Oh dude, I’m watching the X-Men cartoon from the 90s for the first time and I totally hear you! (Yeah, it was sitting in my backlog, late is better than never I guess).
The humans find any fuckin time to mess up with them!
I mean, just type in X-Men '97 on your preferred search engine and you’ll see that it’s in production. Although, the writers and actors strike is ongoing so…
I've appreciated a lot of these stories so much differently as an adult.
Xavier, the good guy, is loaded and low-key supports mutant genocide because his motivation is to maintain the system that allows for out groups to be genocided.
Magneto is attempting to make everyone safer by dismantling the systems of oppression.
It was the loudest and smelliest country I’ve ever been to.
I’ve never seen a country where the cross-country sleeper train bathrooms had literal holes on the floor to shit and piss out of. You saw the tracks wizz below you from the toilets. No plumbing, just excrete onto the tracks.
Chennai train station had the strongest most overwhelming diarrhea smell I ever experienced in my entire life.
Dudes were creepy as hell. They see you’re white and then you’re swarmed everywhere you go. People trying to scam, trying to appoint themselves as your tour guide and won’t stop following you and trying to guide you to “the mall”. Calling you Harry Potter because you wear glasses. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I was a woman there. I shudder to think.
Crossing the street means walking into oncoming traffic and hoping and trusting everyone to just drive around you. Absolute fucking chaos. The people are not warm or friendly. They stare and get too close and touch you all the time. I kept having people touch my shoulders and try and touch my face when I was in public or queuing.
I never ever want to return to India ever again. I don’t recommend any of my friends go there. There were very few positives about that trip other than it being an eye opening experience as to how over 1 billion humans on the planet live.
They stare and get too close and touch you all the time. I kept having people touch my shoulders and try and touch my face when I was in public or queuing
This is more of a culture thing, I used to do it a lot when I was younger (it’s considered friendly)
To someone from my culture and to me when I was there, I hated it. It felt the absolute opposite of friendly. It felt predatory. I didn’t feel safe, I felt uncomfortable, I felt I was a freak and an oddity and it made me embarrassed to go anywhere. And this was with Indian-American guides who were familiar with which places to go to and which to avoid for tourists.
I say this to you with no disrespect to you as a person. I’m just trying to state things without sugarcoating them. I appreciate you explaining the cultural perception.
It felt predatory. I didn’t feel safe, I felt uncomfortable, I felt I was a freak and an oddity
I feel no connection to this culture whatsoever, I would happily follow your cultural norms if ever am lucky enough to visit the West, so you are not offending me, and I appreciate the honestly too :)
Train toilets dumping directly on the tracks isn’t excessively unusual, we still have trains here in Austria that do that although it is definitely being phased out.
It is not about having your particular data. Is about the aggregated data of a population. On a shallow level that information can be used to engineer ads to appeal to a greater audience. On a deeper level, population dynamics can be used for nefarious purposes such as driving them to an agreement that wasn’t in their best interest. Brexit and the Trump election are two examples of this being possible thanks to data from Cambridge Analytica. See voting paradoxes and Asimov’s psychohistory that each day is getting farther from fictional.
It’s just sureal to me. Since they know I was up till 2:00am on a Wednesday wrenching my hog like there was a million dollars hidden inside Donald Trump was elected president.
Landlords aren’t inherently evil - it’s a useful job… a good landlord will make sure that units are well maintained and appliances are functional. A good landlord is also a property manager.
Landlords get a bad name because passive income is a bullshit lie. If you’re earning “passive income” you’re stealing someone else’s income - there’s no such thing as money for nothing, if you’re getting money and doing nothing it’s because someone else isn’t being properly paid for their work.
So basically, a good landlord doesn’t make any actually passive income? That makes sense. I just see a lot of people on here saying things like “we should kill all landlords” and they just sound ridiculous to me.
