• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Democrat in NYS here. The right wingers I know are often pissed that we have to obey laws that make sense for cities but don’t make sense for rural areas.

    Similarly, they get pissed that billions of dollars go to NYC when we have important bridges and roads that have been closed for years.

    I understand why it is that way. I understand it’s hard to have it any other way. And I understand our country is facing more important things right now. But I can also sympathize a bit.

    NYC is the money maker because money gets put into it which makes it the money maker which is why money gets put into it, etc.

    A lot of these areas used to be economically successful and aren’t anymore. It does suck that I’m stuck here due to family and friends. Sure I could pack up and move to a liberal city but I’d be leaving a lot behind and my son would be without any extended family. Can’t do it.






  • Yeah the funniest part of his new special was where he said he would identify as a woman to get into women’s prison and make all the women suck his lady dick.

    Hilarious.

    /s

    He’s a comedian. He has the right and the freedom to say whatever he wants and people have the right to laugh. Similarly, people have the right to not laugh, and the right to criticize and argue with him. We have the right to point out that a lot of people who are laughing with him aren’t doing so ironically. They’re laughing because they wholeheartedly agree and find trans people disgusting and worthy of ridicule.



  • I imagine your priorities become different.

    You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.

    Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.

    Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.

    Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”

    I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.

    I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.




  • As another commenter rightfully pointed out - you don’t get to be independent and isolationist at the same time.

    Indigenous island tribes may have had this luxury for a time, but once your nation is known by another nation, it’s compete or die.

    China and various other countries would immediately start filling the power vacuum. Your standard of living would drop immensely and your grandchildren would be consuming Chinese culture within a decade or two at most. The American dollar, America’s total dominance in science/culture/medicine, the spread of the English language - these could all be wiped out fairly quickly if America just threw up its hands and said we were done.

    What you’re suggesting would be like Apple saying they’re going to take it easy and just stick with the iPhone 15 for good. The result would be an immediate power grab and some other company would pull ahead, leaving Apple so far behind they’d never catch up again.


  • As a devout lefty who thinks America and capitalism need a lot more checks and balances, I have to somewhat disagree with you.

    When we talk peace, we are talking relative terms. And I suppose I should also add prosperity into the mix.

    I think the West has enabled a period of relative peace and prosperity never before seen. And I think it’s getting, overall, better every day. Technology and capitalism, for all their evils, have lifted billions out of poverty and saved billions of lives.


  • Depends. He seems pretty out of it right now and I don’t know how much he would really accomplish. He’s also pretty old and unhealthy.

    But if he comes back angry and the people around him are effective, then yeah we would start looking for other places to live. I’m not trying to live in a Russian-style handmaid’s tale.

    I don’t think it’s dramatic to suggest Trump may actually put an end to our democracy though. Another Lemmy commenter summed it up best. They pointed out that we on the left may have disagreed with McCain or Bush, but we never once feared that they would seize power or leave NATO. We trusted them to at least keep the ship afloat and respect the basic tenants of our free and democratic nation.

    With Trump, we don’t have that. All bets are off because he’s an unhinged narcissist. He would leave NATO and risk the Pax Americana that has stabilized the world for almost 100 years now. And he would do it for money, for negative attention, or just because someone told him he couldn’t. America has some pretty major faults but China and Russia are not ready to take the reigns. Say what you will about the West but we at least endeavor to protect human rights. I think anyone who isn’t trying to build on the current Western peace is incredibly dangerous in a very scary way.