If your business can't afford to pay its workers a living wage without going bust-- then it deserves to go bust.

Jimmy Carter did-- Ted Kennedy challenged him for the 1980 presidential nomination. The result was them doing so much damage to each other that the ultimate winner of the primary (Carter) came out battered and bruised, giving Reagan the edge he needed to win the general. And we all know how well that worked out for the planet. (Spoiler alert: horrifically.)

As an elder Zoomer, can confirm. Seeing first-hand the horrific effects social media has had on so many of my IRL friends' mental health-- and how it's utterly decimated IRL communities-- makes me want to cut it out of my life as much as possible.

Friendly reminder Russia is committing atrocities in the occupied territories. So any kind of negotiated "peace" that involves Ukraine giving up territory means them consigning all their citizens living there to torture, random executions, wanton sexual violence, having their children taken away, and worse!

That's what you're calling for when you advocate a "negotiated settlement".

Because most lemmy users used to be redditors, and redditors are morose and pessimistic as fuck.

Also, people are vastly underestimating how slow boats are. A boat large enough to be useful for search and rescue can only move at like 30 mph, tops. The wreck of the Titanic is only a few hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland; reason it took so long to find the sub debris field is because the boat carrying a submersible capable of diving to those depths only just arrived on the scene this morning-- four days after the search began.

No way any boats stationed on the east coast of the US could have made it to the Medditeranean in time to be helpful in the search for the drowned migrants, and vice versa.

Friendly reminder a significant portion of the Republican party has been in Putin's pocket since at least 2016!

This. People this controlling and with this little regard for other people's rights and boundaries tend to react extremely poorly to having their control challenged. The most dangerous time in any abusive relationship is when the victim leaves-- and make no mistake, OP, that's what's happening to your friend. Escalation to physical violence in these circumstances would not be out of the ordinary.

Please be careful, and make sure your friend has a plan to make sure she's in a safe place where her soon-to-be-ex can't get to her before she breaks up with him. And I would strongly recommend you both get a restraining order if that's something you feel comfortable doing.

I know this may sound paranoid, but it's always best to err on the side of caution in potentially dangerous situations like these.

Yeah, and the author all but freely admits that. But they're apparently willing to throw all that away to have it "feel like everyone’s there."

Maybe this is me being uncharitable, but to be blunt it sounds like he just wants to feel like he's sitting at the cool kids' table.

True, but there are definitely places where it's much better to be trans than others, and Russia's near the bottom of the pack.

The counter offensive isn't into Russia, it's them trying to get back their territory which was occupied last February. Where a lot of Ukrainians currently have family members, and where we know for a fact torture of dissenters and kidnapping of children is taking place.

IIRC almost all polls show strong support from Ukrainians to take all their land back.

True, but the original intent was that defederation would be a nuclear option, reserved only for instances that totally failed to moderate stuff like hate speech, bot activity, etc-- given that it damages the Fediverse as a whole.

The lemmy.ml admins are free to federate or defederate from other instances as they please-- and we're free to criticize their decision as we please, too.

My guess is it's to offset the lack of other benefits-- health care being a huge one-- that you lose when you sign up to be a gig worker, not a full-time worker.

And we already have different minimum wages for at least one industry: servers at restaurants. The economy isn't going to collapse if we put gig workers in their own category, too.

Hopefully with less Nazis this time...

Yep, the Republican base has proven they'll vote for literally anyone with an (R) next to their name no matter how many felonies they commit. And because they're fanatics, they turn out to vote every time, no matter what.

The only way we get out of this nightmare is to hold the line, keep voting every cycle to keep the mainiacs out of power until the party inevitably implodes due to demographic shifts. Hopefully it'll happen soon, worrying about this shit is exhausting. But until then, we can't afford to be complacent.

Because if everyone involved is quitting their jobs, they'll have no money with which to buy food. Which means they'll have to farm it themselves. And farming, even with top-of-the-line modern tech, is backbreaking fucking work. Also unpredictable as hell: bad harvests aren't uncommon, especially for novice farmers with no formal training like these guys would be.

In other words, one bad harvest, and everyone in the system you're proposing fucking dies. Yeah, there's a reason in the 1800s people were abandoning their family farms for the horrorshow of Victorian era-factories en masse: because even that hell was still preferable to farming.

Can we not do the whole "women are objects to be ranked based on physical appearance only and fought over as prizes" thing, please? That prom queen has agency of her own-- who's to say she's even into the "winner", let alone that their personalities are in any way compatible? Maybe (assuming she's interested in men and looking for a relationship) she'd rather be with a guy who isn't hypercompetitive, who's more laid back and easygoing?

Which brings me to the other problem with your metaphor: what's "winning"? Someone could be doing well by society's metrics and be miserable, because their current lifestyle isn't the right fit for them. Someone else could be a total failure by society's metrics, but perfectly content with their life the way it is. Who's the real winner there? (Spoiler alert: it's the second person).

There was like one poll that showed him with 20% of Democrats saying they'd vote for him in 2024-- back when the only thing people knew about him was a his name, before it became well known how insane (and how obviously a far-right plant) he was. Oh, and even then that poll was an outlier, most polls before the hype began showed him with less than 10% support-- well below the crazification factor.

Nah, Dorsey's always been a "libertarian" (read: Republican who wants to smoke weed) POS since he was a broke nobody. All that's changed is, if his stupid Blusky thing takes off, he'll have the power to make his idiocy our problem.

Always a good time to remind people the OG version of the laptop conspiracy in 2019 was as much about dragging Ukraine through the mud as well as the Bidens! And I'd be willing to bet anything it was to turn Republican opinion against Ukraine, so the base wouldn't be upset when dear leader turned a blind eye to Putin invading them in his second term.