People speak in absolutes as it gets the point across. Also socialism is pretty hot here I myself am a democratic socialist and I have said “kill landlords/rich/owner class” but in reality when the socialist party get in the owner class wont be murder but forced to pay more taxes, slowly forgo they’re business and property.
it may not but as a guess, society tends to move inline with bettering the human condition capitalism was better than mercantilism but still leaves many to suffer, so socialism is the natural direction unless something comes up that we haven’t thought of yet.
Because fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with landlords as people. They live in an unfair system and they’re doing what’s best for them. That’s true of the vast majority of people. Change the system, create one where doing pro social things are rewarded, and landlords will become beneficial actors. Honestly, this is true for the vast majority of people. Very few people really need “the wall”
People say that because outside of modern times in the first world, landlords = the mafia. Without expensive police, landlords have to enforce their own rent. So if you’re socialist or any other political movement bad for landlords, they probably make up the biggest paramilitary force in your country and if you don’t decapitate that chain of command fast you get dumped in a cave with 20,000 other skeletons.
And even in a first world country, the police manhours dedicated to evictions and the private security industry funded almost entirely by landlords is something anybody who wants to deal with housing prices is going to have to worry about.
So basically, a good landlord doesn’t make any actually passive income? That makes sense. I just see a lot of people on here saying things like “we should kill all landlords” and they just sound ridiculous to me.
To me the question is whether the result of what you’re doing makes the world around you better or worse. Would the people living in your place be better off if you were out of the equation? Then you’re a bad landlord.
If you’re making money from providing labor for the people who live in a place you own, and they’re paying your costs to do so, I think there’s a case for that being a reasonable occupation to hold. If there’s an issue with it, it’s not my highest priority, and there’s definitely some value in flexible housing stock for people.
If your goal is passive income, or you’re making money from owning housing and denying that ownership to people who need a place to live, then you’re behaving as a parasite, and I think it’s reasonable for people to give you an amount of respect proportional to that.
How many landlords actually do it as a job? And how many just collect the checks and hire bottom of the barrel contractors for anything that involves work? In my experience it's been the latter.
I have never had a single landlord where this isn’t the case, except in instances where they are too cheap to even hire professionals to do things that they don’t have the skill to do, and they get their dipshit son to “fix” the sink that fell clean out of the kitchen counter with a lumpy bead of clear silicone and a 1’ piece of 2x4 wedged underneath.
I think most of the older landlords were like this but their renters are very reluctant to move. The landlords that suck have high turn overs - and recently there’s been a wave of idiots buying apartments to park their money and get “free” income - so the environment is actively getting worse.
Another thing that pisses me off is that I’m literally paying >100% of the cost of the property over time, yet they retain full ownership. It’s an investment with essentially zero risk, if you have a tenant that isn’t a racoon.
Not sure I have a good solution for that issue, honestly, but the idea of it irks me.
My overall position boils down to: Housing should never generate profit. A landlord can take pay for the work they do, and put money aside for maintenance, but there should never be a profit made on rent.
Sure, let’s assume that’s true. The difference though is, I own the property. I get something out of the deal other than a temporary roof over my head - something I would argue is a human right.
If I were renting, I would be paying all those same costs, plus a profit margin - and I wouldn’t own anything at all. Someone else gets to cash out on the investment that I entirely paid for.
You misunderstand. The comparison I’m trying to make is this:
Scenario 1: You own a home mortgage-free. You pay maintenance costs and taxes on that property.
Scenario 2: You own the value of the same home in cash. You rent a home to live in.
How high does rent need to be before it becomes a better financial choice to choose scenario 1 over scenario 2? The break-even point is around the price where you would end up paying off the entire value of the home over ten years.
There are some interesting scenarios I’ve seen contracted out that you might be interested in.
Scenario: Co-op housing, you lease a lot with housing (based on your desired price point) with a 100-year lease. You may “purchase” a portion of the capital that the co-op housing has on your leased property (lets say 100k value property). The invested money can be used for loans or other means (like how capital can be used for leverage) through the co-op (think State-employee-credit-unions which are co-ops themselves). Any interest or value accrued while maintaining that lease is passed onto the signer of that lease. Aka, 100k property sold 20 years later for 200k you receive a 100k “buyout” from the co-op if you’re leaving.
