Sounds as if there is a point at which digging and refining is more expensive than buyers are willing to pay, so when demand goes up it takes time to expand supply.

If mainstream news sources do pick up this story, they'll likely cite this article as the source. That's how journalism works. It's not all investigative journalism blowing the lids off of things. They start with knowledge sources. They check the sources against independent ones before publishing, so that they're not just repeating propaganda, but they also tell you where the information came from initially. They may add context from their own knowledge, but the actual news rarely originates with them.

If authentic being-in-itself is truly random, then how can it have identity? It can't have memory and it can't be influenced by events.

Here we're talking about individual behavior: you usually choose chocolate ice cream because you, personally, like chocolate. That allows individual predictions, rather than the aggregate ones of psychohistory.

Another outgrowth: Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a reaction to the end of Prohibition, turning the prohibition internal rather than universal.

And... he denied that the song was about seeking gay sex. Which seems bizarre. Nobody else in the Village People agreed with him about that.

Mostly, he made it pretty clear that it was all about the money.

That doesn't make the US more reliable. It may well make it less reliable. Putin cannot live forever, but Trumpism can. What makes America unreliable isn't one politician, or even a cabal of politicians, but a large section of the electorate who wants exactly what Trump is giving them. They will continue to vote for that even if he dies.

Even if his opponents take over, it will only be temporary. Trump's constituents will always be seeking to win the next election. And since the American system is designed to prevent a President from taking absolute control, it's practically impossible for Trump's opponents to make deals that can be relied upon.

None of that is what philosophers actually do for a living. It's comparable to reading an introductory math textbook and coming away with the impression that academic mathematics is about learning to multiply and divide really, really, really well. (And I've seen people who do indeed get that impression.)

It's difficult to describe what philosophy "truly is" because any sufficiently well-defined area of philosophy ceases to be called philosophy. What we call science was originally "natural philosophy", which is why we grant experts in the field Doctorates of Philosophy. The same is true for law, linguistics, and many other areas. What remains is a mishmash of topics unified only by the fact that they do not yet have rigorous boundaries.

I can say, however, that if you go to an academic philosophical conference, it will not sound anything like what most people expect. They are not re-re-re-debating the meaning of the Ship of Theseus, nor are they counting angels on pinheads. Much of it will sound tedious and irrelevant, but the same goes for any specialized field.

I apologize that my above comment sounds dismissive. I was speaking to somebody who I think has experience in the field, and so my statement took a lot of things for granted.

But generations of philosophers who have described the next couple of thousand years as "footnotes to Plato", and treat philosophy as if it can only be understood in terms of one very dead guy... It turned me off philosophy for a very long time. Maybe they aren't stupid, but they at least lack the tool kit for showing me the merit of their position.

If one consumed nonfiction media one might get a different impression.

The system got a series of lucky breaks for about a century: immense natural resources, and the European economies destroying each other. This obscured the deep flaws in the system and has made it practically impossible for Americans to see them. Quite the opposite: whenever the flaws manifest, we try to solve them my entrenching them further.

We adapt to the audience expectations. I don't think Shakespeare audiences were dumb for not paying close attention. That's just what they thought the theater was for. They were neither smarter nor dumber than us, just people.

There are no "disaffected Trumpists" who would vote for that anti-wokist Democrat. They might sit out but they will never vote for any Democrat. They've spent too many years certain that people like the Clintons and Obama are bomb-throwing anarchists who want to force them to get gay married. The existence of AOC doesn't reduce the "antichrist" energy thrown at any other Democrat. It just convinces them that every Democrat is AOC.

I don't know if running AOC would actually help. I think that the left-wingers who make excuses not to vote for Democrats will still not turn up even for an actual socialist. They'll find some excuse by which AOC is now too right-wing for them. But I'd be willing to consider it if I thought that there was any chance of bringing out a few left-wing non-voters.

Republicans will present any candidate as a socialist extremist anyway. They can't vote against her any harder than the voted against Biden. (They only lost 2020 because of a literal ongoing pandemic being wildly mis-managed. Democrats will likely not get that opportunity again.)

I am one of those "centrist" Democrats who doesn't particularly want the far-left wing to control the party. But I'd vote for that in a heartbeat over continued dominance by the alliance of theocrats and billionaire-worshippers.