It makes sense. He's actually been competent, which not many (certainly not I) quite expected, but the media hasn't reported a lot of his successes, which have been unusually deployed and quite complex to begin with. People don't understand it. Maybe they'll vote for him anyway, but it's not assured, somehow even with Trump on the other side again.

e.g.how he blocked the railway strike at Christmas to save "the economy" first and foremost at the workers expense, but then kept working afterwards to help get most if not all of their demands met (I'm not sure if they got any sick leave though). Right or wrong, in the past that would have been hailed as a "huge success", but instead we barely heard about it.

Likewise with Gaza he has tried to toe the line - we technically have obligations to fulfill there, but does genocide change that, and if so what is the process by which to do that, and is he engaging in that, or doesn't Israel have a veto anyway, so what else is he doing that we might want done?

We have depended upon our media so much, to tell us not just what happened but what it means and how to feel about it all. So with it being bought out now by billionaires... it is like our fourth branch of government has become as unreliable as Congress and the Supreme Court.

TLDR: not worth reading the article, it's just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you'll see the "this content has been removed by" (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.

Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in "hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now". It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests lasts (edit: lasted) for "weeks" - not the more truthful "months", not "permanent changes", but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.

I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as "news".

Please God let this be a humorous post that somehow does not also find a way to manage to come true...

The article ends with:

it is only going to get shittier

(in reference to a comment that Musk had said to advertisers to go ‘fuck themselves’, so meaning i.e. X, not necessarily overall, i.e. Fediverse)

Except consequences - and facts - do not seem to ever stick to him. He's already been impeached, twice, after causing more "excess deaths" than all wars combined (except the Civil War - or maybe we passed that marker too? tbf not all of that is on him, though surely a lot of it is, e.g. lying about the virus being airborne). And now there's a not insignificant chance that he will be re-elected again.

It does make you work harder... at finding some other job:-P.

I don't pay anything to side load apps on my phone.

Probably bc I switched to Android.:-)

And I am never ever going back!

In contrast to the others, Reddit decided to kill itself off before most Boomers have even heard of it:-).

(1) ngl that is amazing, a heart-warming story

(2) still fuck Elon Musk

I wonder if somebody shot the guy?

It is what they said they would do, now they are doing it, later they will brag about having done it, rinse & repeat with the next item on their agenda.

Liberals gonna liberate, while conservatives gonna conserve radically overthrow everything that has come before. It is no accident, it was the point all along.

Maybe RBG could have helped by stepping down, at her advanced age, rather than rolled the dice. Now surely Biden, in his own advanced age, will learn from that? Or, you know, we can roll the dice again I guess...

You mean like... oh purpose!?

There was a time long ago I did that to help them with their business. I've learned a lot since then and now I don't do that anymore.

At the same time, his leaving was also a success story in itself. He had all the money he ever needed in life, he was at the top of his game except just was exhausted working that continual grind, and was feeling his age so unlike e.g. any member of Congress, decided to voluntarily relinquish his power in order to create room for new people to step up, while he went on to blaze entirely new pioneer territory outside of mainstream TV, which was quite a risk even for someone like him. Wow... what a class act! 😍

Managers do all the real work, thus deserve all the compensation

- managers everywhere, every day

I may not know how to write programs, but I could still do a better job than people with decades of experience in doing exactly that

- these particular managers

Their corporate website mentions that they use the data for marketing purposes. Whatever type of face they see - e.g. male or female, large or skinny, etc. - gets correlated with what was purchased, and then they sell that data for marketing purposes. Exactly like Google selling your search history, except with likely fewer restrictions in place.

Their website doesn't mention how often they get hacked to give away that data for free - to be clear, that data meaning A PICTURE OF YOUR ACTUAL FUCKING FACE. I don't know what resolution, or even what someone would do with it later, I am focusing here on the fact that the picture taking seems nonconsensual, especially for it to be stored in a database rather than simply used in the moment.

This "threat" stings less and less over time - i.e., if we get nothing from them now in taxes, then how would them moving away change anything? Like, would we pay higher amounts for food maybe, or not be able to buy a house anymore, or have lesser access to medical care as a result?

Also, we cannot change how others act, only what we ourselves do. e.g. perhaps if they become honest about being non-taxpaying corporations, we could do things like pass laws restricting the amount of money that such entities could contribute to politicians?

