It depends where you go - e.g. the entire purpose of chapotraphouse is to dunk on people, and the users on that instance constantly crawl out from under their bridge and harass innocent passer-bys in other communities. But if you block a few notable places, which sometimes your instance does for you (I note that yours in particular does not though), then overall the Fediverse can be quite a pleasant place!:-)

Tbf, there’s no “right” anymore in the USA - it got eaten up, vomited back out, re-eaten again, with that process repeated a few times, and is now known as the “Alt-Right”, before being subsequently rebranded yet again as “Q”.

In other words, the old “GOP” (e.g. Mitch McConnell) is virtually dead at this point, or at least barely hanging on by the slimmest of threads, while now long live the “GQP”, that is an entirely different beast.

And I think I am hearing similarly of the UK as well, with Brexit?

So if you meant that we need a healthy balance of diverse viewpoints, then I am 100% with you, but if you mean that we need to pollute true scientific facts with the craziest batshit insanity that anyone has ever heard of, then not so much:-). Diversity among viable solutions = good, whereas a literal Civil War b/c the “right” is throwing a temper tantrum = not so much. Even/especially the very people in charge… they are so scared of what is happening, the dissolution of a nation right before all of our eyes, and on their watch too.

Fwiw, a lot of us were ready to leave it anyway. Reddit used to be a place for left-leaning people, though I would guess more of the progressive liberal-relative-to-center variety, due to it being started from within the USA (I joined it quite late so not totally sure).

Its downhill slide was long and convoluted and not evenly distributed across all subs. There were pockets of resistance, and probably some niche communities remain even now that are halfway tolerable. Anything worth doing takes real effort to build, and some people have put in those efforts and held on tenaciously. And, to be very clear, morally as well: e.g. places that try to reach the maximum audience possible to combat misinformation, or suicidal or similar behaviors - those places NEED to be on Reddit, yes and even Twitter/X, and 🤮 Facebook too, to achieve their aims of maximal outreach (at which point they could do dual duty to funnel people to the real places too:-).

For those of us that want deeper discourse, Reddit was not meeting that need, but Lemmy/Mbin very much does:-). Btw fascinating related article: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

So that’s one category of people, and another is the set of those who just needed to be awakened in order to realize what was going on. Maybe they were busy with children irl or some such and didn’t notice Reddit’s slide. I am glad that we can provide a home to them as well - it enriches us all to have more people here (mostly).

I wonder if part of it is that climate change might mean the death of modern human civilization, so could the slim hope of life as a slave seem more preferable than the greater certainty of death as a free agent?

I cannot fathom that, but then again that’s why I am on the Fediverse rather than on Reddit. :-P

Great synopsis. I may have found a twenty first definition if you want!?:-P

Explained in this post to [email protected].

Supposedly it is a pejorative label applied to authoritarian communists, particularly Marxist–Leninist socialists. I presume it is the “pejorative” part that people do not like, b/c many of the places labelled as tankies by others unabashedly do precisely that!

I’ve only used the term twice myself, both kinda self-questioning what it even means, but if it is truly pejorative, then I should stop regardless.

A lot of the rage was from their entire race being literally enslaved by the Empire, so they were angry, as anyone would be. Also, a lot of the “intimidation” scenes from the OG movies were when Chewie was trying to appear thus.

But also like their whole thing is to live in harmony with nature and have honor, so e.g. they all have retractable claws (not joking), but you never see those b/c they refuse to use them against a fellow sentient being, even when immensely angry. Edit: if it helps to know, they are for climbing.

So if anything I think their culture, at least pre-Empire enslavement, would bias them towards the Light side. Though literally everyone, and especially in the face of such evil being directed at them, would face great temptation to use all that power granted to them to achieve an end that they considered “good” - e.g. wiping out the “evil” enemies that enslaved them, as in every… last… one…

Right, civilization might survive… maybe, possibly, hopefully, just like if we all were to play Russian Roulette. Still doesn’t sound like a smart idea to me to mess with something known to be so dangerous.

At the absolute minimum the changes will be cruel, and hundreds of thousands of people are already dying from each of many individual events like hurricanes outside of their normal seasons, at intensities never before seen in a particular area.

So my thought: at the very least we could care? Except I was wrong - we can go lower, so much lower. We do have the satisfaction though that whatever comes, we brought it upon ourselves.

Yeah, the increasing likelihood of Russia or China using nukes to get their way was what I was thinking, especially with talk that the Western nations might be giving Ukraine the go-ahead to use those weapons to strike within Russia itself.

The plastic sperm issue actually doesn’t sound so bad in comparison, bc fertilization treatments might work even if needing to extract outside of the body first. Overall, it still sounds less dangerous to me than e.g. a young woman living in Florida these days without access to money to leave the state for medical care.

