• 2 Posts
  • 239 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I hate to defend a major party, but it does feel like people expect Democrats to fix all the nation’s problems when they have utterly no power to do so.

    The reality is most Americans are not with Bernie on the things he’s talking about. The average American has been heavily propagandized by the corporate media (not just news media, all of it) to love corporate stuff. Capitalism good, socialism bad, cheap gas good, electric stoves bad. Go to most Americans in the rust belt, that’s how they think.

    If Democrats are supposed to skip to the part where they implement policies that no one currently supports outside of liberal intellectual circles with all the power they supposedly have, that’s skipping to the end. What’s Bernie’s solution for getting people outside of Vermont on his side to begin with?


  • We should remember that most Americans still live in blue states with sane governments. The federal government can’t just barge in and do whatever it wants, and if tries to do so, the social contract that binds the nation together is broken and secession becomes a real possibility. But that’s unlikely because Trump is far too clueless to know about any of the problems he’ll run into if he tries to implement any of his plans.

    Which is fine for him because it was always a con anyway. He talks and acts out of his ass. What he will do is anyone’s guess, but it’ll at least be restrained by what’s realistically possible.





  • Wired headphones. I like that they just plug into whatever without syncing, are cheap, light, and last basically forever. Of course I need a dongle for the vast majority of modern phones, but I a have a sturdy solid dongle and other than the annoyance of having to carry it with me (and using the word “dongle” to describe it) it works quite nicely. A wire clip is also a necessity.



  • Because of slavery, basically. The US couldn’t have a directly-elected president at founding because that would mean slaveholding states would get less power per person actually living there, unless they wanted to let slaves vote which of course they wouldn’t. So 3/5ths compromise, electoral college, yadda yadda yadda, and 250 years later power still is filtered through the states. So now that that’s the case, giving any new people voting rights would change the power balance between the slaveholders right and abolitionists left. So as a result, places like PR that have an abnormal amount of minorities Democratic voters tend to be unable to get Congress to grant them voting rights.





  • Yeah it’s that terrible, but look at the rest of the world. Putin enjoys a lot of support from the same people he’s sending to die, Modi in India wins elections by a large margin on a platform of basically “Fuck Sikhs and Muslims”. Add China and basically most of humanity lives under someone who is blatantly racist, corrupt, generally horrible, or a combination thereof. And Western Europe doesn’t have a leg to stand on either, the UK ignored dire warnings and voted for Brexit without even understanding what it is.

    Humans don’t believe what’s objectively correct, they believe what they want to believe. This makes feeding people what they want to hear a very successful strategy, and one that psychopaths have an advantage in pursuing.




  • It really comes down to feature removal. Elon annihilated Twitter’s staff, and the more features they can cut, the less staff they need. It may not seem like much to maintain a block feature, and if you have a staff, it’s not. But you do need to have probably some sort of blocker backend service, a blocking UI, probably an unblocking UI (I dunno if that’s a thing I don’t use twitter), storage that keeps track of who blocked who, and somebody who knows how all that works.



  • Musk has said that humans drive with only eyesight, so cars should be able to drive with just cameras.

    This of course assumes 1) that cameras are just as good as eyes (they’re not) and 2) that the processing of visual data that the human brain does can be replicated by a machine, which seems highly dubious given that we only partially understand how humans process visual data to make decisions.

    Finally, it assumes that the current rate of human-caused crashes is acceptable. Which it isn’t. We tolerate crashes because we can’t improve people without unrealistic expense. In an automated system, if a bit of additional hardware can significantly reduce crashes it’s irrational not to do it.


  • It works for me because I’m into a lot of the stuff discussed on Lemmy. My biggest problem with reddit was that at some point they seemed eager to smoosh all the subs together into one big Basic Betty fest. For example having r/all be a mandatory sub and having a million default subs…It kind of felt like towards the end everyone was discussing the same stuff on every sub, and it was basically the same stuff being discussed on Twitter (and many posts were just pics of tweets).

    I know Lemmy kinda has some similar issues, but because the whole ecosystem is its own niche it still works for me.