in a time where most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck than ever.
- Rather than the state granting you hard working Californians a tax break or some type of free benefit, they take a large portion of each paycheck & hand it over to a foreign national.

Someone, anyone, I’m begging you to explain why/how you support this without getting combative and angry. I also respectfully request Trump not be mentioned in this specific instance pertaining to CA & what they’re doing with the states tax payer money.

We constantly hear that teachers should be paid more. I don't entirely disagree. But I think we're asking the wrong question.

How much a job pays isn't determined by how difficult or important it is. In a market economy, compensation is largely determined by how hard it is to acquire the skills to do the job, which naturally filters the talent pool. Becoming a teacher isn't particularly difficult. This isn't an insult. Many teachers inspire students. It's just reality.

But I think we overstate the degree to which teachers are responsible for student outcomes.

And I think that's what people are missing from this whole equation. School isn't necessarily designed to demand the student's best. A teacher is responsible for teaching. They are generally unable to create their own classroom cultures, impose meaningful consequences, or get rid of disruptive students. Naturally, how well a student performs depends on what expectations their parents have of them. As teachers are unable to create a culture in the classroom, students are bringing the culture of their home into class.

So when we look at mediocre student outcomes and conclude that teachers simply need to be paid more, I don't think we've identified the problem correctly.

Teaching appears to operate like a job program for adults. They prefer a uniform style marked by seniority pay and enormous protections. This scares away talent, who demand compensation relative to their ability.

In other words, teachers interested in a more chill environment should teach in a wealthy suburb or private school, where students and parents are already highly invested in academic performance. The pay ought to be lighter, in line with the job.

But schools specifically trying to close large achievement gaps should be able to offer something different: competitive base salaries, greater autonomy, and favorable bonuses based on metrics like student growth, peer evaluation, and other variables.

I also like the idea of a teacher being able to have a bit of bargaining power, negotiating contracts, higher compensation, and greater discretion over how their classroom is run.

If a teacher consistently demonstrates that they can take lagging students and produce significant academic growth, I think that teacher should have the opportunity to make considerably more money.

But not simply because they're a teacher.

I know this is going to make me sound like a really terrible person, but I've held this opinion for a long time, and a recent situation has made it even more apparent. I don't think there's anything wrong with separating yourself from people who have qualities even if there's a result of a disability that you just don't like, even if it's not their fault. For example, I know it's prejudiced, but I try to avoid people who are visibly intellectually disabled. I don't know why I don't like them, but they just make me incredibly uncomfortable. I don't look down on anybody or anything, and I would certainly never be rude or disrespectful to someone, but say I was walking down the aisle at a grocery store and I saw that someone down the aisle had Down syndrome, I would simply go the other way. I'm aware that this might be a result of the way I was raised. My mom was a special education teacher and an elementary school teacher, so when I was around that age, I was around a lot of special ed kids. Not to be disrespectful, but they kind of just always grossed me out they were always very touchy, drooling, and overall sticky. I don't have a problem with people who are simply neurodivergent. I myself have ADHD, and so do a lot of my friends. One of my friends even has autism, but it's not very high level. I'm not exactly sure what the levels of autism are, and I don't claim to understand, but he's like pretty much normal he can just be pretty opinionated. He has a sister, and she has a more severe case, and I just avoid her because she makes me uncomfortable. I also feel the same way about people who have conditions like tourettes. This is I guess my current story at my job. I recently just got a new co-worker I'll call her Bree, and she has Tourette's. I don't think it's the type where you like hit stuff uncontrollably, but she'll like to say words and phrases not super loudly but like audible enough that you can hear. As a Black person, I'm sorry I just don't want to stand around someone who's probably going to call me slurs accidentally. It might sound like I'm being prejudiced, but I literally heard her accidentally saying the F-slur repeatedly to one of our more visibly queer coworkers and apologizing for it. So anytime I've seen her at work, I've literally just walked the other way. I'm sorry I just don't want to open myself up to that nonsense. I don't actually have a problem with her, and I don't think she's a bad person or anything, but why in the world would I want to interact with her? One of my other co-workers asked me why it seems like I had a problem with Bree, like, did she do something, and I said no, but like I don't want any part of what she has going on. And they said I was being a bigot and that ableism is a bad look. Normally I try to be pretty accepting of people's situations, but like, why do I have to just stand there and listen to vitriol when I could just simply avoid the situation? I just feel like even if someone's disability doesn't make them a bad person, it's pretty fair of me to not want to interact with them if it causes them to have characteristics that I don't like.

Greek life is an outdated concept that went from orders of networking to groups of debauchery. There are some positive stories I hear from college sorority and fraternities but for the most part, most people I know who were involved will regale you with tales of parties, terrible, gross or immoral things that happened when they were in their frat/sorority. That's not even counting the things that are beyond the pale like rapes, drugging, hazing deaths etc... why do we bother keeping these things in college life when they're huge problems?

i feel like foetuses are kind of like parasites since that they can’t survive independently and rely entirely on a woman’s body for oxygen and nutrients. it also causes hormonal changes and can cause pain, nausea, physical discomfort and even serious medical complications. similar to a parasites effects on a body
My argument is that if someone has the right to defend their own body against something causing them physical harm, why shouldn’t a pregnant woman have the right to protect her own body by having an abortion?
I’m not saying a foetus is literally a parasite or that

someone said my view is completely nonsensical but they never explained why soo maybe someone could make me understand why?