Heavily regulated with plenty of stipulations of course so nefarious actors and “flippers” don’t buy. The co-op retains the property for future housing even if you die at 118. Have seem family clauses so it can be passed down as well. There’s just so many versatile and victimless situations that can be created which have the community and the individual in mind for fairness.
Also, I would just like to point out that I have very rarely had a landlord do maintenance on the property I live in. One building hadn’t seen a lick of maintenance in over 30 years, until I finally convinced them to replace the oven.
it would surprise you to learn that many business owners are shit at their jobs. You’ve never heard of mechanics ripping off people for headlight fluid? Or shoddy construction work?
This is the main issue. There’s not enough skilled workers to actually make enough houses and homebuilding supplies. It’s so expensive and the average person can’t do it up to code.
Before, if you had some small amount of money and a lot of time you could just buy a small plot and build a house yourself. Now you’d be an idiot to waste time doing that. No one will buy your handmade house even if it’s up to code.
Apartments in cities used to be cheap because the city stank of horse manure and smoke, and there were no elevators. Basically we’ve made the world much nicer and realized people will pay an arm and a leg for a nice place to live.
Actually the housing crisis has gotten so bad that I’ve seen quite a number of “handmade houses” sell in my region (US Pacific Northwest). And they’re selling for way more than just land value…
there absolutely should be a profit for rent. Being a good landlord is work, work should be compensated. Taking the risk of ownership (low though it might be) should be compensated.
The issue isn’t profit. The issue is a) artificial lack of supply driving up prices b) greed and exploitation of basic needs.
In some countries, like some of the USA, you get clean drinking water pumped into your house for your toilets. However you do the math a) people need to work on the system to keep it working and they should get paid a living wage b) water is a need even more than housing. We pay for water, and people make profit on it. How you pay for it - taxes, city rates, privately - whatever, you pay for it.
that isn’t the issue, just like paying rent isn’t the issue. it’s the amount which is.
the solution is simple and already exists: universal basic income, and make basic needs like water and rent limited by this amount.
Tap water is not really a for-profit enterprise. Even Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, though there are some well paid lawyers and engineers on staff, has to justify their rates and re-invest it all into water supply reliability. No shareholders making a profit on tap water.
UBI would not prevent landlords from profit. If we can afford to spend trillions on concrete bridges, we could build public housing in every city.
People have some myth of passive income. I sold all my rentals because they were taking to much time. I never turned a profit but it was good for my taxes. If you want to slum lord you can turn a profit but even I dislike those people.
Market rent is basically set by current home costs. Any long term owners who have 15+ year old tax base essentially get to pocket the difference due to lower property taxes. Any newer buyer who is renting can only cover costs.
That is incorrect. I can tell you’ve never rented to people rent is set by the market. Supply and demand.
It doesn’t matter if the house cost 800k. If the market rent is 2k a month. That’s all you’ll get.
In the area where I had my rentals, the houses are 500k but the rent is only 1k. Now I bought in 2008 and only paid 120k. So only lost some money but I made it up in tax benefits.
People really don’t understand the economics of landlords. They think it’s all money in the pocket. It’s not. It’s a very thin profit margin with most the benefit being taxes.
there’s no such thing as money for nothing, if you’re getting money and doing nothing it’s because someone else isn’t being properly paid for their work
I earn around 3 to 6k a year of passive income from owning stocks. It’s passive because once I’ve bought the stocks I no longer need to actively do anything to earn interests but it’s not “money for nothing” either because I had to work to earn the money to invest and having one’s money invested into someone else’s business is always inherently risky. Interests are compensation for the risk I’m taking by buying shares in a company and betting on it’s success. Renting property is effectively the same thing. It’s not necessarily what you do that makes it good or bad, it’s how you do it.
I’m not sure what angle you’re coming from here. Anything with a risk involved is inherently not bad? or the origin of the investment capital was morally sound, so the profit off the investment must also be morally sound? I’m not even going to touch on the fundamentals and optics of the stock market at this point and what it has done to the economy, business practices, enshittification, etc etc.