Ultimately, would it be so bad if like "Apple" were a non-American company anymore, and we could incentive our own USA-backed companies instead? (or if Apple does pay appropriate taxes, then substitute with some other company example here) Likewise, Google already is losing its ability to "find stuff", b/c of its chasing after pure profiteering. Let them go, I say, b/c while that may induce some pain in the short-term, it is the only way that we will heal.

But, I have been wrong before, and you should not base any real decisions off of my opinion:-).

"Can't compete" => won't, ftfy :-P

Google got their money, so they are simply "done", unlike software made by people who genuinely care about stuff, and donate their time for free to improve it.

I mean... right or wrong, FAAFO with banks does not sound fun, I hope they have an exit strategy like to live with someone else as they drop off the grid.:-|

Tell me more about these "spells", which occur in limited numbers, are capable of long-range attacks, deal explosive & powerful damage... and can only be performed by someone who has the proper equipment and spends time in advance preparing them for use? :-D

Or locked behind 100 pages of unnecessarily paginated content. Seriously, one of the best features that a webpage has over a physical printed page is the ability to search it for what you were looking for... smh:-(.

While true that the timing is shit, the amount is nowhere close to "table scraps" - this seems like it will legit be helpful, maybe even enough to turn the tide in Ukraine?

Also, it's not like Congress fed its own and then waited months to feed the dog - rather, dinner for the entire family was delayed from the start of the fiscal year 2024 in October 1 until just a few weeks ago, involving the ousting of one Speaker of the House and almost doing so to the second as well. And now, this aid package for Ukraine may likewise finish the job of getting the Speaker kicked out, bc any time the government is "functional" is considered bad by some elements.

But the timing from passing the federal budget itself to passing this aid package is actually quite short. Yes it's half a year late, but it did eventually happen, and the amount of aid is large, so is a "success" by multiple metrics, and all the more so given the opposition. If we do end up having a civil war as people like MTG are calling for, this may well be the last aid package that the USA ever manages to pass in the final stages of its democracy.

So imho we should take the win and be happy - we may not get to celebrate Congress doing routine activities like "passing budgets" very often in the future, even six months late.

It is impossible to type out all of the reasons, but here are a few. Check out Bowling for Columbine btw - a movie from two thousand fucking two, 15 years BEFORE that particular one. We've seen that particular bullet coming for a LONG time, and the ones before it, and the ones after it, and the ones yet to come - we KNOW, yet we do NOTHING. Most especially the "Pro-Life" crowd.

Lobbying. It's a thing. The NRS especially is one of the more powerful ones. More than 80% of American citizens - rising to >90% of NRA members even!!! - want some form of extremely limited gun control. However, we do not live in a democracy, not even one dominated by conservatives or rural Americans - rather, we live in a plutocracy where despite the OVERWHELMING support of the VAST MAJORITY of Americans, we cannot manage to get anything done.

Also, much of that money supposedly flowing to politicians from the "NRA" actually has been found to have ties back to Russia. Many of the politicians receiving that money may not even know the true source of where it came from - nor do they particularly seem to care.

Oh, and then billionaires bought up pretty much all of the major news outlets (a handful of others still exist - did The Guardian escape that? Well, even if they were, they seem to be allowed to talk about other corporate take-overs (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/03/billionaires-extra-power-media-ownership-elon-musk).

And hopefully you already know what happened to Google, where SEOs took over the searches so that it is nearly impossible to find things that just five years ago were easily retrievable, with the only lingering hold-out being Reddit, before then that whole thing happened...

BTW, the government is literally not allowed to collect statistics on how many violent gun deaths occur in America. I am not sure if this is the video where Jordan Klepper showcases that, but if not then he has a bunch of others. Or take your pick - there are millions if not billions of videos, of varying degree of quality and relevance. I've never seen one show a truly "unbalanced" take though - that is just not how for-profit corporations work. You just have to educate yourself by watching a bunch of stuff until you know how trustworthy the source is, and also each and every material topic too. It is sad, but we cannot seem to trust any (especially for-profit) advice these days. Though if you want another recommendation, there's John Oliver's whole expose on the NRA. To provide a modicum of balance, on the other side there are series such as Paul Harrell's Mass Shootings: Causes and Possible Solutions.