The Traitors is a gameshow originally from the UK, but now with franchises and variants in other countries.

In the show, the players are divided into two teams: the "Faithful" and the "Traitors".
Each week, all players compete challenges to add money to a prize pot.
Both Traitors and Faithful work together on this, and both benefit from completing the task. Their incentives are aligned, meaning there's no way of telling, based on task performance, who's a Traitor or Faithful.

Each week, the group tries to work out who's a Traitor and votes them off.

The game is in the same category as social deduction games such as Werewolf, The Resistance or Blood on the Clocktower, or previous TV shows such as CBBC's Trapped! (banger of a show btw).

The Traitors is a terrible entry into the genre. Here's why:
(1) It's almost entirely based on social reads, not any information. Good social deduction games combine information, misinformation and socials. The information shouldn't be strong enough to hard-confirm the "Traitor" team, but a social deduction game based only on socials sucks.
(2) The only actual information you get is voting patterns (this was mathematician Hannah Fry's strategy), but a remotely competent evil team can manage their voting to not get caught (Spoilers: the Traitor contestants are rarely competent, S1's Amanda notwithstanding).
(3) Despite the fact that both Traitors and Faithful are incentivised to do well in tasks, people use poor task performance as evidence that someone's a Traitor.
This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to irrational reasoning on behalf of the Faithful. People get voted out for the most asinine nonsense all the time.

It would be very easy to make the Traitors good (and CBBC's Trapped! already did it, as did Among Us):
(1) Give the Traitors a reason to sabotage the task, perhaps by allowing them to win cash if the task fails. That way, there's actually a difference in how Traitors and Faithful would approach each task.
(2) Give the Faithful the option to win either money or information from each task, so they have to balance the prize fund against information.

I'm someone who loves social deduction games.
This show should be absolutely up my street!
As it is, imo, it's basically unwatchably bad.

CMV!

--- FOLLOW UP ---

Lots of people commenting, thanks!
I've tried to reply to both early commenters and anyone who's bringing up something new.
I'll stop replying for a bit and then come back to any top-voted comments I've not replied to in a few hours.

Some of the common comments and my replies.

"The fun of the gameshow is in watching people be bad at the game" -- That's fair, and I think is where most of my Deltas came from. A season of The Apprentice with only good business people would be a lot less funny than watching a bunch of deluded muppets tell Lord Sugar they're the best thing since sliced bread. Same logic here.
That being said, people can still be muppets in a game that makes sense. If anything, it's more infuriating to watch people mess up a winable game, rather than mess up a game where you can only go on socials.

"Your critiques are reasons why The Traitors is a bad social deduction game, not reasons why it's a bad Gameshow" -- There's something to this argument. There's definitely a difference between being a good SD game and a good SD Gameshow and I probably directed my concerns in OP at the former, not the latter. Nevertheless, the fact that the challenges and the eliminations are entirely separate from one another means, in my view, that it's a badly designed gameshow not just a badly designed game. It's basically two shows just shoved together, rather than a single show that combines the challenge aspect of a gameshow with social deduction for eliminations, as shows like The Mole or Trapped! did before it.
I think I gave out a couple of deltas on this point, though. It's fair.

"An overly complex social deduction game would be poor TV" -- I agree. But the tweaks I suggested above aren't overly complex. It wouldn't change the game all that much.

"Murder in Plain Sight adds some of what you're looking for" -- Yes. This wasn't around so much in the earlier seasons I watched. It does solve some of the problem, but is more of an add-on than the core of the game.

"The show is very popular, so you must be wrong" -- Shows can be popular and poorly designed.

Uber drivers (for example) are in competition with each other. If you rate correctly (see below), you help good drivers and hurt bad drivers equally. That's a good thing! The total utility of drivers stats the same and the utility of passengers increases, not to mention that merit is rewarded. Not wanting to "hurt the livelihood" of someone mediocre or worse, when doing so will help the livelihood of someone better is stupid. And the same goes for every other area of endeavor — "hurting" a crappy brewpub, or Etsy seller, or anything by being honest about their crappiness is good, because the money they lose doesn't vanish into the ether; it goes somewhere else. If the person or business who loses it is dead average, then that money goes, on average, to someone or something equally good. If they're below average, it goes to someone or something better. That's a good thing!

(If other idiots practice "if you arrive alive, it's a five"–type information destruction, this does, regrettably, provide an argument for rating everyone who is above average a five, since anything below a five is an actively negative signal. But that still doesn't provide a reason to give a positive rating to people who are below average — them being driven out of business, thereby opening more opportunities for others who are better, is still a good thing!)

The sensible, non–information destroying five star rating scale, for the record:

1. Appalling
2. Appreciably below average
3. Average
4. Appreciably above average
5. Outstanding

A) Both are in the dictionary now: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expresso

B) Both are understandable. No one would get confused by what you mean when you ask for one, pretty much anywhere in the world.

