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Or maybe you are applying an unreasonably high burden of proof here

Your common oscilloscope is common ground referenced. You attach to your test circuits ground with the typically black alligator clips coming off the probe and then read voltage at a point with the test lead. A decent differential probe like you might be thinking of usually costs about as much as a decent hobbyist oscilloscope.

OTOH there are more people than ever earnestly doing all those things. If we take the barrier to entry for publishing being as low as it is as a factor in you and many other professionals having written top quality technical books then I for one am thankful for this process you speak of.

Doritos are bad because poor people can afford them. Making your diet mostly organic greens is good because you need lots of money to afford them and you will be underweight and incapable of performing peasant style manual labor.

The cognitive dissonance here is striking. A growing man needs a shit ton of calories to grow to their full potential. You might as well fill your caloric needs with "junk" food otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect.

Because the idea of class interest being split along easy to understand lines like billionaires versus everyone else or rich people versus poor people is a fallacy. In the real world your economic interest relies more on exactly how you make your money, in what industry, in what region, what your assets are, etc, etc. A teacher in California might have close economic interests with billionaire group X and a truck driver in Wyoming might have close economic interests in line with billionaire group Y.

Everything else is just propaganda to try and give a compelling narrative to these unintuitive groups. Because what we are actually talking about is essentially a classification problem in highly multi-dimensional space there really isn't a coherent narrative. The only way the propaganda narratives make sense to you is if you have shut down your critical thinking skills. Being confused means you aren't a brainwashed partisan.

And? Mind-body dualism as Descartes imagined has been practically disproven on almost every front.

That doesn't seem too bad to me. It isn't trivial to prove the earth is flat. 10th percentile IQ seems to be around the functional illiteracy threshold. The military won't take them because as much as they have tried they can't seem to get that 10th percentile trained in just about anything. If such a person looks out into the distance, sees that things look flat and not like a sphere, and then watches some video with half-baked reasoning telling them they are right then I'm not sure how you could realistically convince them otherwise.

Let's do a thought experiment. Floating in an otherwise completely empty region of space is a bomb. It explodes. For quite some time after the explosion entropy will be decreasing in that region. I really don't see the mystery here.

It is actually very easy to correctly assert certain statements outside of your domain as long as the domain you are butting in on is obviously fraudulent, pseudoscientific, full of charlatans, practitioners don't have any skin in the game, is almost entirely funded by political money (and wouldn't be funded otherwise), or is heavily based on some sort of mysticism, and I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. Turns out that is a lot of domains of human activity.

You don't have to touch it or eat it ;)

Use a fume hood or extractor and really learn how to solder properly. It sounds like you are either running your iron too hot and/or you are trying to melt your solder on the iron and pass it to the joint. The pros use a TON of flux because it practically solves the oxidization issue and helps a lot with spreading the heat to where you want it to go. Half of your temperature issues can be solved by either preheating your boards or spot heating with a hot air rework tool.

Piracy is very cool. It allows people left out on the price-consumption curve to enjoy what everyone else is enjoying. Usually children, students, and people living in third world countries with low incomes or bad exchange rates. I pirated tons of software when I was younger, you probably couldn't price software cheap enough that I would (or could) actually buy it. Now it simply isn't worth my time to pirate.

I still pirate roms and games that aren't sold though :)

You don't actually act or behave in accordance with that "belief". You would be incapable of perceiving anything, taking any action, or making this post.