Anything with a risk involved is inherently not bad?
No, but that it’s not money for nothing. It’s compensation for the risk I’m taking of never getting my money back.
It’s not obvious to me that any of this is inherently bad. Like with everything it depends on how you use it. Greedy landlords that don’t do their duties are bad. It’s not the being landlord itself that’s the issue. Me owning a small part of a company isn’t bad - that company treating its employees bad and polluting the envoronment is.
I’m not delusional with righteousness to the point where I don’t get what you’re saying. Obviously we’re all having conversations involving the nuances so it’s a legitimate debate. It’s late and I’m having trouble breaking it down into a short reply without a wall of text so hopefully you’ll fill in the gaps of my meaning.
I suppose it depends on what “hat” you’re wearing. Are we individuals surviving and trying to continue in a turbulent society like 99% of the populace, or are we participating and forming a society we wish to see our younger generations take over? No matter my rhetoric, I don’t fault anyone for the actions they take in today’s world so don’t take anything I say personally. That being said, “land” is a finite resource. There is no getting over or around that. It’s a simple physics matter that everyone is just glossing over for their financial portfolio. These are the “Oil Baron’s Lite” of the old world brought to the new. You can’t think of the new world without the realization that the world is getting smaller over time. I refuse to believe anyone is that dense when it comes to physical manifestations, the “world pie” in being continually split up amongst the more fortunate.
Same with the company. Sure, owning a small portion of a profitable company is fucking fantastic in today’s eyes and society. Look at Hershey or Apple with the continued labor practices everyone promotes with purchases. You would be financially insane to say those are bad companies to be invested in. Is that the end to the societal metric though? Profit over outcome? Which is your formula, “Past societal norms + societal progression” or “societal progression + Future societal norms”.
The past “Venture Capitalist” in the 1920’s might’ve gotten away without knowing where the actual “labor” or environmental degradation of your invested companies profit might impact or subjugate from. In the 2020’s though? You’re either reaping too much of a profit to care, or you’re too lazy to do due diligence so you’re not worried about the actual risk of an investment after all.
To emphasize this, I’ve had both types of landlords:
One apartment I moved into was available because it was the owners residence, but he had to move away for two years because of his job. He wanted to move back afterwards, so he put some money into refurbishing an already decent place, and rented it out to me at a price that mostly just covered mortgage, maintenance, and wear & tear. Best landlord I ever had.
Afterwards I spent two years in a typical predatory unit that was a normal house, but had been, as cheaply as possible, been renovated/converted into a place meant for packing as many renters as possible. It was expensive, there was always something wrong, it took ages to get anything fixed, and it was obvious that the owner who lived elsewhere only used the peiperty as passive income. The only reason why I stayed that long was economic desperation, and a housing market that was awful.
In a U.S. context, it is actually really simple. Racism and the age old practice of othering types of people by associating them with a drug (cocaine = rich and white, crack = poor, black and dangerous). That’s it, the full answer is of course a lot more complicated but in the end it is exactly still this dumb and cruel.
politicians across the political divide spent much of the 20th century using marijuana as a means of dividing America. By painting the drug as a scourge from south of the border to a “jazz drug” to the corruptive intoxicant of choice for beatniks and hippies, marijuana as a drug and the laws that sought to control it played on some of America’s worst tendencies around race, ethnicity, civil disobedience, and otherness.
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
Right, because alcohol is the white man’s drug. Plain and simple.
They made alcohol illegal for a while but it turned out to be too onerous for the white people so it was legalized again. Marijuana laws have caused massive damage to minority communities, so they remain in place.
I could see 50+ years from now some Johnny Appleweed from Humboldt County with a family history in black market grow/distribution op running for President.
Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.
Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.
Talks all about this with wave after wave of synthetic drug scares. LSD, ecstasy, GHB, etc. All follow basically an identical pattern starting with a moral panic by mainly religious shitheels and corporate media.
Why be legislators and make progressive policies (ewww hard and so boringggg) when you can just tell stories about who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t?