And - yes there is always more - there are other arguments such as: "if someone cannot get a gun they will simply make their own bomb" (ignores how much harder it is to do that), and the whole thing of plastic ghost guns (again ignores how difficult it would be to do that). Ultimately, i think that children being sacrificed is itself merely a symptom of a much deeper cause. People on Lemmy call it "capitalism", which has a LOT of truth to it - but then again, nations such as communist China have their own different issues. But, again, since ~90% of Americans already are in favor of stopping these kinds of mass-shootings, this will not be solved by merely educating yourself or "getting the word out". In fact, this type of issue is precisely the type of thing that Trump leaned heavily on as his route to the White House - "Hillary Clinton is corrupt so you should elect me and I will get rid of all the corruption, everywhere". So realistically, this is just something that we are going to simply have to live with, unless and until people fucking DO something about it. e.g. a responsible gun owner could patrol their own neighborhood schools. However, do note that every time someone does try to do that, they end up shooting innocent people instead, and yet it does nothing to stop the actual shooters, who can pull guns out of a bag (long-ish violin or trumpet case maybe?) and start shooting in mere seconds - not enough time to notice and prevent it. So start by educating yourself, since that's really all you can do, and also it will help enormously to ensure that you are on the correct side of the issue.

For those so inclined, there is a verse commanding the latter point even in the actual Holy Bible, at 1 Thessalonians 5:21: "Test EVERYTHING against what you KNOW to be true". I don't know what can be done, after the education stage, but I know it MUST begin with that.

Life is pain. Sometimes the sex is real.

git add cry

git commit -m "nobody but me will read this anyway"

git push

git end-of-line :-|

Naw, they're probably so tired after doing that at work all day long that they are just like "want dinner?" "Okay". :-P

Bold of you to presume that Musk wanted less celebrity pornography on Twitt X.

I found it hilarious when many California farmers (e.g. fruits) voted for Trump, then got angry when he immediately started cutting back on immigration - like what the hell did you think he meant when he talked about that EVERY SINGLE TIME!? That man isn't exactly known for using "metaphors" or having the slightest degree of "subtlety" - e.g. when he talks about grabbing pussy, he doesn't mean getting to know someone intimately, he means to GRAB someone's ACTUAL genitalia, which simply being within arms reach seems to imply automatically giving consent, and if not then you can take it up with his team of lawyers.

After that, people started dying, and other things happened like infants were literally ripped right out of their mothers' arms and I suddenly found it less funny:-(.

I guess arguably it could be funny to think how liberals get mad when the Democrats they vote for do not do what they promised, yet Trump supporters got mad at him when he did - if that situation were not so fucking tragic for us all:-(.

Edit:

It seems like I've heard of the strategy of "appeasement" having been attempted before - how did that work out for them again?

Oh this is a much better idea. I was thinking like... vegetables? But now I hope for your thing instead:-).

He also deregulated the FCC, the SEC, and trains. I dunno, I seem to recall hearing some stuff about train derailments that seem to me to be directly traceable back to those decisions...

Also, while he is not directly responsible for Russia invading Ukraine, he likewise directed our response - e.g. "you have to do me a favor though" (which iirc is literally treasonous).

Also, well there's a lot of also's.:-( Unfortunately, we may get to start working on a whole second listing:-(.

Fwiw, they mostly did, it's just that it is no longer restricted solely to COVID and now is shared with others.

e.g. stating that people should "take precautions", which if someone can work from home could be that, and/or wearing masks if not, etc. Unfortunately, not everyone (single mothers?) has the luxury of taking a week off whenever they want or even NEED to.

Also, this is just a guess but I am fairly positive that this is based on all the EXTREME amount of push-back that they have been putting up with from Republicans over the last few years to CONTINUALLY get all up in their business, despite barely having finished a high school's worth of edumacashiun. And probably also, to an enormously lesser degree, from Democrats who want to push the "pandemic is solved, b/c Biden won the last election" message that they believe will resonate with the handful of centrist people left in the country.

So this is once again a symptom of late-stage capitalism, where obstructionists shoot the department in the head, then complain how "ineffective" it is after that.

If the bump in the wall starts moaning, speaking, or forms a face, then GTFO FAST! :-P

Unless your summoning the demon was intentional, in which case don't be rude - say hi back! :-D

fr fr no cap skibidi rizz 😜

Reddit will teach you for free...

Discord will even throw in doxxing.

I doubt anything compares to X though, especially for sheer volume:-P.