I frankly have no idea what to expect about climate change at this point - we’ve blown far past all the targets and seem now to be in uncharted territory, according to what little I understand. I do notice far fewer birds, bees and other insect life, and I recall hearing how in the Antarctic a few months back there was a single day where the temperature spiked by +70 degrees F (~40°C). I can only imagine what that would do to e.g. Texas if it went from already 100 to then 170 degrees, even if only for a few hours. “Coral” is the least of the issue iirc, they were (by virtue of being sensitive) mainly indicators of the actual events, which we won’t know until we see it, but scientists are saying that it’s no bueno. Anyway, it seems like the changes could wipe out all mammalian life on the planet, but then again maybe not!?:-P i.e. it could be really bad, but it could be less so, we just don’t know, and as you said, we mostly barely care (“we” meaning voters, so chiefly Boomers & evangelical Christians, as Trump and the Republican party’s biggest bases).

And yet we seem to care a great deal about tHe EcOnOmY tHo - so it’s a choice of prioritization to pick what “matters” to us.

Thanks for sharing the link - TIL something!:-)

Can something be done? Possibly, who knows?

Will something be done? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

This isn’t the only potentially human civilization-ending event I first heard about this past month, and that doesn’t include climate change that we’ve known about for literally decades, which many of the major players involved including the USA and China still don’t seem to care much about even now.

There is a saying: “put your money where your mouth is”, meaning that if people want to truly “care” about something - e.g. to be Pro-Life - then we need to actually get up off the couch and do something about what we otherwise claim to but don’t really care. For instance we could… I dunno, wear masks when we feel the slightest hint of a respiratory illness coming on - cheap, trivially easy, and can save literal lives. And not to trivialize this, some people truly do care - even as I type this I’m listening to a livestream talking about restoration taking much more effort but yielding much greater results than merely shaming people by pointing out something bad.

However, and a bit ironically, Big Tobacco and Big Oil and Big Sugar and Big Tech and Big Plastic etc. all do this, investing great efforts into stopping efforts to try to stop them. Without equal or greater efforts in opposition… well, like I said, I would not hold my breath.

So many songs about rape… tbf I don’t get that vibe from that Beatles song that seems more about just opposite phrases:-), but in general, we have it far too much in our culture.

So… a nurmal Redhti usre then? :-P

Sadly, b/c their jobs literally depend on them NOT doing so, in today’s corporate hellscape environ:-(.

Ironically, we keep being told (iirc?) that middle-management was going to be one of the first things to go with the advent of AI. Software was going to eliminate the need for it, allowing one person to manage many tens to hundreds (to thousands?) of people directly.

Instead, most companies - like big tech, and Boeing, etc. - seem to be going the opposite direction, ditching their actual workers who produce things while keeping the managers?

This does not seem to be going all that well for Google lately…

His decision tree is like: I say yes, content creators say no, admin rights say yes tho, market ends up saying no tho, the end.

It seems like I’ve heard this story before somewhere lately…

I almost wonder what Huffman is thinking right now - he could have been so very close to becoming a billionaire, managing the repository of human general technical knowledge explained simply, but he blew it by being a greedy piggy…

Not that he will ever admit that, even to himself.

I hope it lasts longer than modern AI tools themselves at this point. They have great potential, but… they cannot replace the (lack of) brains of a manager to be a magic bullet to cure all ill effects of greed, with as little effort put into deploying them as has been done so far.

(From the OG Matrix movie)

Step 1: add gasoline.

Step 2: add more gasoline.

Step 3: don’t think about the bridge…

Step 4: what spaghetti?

Okay but do you also do that for StackOverflow? And if so, then also for IMDB, and everything else? Google invested heavy effort to get people to not even remember or bookmark URLs - simply type “Wikipedia” into the bar and it would do a quick search to translate that into something, perhaps https://www.wikipedia.org/ or even https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Later, browsers started allowing other ways like searching through your locally stored bookmarks, but that doesn’t change how Google pushed heavily and first towards being your one-stop place to find what you want just by thinking about it and typing a word or two. Their summaries of movies I find far superior to IMDB, and even to Wikipedia, if all I want is like the most famous movie or two from a particular actor/actress to think - “oh, that’s where I know them from!”

You resisted that trend, which was inefficient, and introduced another dependency of Google to something that did not need it in the chain of finding results that you expected to be found on Wikipedia, so good on you. But not everyone did that.

Likewise, adding “Reddit” to a query added another purpose: if you knew you wanted a search result from Reddit specifically, then finding it via Google was far easier than trying to use Reddit’s internal search, which remains extremely poorly implemented. A lot of places use Google searches internally, and if not then they rely on Google externally, to help find content in them. And why not, bc Google “wasn’t evil”, unlike e.g. Microsoft or questionably (at the time) Apple? So bc everything tied back to Google regardless, why not get the full Google experience? Or so I imagine the thinking went.

But no, I don’t think “people” meaning “everyone” already went straight to where they wanted to search, and even those of us who did (I also most often went straight to Wikipedia, depending on what I was searching for, bc it has fairly good internal search capabilities) did not do it for everything or even perhaps for most things - the latter measured as width of categorizations as in breadth of variety of info - even if not numerically as in “most searches performed”. Google was extremely prominent and central for most people, especially those who did not think about how prominent and central it had become.