I wasn't insulted, but it did feel a bit too on the nose to really work as satire.
Idiocracy got there just in time, before things became so stupid that satire wasn't possible any more. You have to exaggerate so hard that it lacks the feeling of cleverness required by satire.
The Onion struggles on. They've always been true masters of the form. I wrote my own news satire back in the 80s and quit when I saw The Onion; they were far better than I would ever be. Practically nobody else can still pull off satire here in the worst timeline.
Armando Iannucci - creator of The Thick of It and Veep - has said this in public statements. Politics is so ridiculous now on both sides of the Atlantic that he finds political satire impossible to pull off anymore. His last show for HBO Avenue 5 had to take place on a space liner for rich people with Hugh Laurie as a faux-captain who can’t keep his accent straight.
Texas Monthly (“The National Magazine of Texas”) covers local news with a straight face, letting the absurdity speak for itself. Read the recent article about ranchers and rabbis searching for the perfect heifer to bring about the end of the world - you can see the movie coming (Coen Brothers or The Daniels?) https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/red-heifer-prophe...
A straightforward rendition of the last 10 years wouldn't even pass the smell test for a satire. It might work as some kind of experimental dark slapstick.
> guess it's that easy for telcos to lobby the legislators
16 states having restrictions while two go explicitly pro-municipal broadband doesn’t seem like a lobbyist’s panacea. Skimming the list of states with restrictions, they look like red states trying to bridle their blue cities. Partisanship seems the more-parsimonious explanation.
~100 million consumers (assuming average sized states are impacted) being essentially defrauded by a cartel of telcos - doesn't really matter what you wanna call it but I'd say it's a pretty major deal.
You're assuming they are giving these people hundreds of thousands of dollars, they aren't. These are mostly state politicians that make between $50k-80k who rarely get a campaign donation above $10k. These corporations absolutely give them the bare minimum (seriously talking between $500 to $4k maybe), it's only federal Senators that typically make the big bucks since they have the ability to single handedly gum up the system to prevent legislation.
But yeah, it's not only easy it's very cheap. This is why you need a workers party so workers can effectively collaborate together to either primary the politician or convince them otherwise.
Oh and you can't just do this once either, it takes an entire life's worth of work and it never ends.
I'd say first of all you need to put a lid on it, call this kind of thing again what it is (bribery), and make it illegal. Secondly, if someone wants a public office: pay them well (they'll still have the revolving door afterwards anyways), but all their finances will need to be published on a quarterly basis. It's not exactly rocket science, this kind of thing is implemented in many jurisdictions.
self hosted Gitea is my recommendation. has everything one needs and is super lean and resource saving. you can run it easily on a 1GB VPS - I even ran it for a while on 512MB.
it's impossible to prove the counterfactual (I guess, as I imagine we don't have enough gene information that far back). But I'd imagine that the high calorie food you can get starting with the advent of agriculture is exactly what could drive evolution in a certain direction that helps brains grow. We've had ~1000 generations since then, that should be enough for some change to happen. Our brains use up 20% of the body's energy. Do we know that this was already the case during the stone age?
The advent of agriculture did not provide better food, it was just the only solution to avoid extinction due to the lack of food.
The archaeological evidence shows that for many generations the first neolithic farmers had serious health problems in comparison with their ancestors. Therefore it is quite certain that they did not transition to agriculture willingly, but to avoid starvation.
Later, when the agriculturalists have displaced everywhere the hunter-gatherers, they did not succeed to do this because they were individually better fed or stronger or smarter, but only because there were much more of them.
The hunter-gatherers required very large territories from which to obtain enough food. For a given territory size, practicing agriculture could sustain a many times greater population, and this was its advantage.
The maximum human brain size had been reached hundreds of thousands years before the development of agriculture, and it regressed a little after that.
There is a theory, which I consider plausible, that the great increase in size of the human brain has been enabled by the fact that humans were able to extract bone marrow from bones, which provided both the high amount of calories and the long-chain fatty acids that are required for a big brain.
I've seen the bone marrow hypothesis also, which is very interesting. Afaik. evidence shows at least that there was enough specialization during neolithic era to have bone marrow cooks where the hunters delivered their bones. Something you wouldn't expect based on just school knowledge (at least back in 90s/2000s).
I see your point about agriculture at first degrading quality of food. Are you aware of evidence of brain size degrading even? Is it visible in the temple bones?
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