It’s a tactic that owners of capital have been using for a very long time going all the way back to the slave plantation owners.

The vast majority of people in the American south could not afford slaves (let alone a plantation!). In order to cover for the fact that a tiny minority (maybe 1% of the population) controlled 99% of the wealth, they institute a system where whites were considered superior so that the working class could be convinced they weren’t being screwed and would participate in the continuation of free labor for the plantation owners. After the civil war, they used Jim Crow to perpetuate the same system, albeit with slave wages rather than literal slavery from the designated underclass.

Once the Civil Rights era came about, it became no longer tenable to use African Americans as the designated underclass to keep the working class in line. It’s no accident that immigration became a hot button political issue right around the time the civil rights era ebbed. Immigrants from Latin American became a convenient replacement. It was more socially acceptable to ostracize outsiders who spoke a different language and because of immigration laws, you could legally discriminate against them the way people used to discriminate against African Americans. The ginned-up outrage over “crime” and “sending rapists” mirrors how society used to talk about African Americans before that ceased to be acceptable.

The group that is the designated underclass has changed, but the result is the same: owners of capital get cheap labor. The underclass does the worst least-paid jobs with no real protections while the working class is distracted from the fact they only getting the crumbs from the capital owners. They are trained to blame those under them in the social order rather than the ones who have created the system. Note: having “illegal” immigrants is a feature, not a bug in this system. Undocumented immigrants still work, but only off the books. This means they will work for sub-minimum wage and the true employer can officially disclaim ever employing them (by hiring via a contractor). You also don’t have to pay them social security or Medicare benefits down the line, but they often do pay into these systems.

Inflation is stubbornly high in the USA, the ridiculous tariffs are hugely damaging, housing costs have soared, it’s hard to find a decent job, and consumer confidence has soured. The federal government is malicious and untethered.

Nonetheless, if you’ve had money invested in the stock market over the past couple of years you’ve made out like a bandit. My portfolio is up 8% just since the beginning of the year and its all just index funds. VYMI (international value category) is up 40% since this time last year, I should have been all in.

It seems completely uncoupled to the underlying economy, defying gravity. But that’s where the obscenely wealthy keep much of their money, and if you have some surplus income you get to come along for the ride. If you don’t, like so many people today, all you can do is watch from the sidelines.

Every once in a while you see a story about a ‘poor’ man making $200k+ and not saving anything.

There are two main reasons for their fiscal incompetence (plus a bonus one):

1) They look at their neighbors - the guy to the right has a boat, the guy across the street has a ski house, and the guy to the left has a beach house. They buy one of each. Or they pick one and pay twice as much for it.

2) They do something similar with kids. Often they will buy a great house in a good neighborhood/suburb ‘for the kids’ and then send them to private school. The entire point of the house in the right location is that it has a good SCHOOL. If you are sending your kids to private school you should be living in a much cheaper house. Just because you have kids does not mean you should spend all your money on them.

Bonus reason: Total and complete fiscal stupidity buying worthless crap. Prime example is Time Shares. [ Even if one makes sense now, ten years later your financial situation will change. Either it will be too expensive or too cheap - and you will not use it. Even point systems are just later regrets]

Try this:

Everything in moderation.

Coffee isn’t going to hurt you, and can be beneficial. So long as you’re not drinking it several times a day, every day, for the entirety of your adult life.

Same for alcohol. It does actually have some benefits. But in small doses. Not all day, every day, to excess.

Same for… almost literally anything. Salt. Sugar. Fat. All the stuff that’s “bad” according to cheap headline-grabbing press. You need it all in some amount. Just not to excess.

Same, even, for things like vitamins. No vitamins = you’re dead. Enough vitamins = you’re fine. More vitamins = you’re going to see no benefit and/or have problems (Vit D can be overdosed on, for example).

Everything in moderation. Eat red meat. It’s fine. Just don’t eat it every single day for every meal for decades on end.

And then you realise - that’s why you get different answers from these studies, based on who’s running them, who’s reporting them, what they’re testing, and who they are trying to target with the messaging.

Caffeine has benefits.
Drinking caffeine to excess outweighs those benefits with downsides.
The beneficial effect is rather small.
The counter-effect is rather large.
Your body consumes more than just caffeine alone.

Which explains ALL those results you gave, without having any untruths in there. Now replace “caffeine” with pretty much anything - all those things I listed above. Even drinking too much water will kill you (and it’s not as much as you might think).

Everything in moderation, and then you won’t have a problem.

Same for things like cigarettes, even. If you only have a few, it’s not going to kill you. But if you’re smoking 20 a day for decades on end? Well, hello lung cancer. It’s why the most dangerous drugs are often the ADDICTIVE ones. Caffeine included. People have died from drinking too many caffeine-based energy drinks in too short a period of time.

Nah, its ruining chess too. Sites like chess.com its getting harder and harder to find a decent game where your playing a similar ranked human and not getting your shit kicked in by some cheater using stockfish.

There is a very important reason why in history, fraud was aggressively hunted down and destroyed. There comes a time when people will just stop trusting the system. Social media goes back to more decentralized items, perhaps just direct messaging or servers like Discord, or IRC channels. People stop using auction sites, and go back to word of mouth, or trusted supply lines with buyer guarantees. When finding a deal online becomes a gamble, we may even see a swing back to physical purchases, where a successor of Sears that may be a bit more expensive, but has a solid warranty, with some type of assurance that everything bought in the store will be useful and not junk.

If banks start becoming untrustworthy, people will take their cash and use their mattresses as ATMs. Same thing will happen with mail order, or other scamming vectors. For example, fewer and fewer people sell stuff on auction sites because someone will take the item, replace it with a lesser one, and then say they were cheated. Even if the sending of the package was filmed and signed, this rampant fraud can easily make it unprofitable for someone to work with auction sites. Maybe it might be good to use those old malls and start having flea markets again.

I live not too far from a big bus station here in the UK (Golders Green). About 70% of the bus lines operating from here are now EVs, and the remainder are all hybrid and tend to run on battery when in and around the station. The cab rank outside now mainly has LEVC EREVs which run on battery the vast majority of the time. And increasing amounts of the passing traffic are EVs too. It’s substantially less smelly and the air is cleaner than five years ago, and it’s also much quieter. Hampstead, St John’s Wood and Marylebone are rife with Taycans and other pricey EVs, and again, the air is very obviously cleaner and less stinky, and the roads are much quieter, at least until some tit in a Lambo decides to rev their engines on a high street to impress themselves and their long-suffering partner.

All the above anecdote, of course, but it matters to me because I am personally experiencing the benefits, as is my family. And its backed up by the air quality monitoring carried out by London’s local government. ULEZ has helped massively too.

Another popular way is date based numbering. So the kernel just released could have been 2026.02, the next prolly 2026.05, the last 2025.11. It doesn’t really matter.