pooooka

Reduced funding has nothing to do with degraded service. MTA is one of the worlds most expensive public transit systems and 15-20% of it's 21 billion dollar budget is being consumed by debt. The term enshittification, in my view, is just a progressive catch phrase for systemantics.

Any system grows to fill its known universe and as it grows it operates in unpredictable ways. And the unseen changes dictate what the system really does (not it's job title). MTA is not here to be your public transportation. It's job is to generate massive debt for investment bankers on wall street who get paid through nefarious interest swap agreements. And how many other city metro's are operating under the same investment banking schemes? From what I could tell LA, Denver, Phili, Detroit and (up until recently) Chicago.

Ashokan carvings are not historical documents attributed to the historical person of Buddha. Which is what I'm referring too. And my textual criticism on Muhammad stands. We do not know which historical or religious texts attributed to Muhammad were destroyed by Uthman, but most scholars agree that it was substantial. The criticism is valid and true and anyone who has issues with this should provide a counter argument...And I'll be the first to admit that Christianity has issues too. There were a plethora of translations that were taking place. For instance, the story of Jesus and the prostitute (stoning) is a late interpolation added after the fact (300 AD). But that doesn't denote the etymology and historical documentation in the new testament and the same standard SHOULD be applied to Buddhism and Islam and the Viking lord and everything else this poster was claiming as BS.

Paul's letters reference new testament scripture and those can be dated roughly 60 AD (so within the life time of the witnesses). The new testament correctly described pontius pilate as governor of judeau (something Tacitus failed to do) and seemed to have referenced the conflict between Tiberius and Sejanus. The Jews (Hellenistic sadducees) blackmailed Pilate knowing that he was a Sejanus ally (John 19:12). The names used in the NT also match first century names used by Jews in the second temple era....And keep in mind Luke was an educated man who wrote the Book of Luke in highly polished greek and as a text-book styled greek historical document...Ragnar Lodbrok, on the other hand, has no first hand historical accounts, only pure speculation from events and etymology associated with the name. Buddha has virtually no textual documents placed within 900 years of his death. Islam went out of its way to dictate only one source of the Quran and destroyed much of its history that Uthman didn't like. Historically you have to give the Christians their due for producing mass amounts of verifiable kone greek parchments and scrolls during the first three centuries.

LOL. Well said...Seems as if we're on some dystopian track that's eventually going to transform a RealID card into something like a Common Access Card (or worse).

What I get from this is that the professional academic community -- as a whole -- has hit critical mass, which has produced a cottage industry of paper mills and fraudulent services to support said surplus.

Socialism wouldn't be the answer to this because socialism is famous for struggling with surpluses and shortages. All socialism would do is clamp down (hard) on academic's, which case you wind up with the famous shortage where not enough PHD's are available to produce research for an industry.

And that's not a problem specific to just socialism, that's the fallacy of central-planning. The US government clamped down on welfare fraud and the result were freak government social workers sniffing people's bed sheets and rooting through drawers and forcing everyone to document partners.

This is the situation where there needs to be a market correction because the alternative could be far worse.

The US did this dance with the devil in the pale moonlight before anyone, way back in the 19th century. Tens of thousands (millions) of wounded soldiers came back from the civil war in chronic pain and addicted to morphine. They put them on "lists" and prescribed them dope and it spiraled out of control. It got so bad that they engineered Heroin to be a safer alternative. And people forget, but the temperance movement wasn't just focused on alcohol. They were the primary forces behind the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. And these people weren't bible thumping crusaders, many were like early feminists that lost children\husbands to drugs and alcohol. I think Europe eventually comes around to this same conclusion when enough damage has been done. Metering out hard drugs has always been a road to ruin.