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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I wouldn’t jump to compare Reddit to Amazon. Amazon may have operated at a loss for a few years, but it seems pretty clear that Bezos did have a roadmap to make it a profitable business and made decisions to make progress towards that relatively early. Reddit has never been a profitable business and has no real way to get there that doesn’t alienate increasing numbers of their users. It’s basically in a race to cut a deal that makes spez some money off the whole thing before the bottom falls out from under it and someone else is left holding the bag.

    Even when Amazon expanded into categories and took losses on them, Bezos was able to do so knowing that it would damage other businesses that didn’t have the deep backing needed to outlast him, eventually leading to many competing retailers in that sector shuttering and Amazon being able to raise prices and rake in money once there wasn’t really another competitor in a given field. He might be a massive scumbag, but spez is a massive scumbag and an absolutely inept businessman. For all his assholery, the best case scenario for his legacy is driving reddit into the ground and managing to foist it off on someone else before they realize it’s no longer worth anything.


  • I’m rather curious how you relativise a lot of the US’ recent history. Sure, Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t pillars of stability, but I think the balance comes down pretty hard against the US with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations as well. Our continued support of Israel and Saudi Arabia isn’t looking so hot either.

    Then we’ve got military intervention in the Dominican Republic and support of Trujillo until he stopped being useful, installing the Pinochet regime after helping topple the government of Salvador Allende, support for the military dictatorship in Brazil, as well as backing dictatorships in Argentina.

    Our colonization of the Philippines was pretty awful, as is our continued treatment of Puerto Rico as essentially a vacation spot and Caribbean ghetto.

    You get the idea. Seriously, I’m hard pressed to think of an instance in the last century where the US has intervened on the international stage and actually has a credible claim to having done good with the exception of World War II.

    The government has created and fought for stability for a small subset of monied interests and has largely left the rest of us to jump for whatever table scraps they deign to let fall to us plebs. As @Nokinori mentions, even domestically, things are increasingly coming undone at the seams and looking ready to get worse.


  • He would leave NATO and risk the Pax Americana that has stabilized the world for almost 100 years now.

    Stabilizing the world is just flat out wrong. At best, the US has stabilized itself and a select few allies. Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan most recently, along with a whole bunch of countries in Central and South America over the last 100 years would probably feel quite strongly that the US has been a disruptive force for them.