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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 12th, 2024

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  • To be fair, streetcars were sometimes a grift that weren’t intended to work in the first place. Not all, but some.

    See, electric companies pushed for new suburbs to be built with electric streetcars, because if you need to put in all the wiring for a streetcar, you might as well just electrify the entire suburb while you’re at it. Which is what electric companies wanted; the streetcars were just an excuse to get the wiring in. They didn’t actually care if the streetcars made sense or stuck around, as long as the electric wiring stayed put.

    So electric companies would happily push for nonsensical streetcar layouts that maximised the number of electrified households, and then someone else would come along and say “this is idiotic, let’s rip it up” (possibly because it’s true, possibly because car/oil $$$) and the electric companies wouldn’t push back, because they didn’t care either way in the first place.


  • Stalin never even claimed that the USSR had achieved communism, yet somehow every grandma in his “state socialist” empire thinks full communism was reached and the state withered away like Marx predicted. They believe lies he never even told.

    He did claim to be communist though - as in, he is ideologically driven to attempt to bring about communism. So calling the USSR “communist” is 100% correct. And naturally, what do you call life under communists? Communism! (This is wrong, but it’s an understandable switch-up).



  • In case this is real: you realize that trains already exist, right? Crackheads don’t “steal the copper from the rail”, in part because the rails don’t have copper (they’re made of steel, the copper is in the overhead line), and in part because the rails are giant continuously-welded steel rails nailed to concrete sleepers; you can’t just pick em up and walk off with em.