Not saying that the US isn’t in fiscal crisis, I’m not at all qualified to say either way, but: Comparing government balance sheets to household finances is a age-old conservative folly designed to encourage the working class to support smaller government in order to reduce taxes on the rich - in other words, encourage the turkeys to vote for Christmas (or in this case maybe Thanksgiving?).

The fact is that government finances and household finances are not at all the same thing, for many reasons I’m not qualified to explain, but a couple of obvious ones:

• Households can’t choose to tax the rich to increase income.
• Households can’t print money.
• Households can’t secure low-interest loans that extend beyond their lifetimes (i.e. issue bonds).
• Households don’t typically find spending increases income (i.e. Government workers pay taxes, infrastructure investment drives growth which increases tax revenue, etc etc).

The UK Conservatives used this line of reasoning around 2010 and it’s led to 15 years of growth stagnation with no real improvement in the debt situation.

I think I’ve figured it out somewhat.

Handling instance invite codes is definitely missing from the official stoatchat-for-web repo I built my frontend from - see: https://github.com/stoatchat/for-web/issues/639

But I think what confuses things when you ask around for help is that AFAIK a lot of people are using various forks and pre-made docker images that patch things like this.

Is a peacoat a coat soaked in pee?

If the US gets a new president in 2029, I’ll be devastated if they don’t take the opportunity to do a major speach or something against the backdrop of a half derelict East Wing - it would be iconic.

I also wasn’t aware so had a search.

If you don’t mind Reddit, this thread is interesting… https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/133lcyl/can_someone_explain_what_happened_with_the/

Or there’s this… https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion

Edit: Actually this is probably the most comprehensive summary: https://schneems.com/2021/05/12/the-room-where-it-happens-how-rails-gets-made/#the-basecamp-incident

I get that, and it was almost certainly Booking.com who leaked it as I have had shady messages through even their own messaging platform before…

I think what baffles me is that this gets so close to convincing (if you’re not internet savvy), and then they throw in something so bizarre like having a username of “Rus Education” 🙄

Unfortunately, I just don’t have the social capital to move people off of Meta messaging services… A good 50% of my friends have ditched FB, but somehow saw WhatsApp as the solution 🤦

I assumed because the category was “things that aren’t actually real chips / potato fries” - by being real pieces of fried potato these are disqualified 😅