Some points of interest:

Corporate profits are soaring. After taxes, they now take 12.3 percent of national output, far above their postwar average of 7.3 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019, Ip noted. Corporate profits over the same period have risen 50 percent.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that since 1979 the productivity of American workers has grown 90 percent while the pay of the typical worker has grown 33 percent. Had wages tracked output, the average worker would earn $16.40 more an hour today.

The profits are concentrated among the largest corporations. Earnings at the 500 biggest US firms rose 28 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2021, and their profit margins reached 14.8 percent. The seven technology giants known as the “Magnificent 7”—Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla—grew their profits 63 percent.

Extract from Dropout’s “Breaking News” episode entitled “True Facts About Grant Anthony O'Brien (Part 2)”

(Grant) Now, here to read my social security number (chuckles) is a field reporter named after the amount of people I performed oral sex on in one night in 2012. (more chuckles)

(Brennan, speechless) …Hello…I'm…"Fifty"?

(Laughs from crew members in the background)

(Lily) In one-

(Brennan) That can’t be right.

(Grant) There… was a party that I went to.

(Laughs from crew members in the background)

(Tao) Whaat?

(Grant) They had parties underneath the supermarket in Brooklyn.

Also, the kiss was a big deal not just because it was gay but because the trans actress was HIV positive. They wanted to show the world that you can't contract HIV just from kissing someone. Bear in mind, the AIDS crisis was still fresh on people's minds in the 90s.

CPR.

There was one episode with a trans woman getting different gender-affirming operations, including breast implants. It showed the procedure, and (what I found so fascinating that it's stuck with me for decades), as soon as the doctor put the implant in, a censor blur popped up on the nipple.

And you just know there was a meeting between the TLC lawyers and the editors and producers of the show to discuss what the difference was between a "man nipple" (can be shown) and a "woman nipple" (no no must obscure, 'tis naughty). And they decided that as soon as the implant goes in and the nipple has more mass behind it, that's the moment when it becomes a woman's nipple and must be hidden to comply with TV rules.

But it's the same nipple. On the same person. I know what it looks like; I just saw it. But TV and obscenity rules are rules, and the rules say woman nipple = sexual and therefore explicit, but man nipple = neutral, just fine.

nonschizophrenics will simply never understand that "what if it was all in the person's head?" will never be scarier than a monster that actually fucking exists.