I don’t know too much about GHB, but from the little I’ve heard it sounds like it has a risk of deadly overdose, which I don’t think is the case for the first two examples you mentioned. You probably know more than me so perhaps you can enlighten me if they deserve to be grouped together?
People from Nixon’s cabinet have straight up said that they made both illegal and started the “War on Drugs” as justification so that they could lock up opposition leaders in both the black and hippie communities.
My wife is nearly home. System alerts me. I quickly tidy my day’s mess. She doesn’t need that after a big day.
She arrives. Gate opens for ger automatically.
As she approaches the door, the light turns on for her.
Her night time play lists starts on low volume, overriding mine.
A leopard approaches the house. The house robot with bolt on subscriptions, (the expensive “hunt and defend” add on), wreaks carnage on said leopard, only to find it was a child trick or treating. Lawyers for subscription bot are arranging payment to child’s family for their lost family member.
I’ve never in my life been on the more hygienic side of things. I’m a barely functional mess of adhd and autism that launched itself into grad school in a new country. I don’t wear socks more than 36 hours (if I put them on at 4pm, I’ll still wear them the next day, but otherwise no).
So, probably do every day if you want to be on the safe side
German as a foreign language instruction, so I can teach integration courses. I’ve been here for several years (including some during my undergrad), and am really integrated and fluent (C2, with a bachelors in German) though, so that won’t work for most people right away 😅
If I leave the house, I’ll change my socks and undies.
If I don’t leave the house for a few days (my partner and I work from home) I’ll wear the same socks and undies for a few days. If I’m mostly inert nothing gets messy!
I have to get up early once a week to drop my kid off at a before school activity. I put on a fresh pair of socks before I go. Then I come back home, shower, and put on a new fresh pair of socks. Putting on a pair of socks that have been on dirty feet would just be weird.
I’m probably dumb and wrong, but I feel like Firefox is going in a bad direction along with Ubuntu.
Like I think in 10 years there will be a business tier paid Ubuntu OS that ships with Firefox, and after like 3 or 4 iterations, it will be the IE of the future.
Current Firefox user. Writing is on the wall. Looking for new browser. And OS.
Lynx /s
This comment was written through Lynx. No, seriously.
Edit: I couldn’t add the screenshot via Lynx as it seems to attempt resolving “.”: Post “https://./pictrs/image”: dial tcp: lookup . on 8.8.8.8:53: no such host.
But anyway: https://i.imgur.com/fza1EN8.jpg
Oh man, that brings me back. Lynx was really important back when GPU support for Linux was less good.
Much time was spent navigating NVIDIA Website in Lynx trying different driver versions. Then the autogenerated Xorg.conf would always be wrong. Kids these days have it so easy. Get off my lawn.
(Seriously though, I like this strange new world where Linux is super easy to set up)
Like I think in 10 years there will be a business tier paid Ubuntu OS that ships with Firefox, and after like 3 or 4 iterations, it will be the IE of the future.
I would love that future, to be honest. Currently, Chromium based browsers have no serious competition. Worst case, we can (and have already) forked Firefox (e.g. to Librewolf).
So usually people do install Linux software from trusted software repositories. Linux practically invented the idea of the app store a full ten years before the first iPhone came out and popularized the term “app.”
The problem with the Mullvad VPN is that their app is not in the trusted software repositories of most Linux distributions. So you are required to go through a few extra steps to first trust the Mullvad software repositories, and then install their VPN app the usual way using apt install or from the software center.
You could just download the “.deb” file and double click on it, but you will have to download and install all software security updates by hand. By going through the extra steps to add Mullvad to your trusted software repository list, you will get software security updates automatically whenever you install all other software updates on your computer.
Most Linux distros don’t bother to make it easy for you to add other trusted software repositories because it can be a major security risk if you trust the wrong people. So I suppose it is for the best that the easiest way to install third-party software is to follow the steps you saw on the website.
My mom was a fast order cook and when I was a teen she got me to help her run a fast food shop our family ran for a few years. She taught me how to work in a kitchen and how to cook.