Also, Chat GPT at least still writes at the level of a somewhat talented ninth grader. Its prose is stilted, and the way it structures essays and stories is super formulaic.

It's absolutely not at the level it can replace a talented human writer yet. (I have no doubt that day is coming, probably sooner than we think, but it's not here yet.)

So publishers making the switch will see the quality of their content drop, and with it the number of clicks / revenue they get. Enough to offset the salaries of all the writers they fired? Probably depends on the publication. For clickbait farms, probably not, but the higher quality the readers are used to the more the publishers stand to lose.

Coup attempt participant who stormed Capitol while on bail on an attempted murder charge gets 3 years

Fixed your headline, NBC!

And the willfully ignorant morons flocking to that site still somehow manage to delude themselves that it's not going to become an alt-right breeding ground. Even though that's true for, oh, I don't know, literally all of Meta's other products.

Simple. The defense minister tells the president they’re buying a new $60k drone, then he calls up one of his generals, orders him to but a new drone, and he had $40k to do it. The general calls his colonel and tells him he had $30k to buy a drone. The colonel calls a captian and tells him he has $20k to buy a new drone…

By the time the procurement officer actually buys the damn thing, he has a budget of $100. So, of course, he buys the finest drone on the market $50 can buy.

By upvoting this post, you confirm you are not Anish Kapoor, not upvoting this on behalf of Anish Kapoor, or in any other way affiliated with or acting on behalf of Anish Kapoor.

This is one of the reasons abusers pressure you to quit your job-- so even if you were finanically stable before, you end up becoming financially dependant on them so you can't just leave. It also makes it nigh-impossible for kids, even kids of wealthy families, to escape abusive situations before they're old enough to get a job (and you can bet their parents will run interference to keep that from happening as long as possible, or else figure out a way to coerce them into giving them their paychecks.)

Nah, it's what happens when you read them as instruction manuals.

I can say said labeling the current tyrannical regime with "Empire" is a misinterpretation.

My brother in Christ, your government is forcefully annexing territory into itself and making the conquered people culturally assimilate at threat of being tortured if they don't comply. That's literally the definition of imperialism.

Or at the very least, show me a healthy variety of ads, instead of spamming the same ad over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and--

Also, there are so, so many bad faith actors on reddit that at some point, you start assuming everyone around you is arguing in bad faith. So you don't even try to engage in conversation any more, you either jump straight to insulting / trolling them, or just downvote/report/block without even interacting.

My cynical thought is that they're not insane, they're trying to kneecap the competition before it gets popular enough to pose a threat to them.

The US passed the largest climate bill in human history last fall, Europe is now getting a plurality of its energy from carbon-free sources (and growing rapidly), and China's continuing to make progress too. And the reason that's all happening is because of all the people who care, who've been pushing for change this past decade.

It's not enough, but it's a huge step in the right direction-- and it's proof we can accomplish even more if we keep standing together.

Tell ya what: don't use a sexist metaphor next time, and I promise not to overreact. ;)

Germany is building coal plants, pretty much the rest of Europe is transitioning away from fossil fuels at a breakneck pace.

(And to be fair, Germany's also investing heavily in clean energy and has made huge progress on that front. They just made the incredibly stupid decision to shut down their remaining nuclear plants before they had enough clean energy sources to make up for the power difference, which is why they're temporarily using coal as a stopgap.)

Police don't help you get out of your home. The best case scenario is they arrest your abuser, who'll be back home the next morning (and hopefully won't retaliate too severely against you for humiliating them). Then, weeks to months later you have a court date-- by which time, your abuser's likely threatened you into saying whatever it takes to get them off the hook, and the judge is more than happy to play along so they can get you out the door and move onto other, "more important" cases.

And again, that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is your abuser convinces them you were actually the assaulter, and you're the one going to jail instead! Actually, I lied, that's the second-to-worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is the police do nothing, and leave you alone to deal with your abuser's rage at almost getting them caught. Or, you know, they just charge in guns fucking blazing because your skin's the wrong color.

Did people's parents not teach them about putting things on the internet they didn't want shared?

They used to, then social media became a thing and they stopped. Suddenly, it was normal to put your entire life up online for other people to see, and if you didn't feel comfortable doing that you were the weird one.

My rule is, never post anything you wouldn't mind the media tracing back to you IRL and then making the top story of the day in your country. Because, while rare, that does occasionally happen!

It was almost like learned helplessness.

This is a huge problem on reddit as a whole, IMO. The whole website is chock-full of doomers, cynics, and pessimists who are quick to say why every piece of good news is bad, actually, why every attempt at change is doomed to fail, why there's no hope for anyone anywhere trying to do anything, and we should all just lie down and wait for the sweet release of death. It's universal, across almost all the big subs, regardless of subject matter.

I'm not sure why reddit ended up that way, but it was both exhausting and depressing. That doomer shit is contagious, spend too much time immersed in it and you catch yourself thinking that way too. And, well, it's just sad to see everyone around you being sad.

One thing I'm loving about Lemmy / KBin so far is that it's not like that. Maybe it's just because they're still small and new, but people seem less nihilistic here. Not polyanna-ish toxic-positivity optimistic either. Just... normal. It's so refreshing. God, I hope this place stays this way!

Best joke I heard is: if everyone's pissed at what you said, and your only defense is "technically, it wasn't illegal for me to have said that!", it was probably a pretty bad argument.

There's nothing moderate about Kennedy, he's a full-blown MAGA far-righter. Which is why he's being laughed out of the Democratic primary, thank God.

The fact that the guy you replied to totally ignored all my points about, ya know, the ongoing genocide is fucking telling.