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Of all the theories to pick, that one seems a bit lacking as the reason the US is so religious is that all the religious fanatics moved there when Europe were moving away from that sort of stuff

It's only whataboutism if you avoid answering. I gave examples of other times where self-imposed rules were blatantly broken while those who broke the rules claimed no wrongdoing.

You're actually the one using whataboutisms as you're calling out similar communities as problematic without actually addressing the near-identical issues with Hexbear (additionally many of those communities have rules against direct links, unlike those on Hexbear).

Additionally, the reason there's no proof Hexbear users are behind brigading is because they're defederated at the moment - Hexbear users can't vote on other instances, hence me saying it'll be an issue when they re-enable federation. Going back a few months, I have seen a large number of posts with sensible debate being downvoted and a disproportionate number of comments from Hexbear users, checked "The Dunk Tank" (slop's predecessor) and sure enough there's a post linking directly to it.

And the US doesn't torture prisoners. And Russia didn't invade Ukraine. And nothing happened in China on 4th June 1989...

The rules are completely unenforced, and also generally don't apply for actions against people on other instances. Take a look at slop as the biggest example where they link to other instances and swathes of Hexbear users go brigade that post without even taking the time to factcheck, and look around at their other communities and you'll find plenty of similar ones.

Hexbear is a tankie instance that celebrates & encourages doxing, trolling & personal attacks and has large communities dedicated to brigading.

They disabled federation due to technical issues regarding domain registration but are planning on re-enabling it once it's fixed

I think the different instances help with that, as it encourages at least some interaction outside of your direct bubble...

That said when Hexbear re-enable federation I very much doubt "open discourse" or "actual conversation" will be the results

No, 1-12 are influenced by the old base 12 Germanic/Norse system, which is why -teen starts at thirteen, same as in German (11: elf, 12: zwölf, 13: dreizehn, 14: vierzehn & so on)... The -teen for 1x in english is also a carryover from this, being threeten, fourten, fiveten etc. with only numbers over 20 having their orders reversed - German has something similar with "und" only appearing in numbers over 20. English did historically too, eg. "four and twenty blackbirds".

Base 20 was historically used for large numbers though, eg "four score and seven years" by Abraham Lincoln, which was a poetic way of saying 87 inspired from Psalms 90:10, which says "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." in the King James Version, which reflects that using base 20 for large numbers (and not just 80) was not uncommon in the 17th century.

Gemini and Copilot are often overly cautious with their guardrails on generating anything violent or misinformation, although super easy to bypass in most cases

Images are a lot easier to create "good enough" generations of locally compared to text and video... I imagine the driving force is probably horny people like 99% of other innovations on the internet

A lot of people here are saying it's cheaper to run in person...

For purely theoretical degrees, that's not true: having to maintain a campus is way more expensive than just doing things remotely, but for more vocational degrees it definitely is: imagine having to send a fume hood or injection moulder or oscilloscope out to every student as well as chase up getting it returned, along with shipping any hazardous materials like batteries, acid, biological samples etc. out, and verifying that people are actually handling those correctly?...

For science, medical and engineering degrees, online tuition is just going to produce people vastly underprepared for work in anything that requires the skills & knowledge the degree is meant to provide you, and as they're the most expensive programs to run you can subsidise them with the other degrees, but only if they're treated as comparable, ie being on the same campus.

for speedtest, fast.com is pretty great as it's a pretty lightweight page and uses netflix's servers which mean it's not really possible for ISPs to game it

That's a bit harsh, prison is a way nicer environment than school

All of space is moving, you need to fix a reference point, there's nothing to stop you making it earth