and what a long, awful six weeks it has been for humanity :(

Fair, whatever the reason is I am glad he is on the right side now

I mean yeah he actually wasn’t quick to denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I am super happy he has come around but I think I’m the beginning he was reluctant to (not because he agreed with it, because he probably didn’t want to mess with Israeli money coming after him politically).

I mean yeah it is heartbreaking how artists are going to be FURTHER devalued in society 🙃

No company is too big to merge with another company here in the land of the free where corporations are people and humans are worthless trash!

Yeah I have one of those, it works pretty good for mining doubloons and is pretty nice all around except that every time another computer gets near it, my pirate computer has these little cannons that come out of the side vents and BAM it starts firing volleys. Can’t play LAN with other friends or anything it is annoying, I am kinda worried it is gonna find out about my smartphone and attack it too.

☠️ ☠️ ☠️ ☠️ that’s right me mateys, being a pirate is lame and you should definitely…… nottttttt do it………….

Good thing I have this eye patch so I can wink without anyone seeing.

Sorry kind of, I was meaning to basically agree with you my bad if it came off confusing

Everyone can shut the f%# up about fatshaming, does someone have scientific evidence that shaming people for being fat does anything other than needlessly hurt people? I am betting that it makes it FAR more likely that the shamed person will spiral into more negative behaviors that result in their health worsening.

People need to stop pretending the glee they feel in judging others when fat shaming as also somehow a genuine concern for their health. Save your judgement for your own extremely flawed self.

I’ll give him credit for fighting for student loans (though he chose a stupid strategy and doesn’t seem to understand basic aspects of negotiation?), I give him zero credit for fighting for a minimum raise increase because of “the parliamentarian”….??

Didn’t you get the memo as a leftist that working together with centrists literally always means abandoning your core values and getting spit in the face by centrists dems who would rather jump on a hand grenade to prove to centrist republicans that they have nothing in common with you rather than engage with your policies? (or even rhetorically defend their legitimacy?)

It was, is and always will be your fault Dems lose. The two party system means that if you conceptualize your vote as a choice you are selfish. You owe your vote to the shitty corporate democrat, that is how it works :)

Look I am sorry if the way centrists try to bully you into a vote comes off as condescending but honestly you have to feel for them, think how hard it is for them to always be twisting their values around so they match the status quo.

The chips are on the table now to actually affect the path of Israel in its genocide of Palestinians though and Biden is out to lunch on it just smiling and patting the backs the IDF while occasionally saying “well, I don’t know if you should do thattt, we would be upset with you” with a rushed whisper following “but you still get all the bombs you want don’t worry!”

Biden doesn’t get a pass because this has been the politically easy default stance for presidents to have, his job is to be president and make choices and he has made some truly awful ones here that have directly allowed the mass murder of children.

No, Biden sucks and if you think he doesn’t you honestly need to turn off the crap cable news you are getting your news from.

Exhibit A, Biden essentially has taken the same path with immigration that Trump did and it is tragic and brutal. He just lets conservatives completely define the narrative “ohhh the border is OUT of control” republicans thousands of miles from the border say… and then implemented the same brutal policies. Now centrist liberals all of a sudden don’t seem to care so much about the brutality of what is happening to immigrants and their families just trying to improve their lives, but that is neoliberals for you. They care when the narrative says they should!

Also, there is the whole thing about Biden being the most powerful enabler of the horrific genocide in Palestine in the world and he seems to be totally fine with it beyond say some curt words for the murderers dropping the bombs.

Is Trump or any republican candidate worse? Absolutely, but Biden is not a great President. He is terribly suited to this moment in US politics and we can only hope everyone hates Trump enough to get Biden elected.

It is also about the philosophy of many people who are focused on fusion as the future. If we just had unlimited cheap power that would solve alllll of our problems…. which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is really the crisis here.

My point is that you can, by raising awareness about what massive corporations ALWAYS attempt to do to public commons and by encouraging everyone to defederate with them.

Sure they can contribute to and use open source, doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are actually well meaning members of the community?

The darkest timeline would be we have made contact with three-tiddied aliens but they were only interested in contacting high ranking officials in shadowy, sketchy U.S. government agencies like the CIA and military. That is what a lot of conspiracy minded people would have me believe and honestly if that was true those would be some lame af aliens. Like… all of all the people on earth to establish first contact with, you chose those losers?

When they said you couldn’t make contact with the rest of humanity you were just like yup seems like these dipshits have the authority to decide that for the rest of humanity?

Those would be some lame aliens and THAT would be the darkest timeline.

Fascists

You say well we have to be pragmatic because threads/meta has so much more power than us that we will be able to reach so many more people with their help (or they could destroy us equally as powerfully)…. I say but wait a minute if they have all that power why is it shitty open source software projects with several orders of magnitude less funding than Meta are providing the vision of the future AND the technology to get us there? I mean sure if we just had the vision that might make sense but we already built the tools too…?

Honestly stop and think about why that is. Meta could have easily funded side projects and paid programmers to rewrite the code for the entire fediverse and all its associated softwares… many times over. Given the amount of money it has it could have done this over and over and over and over again and still be only spending a tiny fraction of its R&D budget. You have to convincingly explain to me why we were the ones who had to do it, through basically entirely volunteer work, and what makes you think engaging with them now AFTER we put in most of the groundwork to build the technology is a good idea.

You say we could get us so much growth, but every single damn person they bring us will still be the product for their true customers (advertisers etc) and from those people’s perspectives nothing meaningful will have changed. The relationship between meta and its users will be essentially the same, meta has to ensure this to protect their bottom line. So people will have joined the fediverse without actually joining it, who cares at that point?

There are a million ways meta can extend and embrace the fediverse, we need to prepare for the extinguish.

Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.

No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don’t agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don’t have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.

…I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!

We can’t stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn’t it?

They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can’t argue it isn’t a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs…

My drivers ed class in new england pretty much focused only on educating teenagers about how brutally dangerous drunk driving is. It was frustrating at the time because I felt like I didn’t even learn how to drive but given how where I grew up as a teenager you had to go drink in sketch places which usually involved driving (what a dumb way to structure society ughh) because of the car hellscape I grew up in…. I honestly think those drivers ed teachers spent their time well.

Driving a car isn’t so hard so long as you take the perspective that you have one rule, don’t hit other people and always remind yourself that you can’t assume other drivers will do anything they should on the road. Drunk driving was VERY hard not to do as a bored teenager trying to hang out with other bored teenagers. I could have died, my friends could have died. Idk, so I can’t be too upset at my drivers ed class in retrospect.