Her basic rules were … if you aren’t cooking you’re cleaning, if you aren’t cleaning you’re cooking, and if you aren’t cooking or cleaning, get out of the kitchen.
once I had a flatmate that every time he was cooking he was leaving the kitchen like a warzone and he had used every utensil available in the kitchen. He somehow thought that it was faster for him to focus only on the cooking and after it is completed, to do all the dishes, pots, utensils, glasses, oven trays, scissors, screwdrivers, hammers, drills or whatever else he may had used.
I learned one of my best cooking lessons from Hell’s Kitchen: taste taste taste!
As long as your food is safe to taste (i.e. not raw poultry or something), taste it, at every stage of cooking. You’ll find you get better at tasting foods and predicting what things your dish needs.
Some cooking is much, much easier than others. Making a pizza isn’t as much an issue as, say, preparing an exotic bird. Cooking involves a level of aesthetics and physics that I could never master for the very reason I could never scrape the iceberg of those two skills.
For me there are few feelings better in the world than having an entire meal not only cooked by yourself, but grown too! I love grabbing veggies from the garden and making dinner. Something so cool about being almost entirely self sufficient.
That’s awesome. I had it on a compilation record from fat wreck called, “Short Music for Short People” had like 100+ songs and the rule was they had to be 30 seconds or less. Had some bangers, that one included.
I mentioned this one to my friends the other day and it took so much convincing before they actually believed me! Definitely an interesting one. Venus also spins the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
It doesn’t. Gravity is caused by mass not spin. The planet’s rotation about it’s own axis will create a centrifugal effect that offsets gravity, but the effect is negligible for anything rotating as slow as planets.
The others already said the core aspect, but to get specific: the difference between your weight on the pole and your weight on the equator differs only by like .5% or something like that. This is the difference between spinning and not spinning (centrifugal force and no centrifugal force). (And also the difference in radius, since the Earth’s rotation makes it a tiny bit flatter than a perfect sphere would be)
Short: It completes a full 360° of the sun before the planet itself does a full 360° spin.
A few sentences longer:
In planet Earth human terms, we have defined one day as “how long it takes the planet to do a full 360 degree rotation”. Example: You spin a basketball on your finger and it does one full rotation.
A year to us is “how long it takes the planet to go around the sun”. Example: You hold a basketball out in front of you and you do one full rotation.
You’re close. Not the tilt of its axis, but its rotation around its axis (day) is slower than its rotation around the sun (year).
Earth’s axis is tilted at about 23 degrees, which causes the seasons. Venus, by contrast, is tilted only about 2.6 degrees, and thus basically doesn’t have seasons in a comparable way.
Earth’s axis does very slowly wobble around (precession). Over long enough time scales, this affects the seasons, and it means the North Star has not always been aligned with Earth’s North - once, North pointed at a patch of black sky and the North Star was just another star appearing to rotate around that arbitrary point.
I’d imagine Venus’s axis might also wobble at least somewhat, but I haven’t actually looked into this at all.
Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole because the day and year lengths are so extremely close to each other, and Venus rotates around its axis clockwise (unlike the other planets) while spinning around the sun clockwise, and its tilt is so slight… so as it spins around the sun, it rotates just enough to keep one side facing the sun almost all the time. I ended up googling whether it was tidally locked, like the moon is to Earth (such that we only ever see one side and it never changes) - and apparently it would be, but its atmosphere is so wild that it prevents tidal locking. But it almost is. It kinda has a dark side, and a light side, like the moon, but there’s just enough mismatch between the yearly rotation the axial rotation that the side facing the sun changes slowly. This is the first article I found.
From that article, it seems like the daylight hours you’d experience standing on the surface of Venus would be 117 Earth days of light, before it got dark again. So the sun would rise, and then you’d have about half a Venus year (aka about half a Venus day, too) of daylight before you’d see night again. And then it’d be night for the rest of the year. But still scorching hot because atmosphere.
Anyway this is blowing my mind a bit. I feel like I should have known this - I used to be obsessed with astronomy when I was little. Maybe I knew it once and forgot. I don’t know. But dayum. Planets are cool.