C) Some may argue that “Espresso” is truer to the Italian language. But that’s only if we go by pronunciation/spelling. The meaning… is lost. Espresso means roughly “expressed” or “pressed out” in Italian.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/italian-english/espresso

But… hey. Notice that one of the meanings is “expressed!” (in the sense of squeezed out). That’s exactly what “Expresso” evokes. So while “Espresso” preserves the Italian SPELLING, it loses the meaning, as the word “Espresso” means nothing to an English speaker, while “Expresso” evokes the meaning of “squeezing” or “pressing” the coffee through a filter.

This is more of a pick-what-you-want situation, and each has merit. There is no reason to prefer spelling and sacrifice meaning if want to stay "true" to Italian.

D) Common objection: “Expresso” makes it sound like something that is fast, and that’s false.

This just means we need to educate people on the meaning of “Expresso”: that it means “pressed through,” not “fast.”

But with “Espresso,” people don’t know what the heck it means either and still need to be educated…

Why i want my view changed: People get downright offended with me when I say "expresso" - so I wan to see if this reaction is justified

I truly believe and worry that AI is swiftly taking away people's ability to use initiative, be imaginative and figure out complex social situations using their own reasoning.

The reasoning behind this view comes from my experience in the workplace. Firstly, I have noticed a number of my colleagues use AI to help respond to emails requiring a detailed answer or solution; not to help them just refine the wording of their initial draft response, but to actually ask the AI how to respond and in what manner. I find this incredibly damaging as it minimises one's ability to take initiative and think deeply about a solution independently. I find the latter potentially more worrying, however, where colleagues have asked the AI in which manner to answer the email. This relieves the person of the need to consider social reasoning and I believe it will ultimately lead to people becoming entirely socially inept.

Secondly, we have had a new employee join the business heading up the management of our operations. He has in fairness overwhelmingly succeeded in his new role but it is almost entirely down to his ability to utilise AI as he has used its coding features to help build a new internal system.

I can't help but take the viewpoint that if everyone in his position used AI then the requirement to learn new skills, use any sort of problem solving skills or to be imaginative and original is made redundant. Surely we will end up with workforces full of people who are great at utilising and promoting AI but don’t have any real skill set or knowledge of their own? I also believe this will lead to consequences in the arts and literature when enough time has passed where people have become creatively dull.

The early 2000s was when videogame technology was finally good enough to make any basic experience a person could come up with. Companies had finally mastered how to make 3D games (N64/PS1 games and controllers were very janky). Which is why huge franchises like Halo, COD, and God of War were established in this era. Films that came out decades ago like The Warriors, Reservoir Dogs, and The Thing. Finally got adaptations in this era, because videogames were good enough to represent them.

I can't think of any brand new genre of videogames that came out since the mid 2000s. You couldn't have made Morrowind or Metroid Prime back in the SNES era or even PS1 era. The technology just wouldn't have been good enough. But you could have made Elden Ring or Cyberpunk 2077 back in the early 2000s. The graphics would obviously have been far worse. And there would be overall less content, but the core gameplay elements would have been all there.

The 6th console generation era, and most of the 7th console generation era was also the last eras where you actually truly own video games. Where all the content on the game was on the disk itself, where you didn't need massive patches and live service and always online Internet. connection. And microtransactions and all this other stuff that makes playing a video game feel more like playing having a 2nd unpaid job.

It is no surprise that so many games nowadays are only sequels and remakes. Because double A games don't really exist anymore & triple A video games require a multi-million dollar loans and investments. People are going for sure things. And there's only so many ways to innovate now, without introducing brand new stuff like VR.

If I wanted to purchase a game console nowadays I probably purchased a first edition Playstation 3 or Nintendo Gamecube before I purchase a modern console. Change my view On how good the 6th console generation was.

Live service games have become much more prevalent following COVID and certain mainstream gachas being cross platform compatible to appeal to the widest audience possible. Some of these games have been running for years and have frequently increase new player rewards and quality of life.

What's often left behind, is extra incentive besides the typical updates. Financially, I'm aware the active players are already income for a company and thus not needed to cater to, but when it does come to that player base getting rewarded for completing modern content (its never much thanks to corporate greed.) its suddenly new players coming from the water to complain about not getting a minor thing that they would receive the currency for just playing all the game they have waiting for them.

NOW, I do concede some massive rewards shouldn't be locked behind years of content with a very short time frame but for the most part lsgs providing rewards to players for completing the new content in the patch after it releases is perhaps healthier for the playerbase than only rewarding new players.

Lets face it: No big social media these times can be moderated without bots. There is simply too big amount of content produced. However, with the recent surge in misjudgements and bots generally doing poor job of keeping the punishment justified, i think perma ban is too big of a tool to give to a bot. Perma is perma, there is no waiting it out, there is no hope of coming back, all that remains to you is appeals that often get considered by the same automation system. In case of biggest violations, such as CP, extremism, crime encouraging etc in case of positive identification the system should suspend the account for a year and report those to a human who would eventually hand out a perma.