And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope!

Violence must be organized and accountable to be just. Non-violence is always preferred, and is always the initial approach.

But if there is a credible threat, defensive violence is OK as long as whoever is being violent accepts whatever accountability may come.

I’m conflicted about it, but the fact is one reason the US has been so successful in leading the world in relative peace (as compared to WWII and before, not compared to the ideal) is because we have so much capacity for violence in our back pocket.

“Talk softly and carry a big stick.”

It would be wild if stuff like this is some proof of life after death.

Hmmm maybe we should ignore #1 and focus on #5 then

If Mastodon wins out in the long run the only reason will be persistence.

All these other “like Twitter but ______” micro blogging or whatever sites only stay viable while they’re profitable.

If Bluesky or Threads become (net) unprofitable, they’ll die. Mastodon is already unprofitable, so that can’t kill it.

I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.

For #2 some person or group needs to develop a Mastodon app (FOSS obviously) that has a “just do this part for me” option, probably automatically enabled.

#3 is on us. We have to do what we can to make Mastodon (and Lemmy) more open and accepting without falling pretty to the paradox of tolerance.

#4 is hard… Although I think if Mastodon follows or tries to replicate the “early” Facebook user experience where most or all of the content people got was from people they follow, that could be better. The only challenge is that algorithms tickle our anger/hate/disgust impulses to drive and maintain engagement. That’s some very strong “lizard brain” stuff.

So… let’s get going y’all! :)

If "disagree with* can be interpreted as “irritates me”

“Not gonna lie” “If I’m being honest” “To tell the truth” (older)

Ugh.

They’re such idiomatic crutches. Just fucking talk. Say what you’re gonna say. If you need an “um” just say that. Don’t waste my brain’s clock cycles interpreting those phrases only to realize they’re meaningless…

Oh I call the cables I use to wire up my controllers “suicide cords” because it’s just the hot, neutral, and ground hanging out one end, waiting to touch me…

Soundproofed Faraday Cage box.

I dunno I think there’s probably been one or two “honest” inflations where a vendor has seen her costs increase and has only raised her prices just enough to cover those increases.

But yeah, I bet the majority of inflation has been rooted in avarice by shareholders and owners.

The Gate

It’s fascinating that this isn’t something that is always thrown back in the so called “pro life” person’s face. They’re only pro birth. They don’t care if the baby that comes out is fed, clothed, housed, eventually educated, etc. Or at least, they don’t believe there’s any collective responsibility to take care of that baby.

I’d make phenomenal amounts of money available to states to implement gun safety legislation at the state level. Red flag laws, domestic violence, background checks, training requirements, locks & storage, etc.

If I have enough Congressional support I’d do head-to-toe Article III reform, add a bunch of courts at every level, maybe add a level between the appellate and supreme, and get a couple more Justices on SCOTUS to cover the added workload of supervising the courts at the level below SCOTUS. There’s currently more circuits than Justices so a couple of them have responsibility to review multiple jurisdictions which I think makes for… challenges.

https://fortune.com/2023/12/19/biden-canceled-one-hundred-billion-dollars-student-debt/

They’ve forgiven $132 billion so far. It’s not what we wanted, but unfortunately the Republican stacked Supreme Court said Biden couldn’t do blanket forgiveness.

It’s almost like it matters not just who the president is today, but who the president was for the past several decades. And who is and was in Congress.

We can build on what Biden and the Democrats did accomplish, but only if we give them the tools to do so. If we want more stuff like the child tax credit expansion that we got in 2021, we have to reelect Biden and get strong Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. If we want more stuff like the inflation reduction act that is creating jobs and repairing infrastructure, we have to vote for Democrats.

They’ve made it clear they want to do more (i.e. build back better, blanket student loan forgiveness, protect abortion rights). Those long drawn out fights with Manchin and Sinema weren’t just for show. They were a clear indication of what the Democratic Party wants to pass if it has the votes in Congress.

As a member of the Oregon Trail Generation (a sweet spot on the boundary of Gen X and Millennial), I think people who were in elementary school in the 80s have a pretty special set of skills where we can use “old” technology, and were frequently the ones who had to help our elders with it, and we have seen new technology (home computers, the Internet, smart phones) come into being and mature.

So we didn’t just learn how to use tech, we learned how to grow with tech as it grew.

I’m guessing large language models - imitative so-called “AI” - is going to do that same sort of growth and change arc over the next couple decades. It’s likely I’ll be pretty mystified by it, but hopefully my kids will be playing with it and growing with it as it grows into a mature technology.

I like the Action Lab guy going through the explanation for this https://youtu.be/ezUmSO_OAxY

Sadly enough the answer right now is to keep voting for the Democratic Party candidates and wait for the Boomers to age out.

If the Republican Party ever escapes its fascist fever dream or a new party takes their place, we should start looking at alternatives to voting Democrat.

PS - my theory about the Boomers is that lead poisoning brain damage explains most of their bullshit.

It has to be a team effort, but those companies also engaged in a multi decade effort to underplay the impact of human activity (specifically theirs) on the climate and the dangerous associated with those changes.

Apparently due to a new clean fuel rule for ocean going vessels they stopped making sulphur oxide clouds and that is the main reason for there recent spikes in ocean water temperatures. It took 3 years to see a manual reduction in sulphur oxide pollution. No calamity in the world economy. Just an unexpected revelation of how much that pollution was cooling the ocean.

https://youtu.be/dk8pwE3IByg

So yeah, we can’t just turn off the O&G sector. But we can set ourselves some pretty aggressive targets and make them.

• not buying obviously useless crap (i.e. does one really need a motion-activated, LED illuminated salt-and-pepper shaker?)

https://youtu.be/X7HmltUWXgs

Yeah I gotta jump on the pro mega thread bandwagon here. On r/politics I can only imagine how worthless the front page would become if they had let every big story be posted in individual posts.

And we can’t rely on users, because some people will like different sources (WaPo, NPR, CNN, whatever) more than others. We also don’t want some bot magically hiding “duplicate” posts because who knows if it will do a good job? A big long list of similar submissions collected in one place for everyone to see is the best worst option.