So far so good. In a smaller community I feel more responsible for contributing to discussions. Others seem to be engaging too with thoughtful comments (not just karma-farming inside jokes).
This is helped by the fact that new interesting threads are not immediately buried in heaps of new content, so you actually have time to think of an answer that someone might actually read and reply to. I realize that this is mostly a function of the current scale of the Fediverse and that the more it grows, the more it might just turn into Reddit.
Luckily we offer a guillotine protection insurance policy for an affordable $85,000,000 per year. It’s optional, but the upfront cost could be $650,000,000,000 if you get caught in a guillotine without it. Just be sure to get dragged to one of our in-network guillotines.
Sounds good. What’s the deductible and cover rate tho? I mean you’re certainly not paying everything once I got caught in a guillotine even tho that’s why I pay you monthly for.
Capitalist was correct. Look in Europe, the social health system is non stop attacked and set in danger. More and more, capitalist system wants health to be a an open market
Same in Canada. Every year we hear of at least one province debating privatizing healthcare as though thats gonna fix our problems and not just make it exponentially worse.
Meh free healthcare is in our constitution, just like many other countries in Europe. The only place experiencing this problem to this degree is the United States. It’s not a capitalist problem at all.
Also, this is why we can’t have healthcare. We don’t know why we deserve it.
I was talking to a person once about single-payer Canadian healthcare. And she said, but what if someone doesn’t work? Should they still get it?
[I mean, yes.]
I said, how come you don’t ask that question about cops and firefighters? You don’t say, well if someone doesn’t work, should the firefighter’s come to their house if there is a fire? We have single-payer police insurance and single-payer firefighter insurance.
Socialism in EU may not have the meaning you think it has, it’s very distinct from communism. It can be called social democracy, like Bernie Sanders, maybe.
For example, the previous French president was from the French Socialist Party and the current primer minister of Spain is from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, and they are not radical lefties.
In this case, socialism means accepting the free market capitalism for the efficiency it may bring to the economy, but with good regulation and, mainly what the USA lack, a good social safety net (free healthcare, free education etc…).
And that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated cliques that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.
If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.
One popular instance, Beehaw announced that they defederated from lemmy.world and shitjustworks to protect itself from an onslaught of new folks. Beehaw’s admins say that lemmy.world and shitjustworks have let in a lot of folks who aren’t well vetted and are the focus of most moderation action, so they’re restricting access from those two instances.
And I’m over here on an instance with 600 users like, “Hm. That’s a pity. Glad I’m not as basic as those poor folks.”
One benefit that people don’t talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We’re not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
The problem is that it’s worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It’s antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.
Perhaps keeping topics de-centralized is a key part of keeping systems from turning tyrannical. That’s the theory behind the term “totalitarian”: that too much unification of thought produces behavioral restrictions, via the justification that if the truth of each topic is known and indisputable, then there’s no reason to share power in society as long as the person in power knows the One Truth.
Centralized systems designed to uncover one clear answer, such as stack overflow, have every reason to fight against redundancy in answers. Anything rightly called a community though should not be built around the (totalitarian) idea that conversations are best centralized and made non-redundant.
Big important questions need to be rehashed millions of times, not just covered once with millions of audience members.
99% of the content people post and interact with doesn’t have a reason for multiple copies of it’s conversation to exist. Most content is consumed not discusses.
And the vast majority of the users consume the answers, not the discussion. They don’t ask the questions, hey look them up, and if no one asked, or no one answered, they can’t find anything and just give up. They don’t ask.
Most communities do not like when people come in asking the same basic questions over and over again. I don’t think you understand how link aggregators work.
reddit is a link aggregator. its for people to find links, post them to relevant groups who then evaluate the quality and relevance of that post, and then vote to bring it up or down in the feeds of people subscribed to that group. that’s how reddit works. its a very poor way to hold discussions because it means any unpopular opinion gets downvoted by ignoramuses who don’t understand that they’re evaluating for quality not for agreement. reddit is not a place for discussion.
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