The first part is true … no one cares about the second part of your statement.

These idiots are dumb enough TO GIVE ACCESS to the Chinese if they thought they could gain something from it

You are partly right … but if you sign up to a service to some of these dumb apps, they will redirect you to different sources to verify a purchase (whether it is legitimate or not). At the time, I was having a bunch of silly fun with my nieces and nephews fooling around with a new phone and finding new apps to play with. I think I got too carried away and wanted to get something to work without being careful enough.

The fun part was in finding some dumb face filter app that turned my big brown brooding middle aged male Indigenous face into a beautiful petite Asian princess that could talk and chat with my nieces and nephews. That was an expensive bit of fun that I paid for later.

Don’t feel bad about it.

About three years ago I got a call from my credit card company asking me if I had booked a first class flight from New York to Milan for $2,000 and reserved a five star hotel in Italy for $1,000 a night, plus a few other hundred dollar charges of other things.

I have travelled overseas before but I’m a budget traveller and I wouldn’t spend money like that … plus my travelling days were basically over anyway … plus I don’t live, work or go near New York city, I’m in northern Ontario, Canada!

I cancelled the card immediately and started looking back on what I had done that led to this. The only thing I could point to was that about a month or two before, I had been playing around with a bunch of phone apps and a few Chinese face filter apps I had experimented with and had signed up to trial subscriptions without knowing it which gave my credit card information through Google Play. I’m very careful with my credit card and apply every security feature that is given but that one slip up gave me away. I now layer Google play purchases behind Pay Pal tagged to a limited Credit Card to just that account and with all security, two factor authentication I can apply on everything.

As security minded as all this can be, all security professionals agree that the weakest link to any secure system are the fallible humans (and I’m one of them) who operate this stuff.

Journalist reports that he sees a man holding a flame thrower threatening to burn everything down may only cause minor heat damage.

They thought it did … so they tried turning it off then on again … and it exploded.

That satellite was about to reveal company secrets

Meanwhile … America: … mmmmm … I don’t know who to vote for … it’s so hard … I don’t know what to do … I’m so confused

*Erection:
You can tell capitalists are getting desperate when they start offering brides to voters during an erection

You can tell capitalists are getting desperate when they start offering brides … bribes … to voters during an election

EDIT: beautiful how a simple typo can grab people’s attention so much

The difference this time is that just about everyone now knows someone who either died or was severely affected by opioids. No better way to drive home the truth than by direct examples and demonstrations.

Personally, I know four people who died of drug overdoses, a dozen more in my extended circle of family and friends and two who are living vegetables from overdoses.

I’m willing to bet that you probably know someone yourself.

If you tell people that if they do a certain thing that it will most likely kill them or have a high likelihood of killing them … eventually enough people begin to understand that.

Children and young people are also very intelligent people with no preconceived or prejudiced ideas of their own (unless taught by someone else) … so they are quick to learn from the mistakes of others around them if given the chance.

Wealth was always concentrated in Rome.

Yes it was … the trouble was that in the early part of the empire, there were many wealthy individuals and a fairly large wealthy middle class citizenry … wealth was concentrated but at least there were many, many wealthy people.

But generally speaking (I’m no historian, I’ve just read lots about it so this is my own interpretation) … as the empire grew, conquered more and stretched itself further, more wealth went to the wealthiest, and the military needed more soldiers, being a soldier meant you had to be citizen but you had to leave your land - leave your land, you made no money, so you sold your land - now you are a full time soldier with no land and your only life is the military - meanwhile your land gets bought for cheap by wealthy land owners - multiply all this for about a hundred years and now you have a few wealthy families with all the land (and all the say in where to fight) and a landless middle class who have no option but the military … the wealthy don’t want to give up control so they free up citizenship to more and more non-Romans … now you have a situation where all of mainland Rome is owned by a few people with all the money (but do no actual fighting), the rest of the people there are either slaves or don’t own anything and the army is becoming filled with people who have never been to mainland Rome and have allegiance to it.

Wealth got concentrated to a very small group of people … and nothing was left to support it … so it collapsed.

We are basically doing the same thing today and the only way we seem to want to sustain it is through perpetual war (which can not be sustained either)

Like I said … I wouldn’t worry about it because we’ll probably repeat it again in a few hundred years … we always have.

That was one of the theories around the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire … towards the end, wealth became so concentrated to just a few wealthy families, empire kept expanding and having to pay for stuff but nothing was left to pay for anything else and every other non-wealthy citizen had to fend for themselves. The machine got to be so top heavy that nothing was left to support it so it just slowly dissolved and crashed.

I wouldn’t worry about it though … just give it a few hundred years and we’ll probably do it all again.

just get another credit card

You are technically correct … but there are several convoluted rules and regulations controlled and mandated by the US that it makes it either very difficult or impossible for most countries to do business or trade with Cuba.

Cuba can trade with anyone they want … it’s just purposely made so difficult that very few do so and the ones who do provide very little in exchange.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/19/facebook-posts/cuba-can-trade-other-countries-heres-some-context/

Cuba can’t pay because Cuba can’t conduct normal finances with the rest of world because of the US embargo

It’s like having having someone handcuff you, cuff you feet and pin you to the ground and rest their knee on your neck and ask you why you can’t get up on your own.

You can control a nation’s ability to import and receive nuclear weapons, especially if you are trying to control the supply of arms … it doesn’t mean you get to starve and decimate an entire country just because you don’t like their politics or they don’t happen to support you.

This just begs the question

Why do we allow a major embargo of an entire island nation and allow an entire people to live without the proper necessities and resources in order to maintain their nation?

We’re just going to normalize how a billionaire can just dump millions of dollars to political campaigns and tell people who to vote for?