TheDemonBuer

@TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
1 Post – 122 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Did take companies long to stop pretending like they care.

I think they care, I just think they care more about maximum profits. A lot of people believe that maximizing profits and meeting our climate goals are not incompatible goals. Personally, I'm skeptical, to say the least. Regardless of my skepticism, however, the world's leaders, many of the world's experts, and most people have decided we should proceed as though the two goals are not mutually exclusive. I guess only time will tell if they're right or not.

There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but "let Trump come to power" is not a real good solution to any of them, to me.

Probably not. I don't know what the right strategies are, assuming they exist at all, but, yeah, that's probably not it.

Obama and John McCain, or Obama and Mitt Romney, I think were all considered pretty respectable by most Americans, especially compared to our current options.

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Lots of people just don’t vote if they don’t like their options.

Do you think those voters like their options now?

See, this confuses me. I'm not saying you're wrong, I mean there must be a reason Biden came out on top in the 2020 primaries, but all the time liberals tell me they would vote for a houseplant over Donald Trump. Literally any Democratic candidate would pass the test of not being Trump, so why couldn't any candidate win?

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Trying to demonize one option because you don’t think it’s perfect is just muddying the waters and subjecting us to decades of more of the shit sandwich we have now while we debate which alternative is flawless (hint: none of them are).

I really have been quite surprised over the past eight years or so by how opposed so many people are to any kind of change. I suppose it's because the status quo is working well enough for them, and, I mean, good for them, but I hope they can recognize that not all of us are so lucky.

Is it really feasible to replace Biden at this point? I didn't watch the debate last night but from what I've heard it was not good for Biden. Nonetheless, I think Biden remains the Democrats' best option. They're just going to have to rely on the electorate recognizing that Biden is still the better of the two choices, as pathetic as that reality may be. However, even if that strategy is somehow successful, again, and Biden does manage to get reelected, the Democrats MUST nominate a better candidate in 2028. I don't think the Democrats can continue with their strategy of just being better than terrible, indefinitely.

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Float a candidate under 60 and they win riotous support from Democrats and undecideds.

But who would that be? Do you remember the 2020 primaries? They started out with 29 candidates, the most since the modern primaries began back in 1972, and several of them were under 60, including Pete Buttigieg, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kamala Harris. Only Pete Buttigieg won any delegates (29 out of a possible 3,979). The Democrats have had many years to find a younger candidate who could unify the party. No such candidate has emerged, that I'm aware of, and so Biden, at 81 years old and showing signs of rapid cognitive decline, ran essentially unopposed in this year's primaries.

The Constitution mandates a maximum of two terms for a President. If he wins, he can't run again.

I know, I didn't mean to imply that the Democrats would try to run Biden again, only that they might try to run a similarly "weak" candidate in 2028, believing that the American people will vote for the candidate simply because they are Democrat and not Republican. I think that would be a mistake.

Trump does still lead in our national average — however narrowly. But the bigger problem for Biden though is that elections in the United States aren’t determined by the popular vote.

That's a problem for all of us. If the president were elected by popular vote, Trump would never have been president.

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Most Americans plan to watch the Biden-Trump debate

Why?

I really don't think it would work at this point, but if I were to pick someone to replace Biden it wouldn't be Gavin Newsom, it would be Andy Beshear. But that's just it, this country is so divided we can't find a consensus candidate.

"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.

This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.

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I'd rather pour hot sauce in my eyes than watch another debate between Biden and Trump.

If it's a secret that Israel wants all of the territory that was Mandatory Palestine, including the West Bank, then it's the worst kept secret ever.

Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn't consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.

Couldn't be any worse than the real Al Michaels these days.

I don't know, it's not specified, nor do I know what every single respondent interpreted 'help' to mean.

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I never claimed that any poll authoritatively proved "how everyone in the U.S. felt before Pearl Harbor."

I want to vote more, but when I try to vote more than once the poll workers get upset and tell me to leave.

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I'm not young, but I feel the same way as these young people. I don't care about this country, I don't care about its people, and I don't care about its future. It's like that Bob Dylan song, "I used to care, but things have changed."

I think this whole bathroom thing is just stupid. While I don't really care who is shitting in the stall next to me, apparently some people do, but I think there's a pretty simple solution: replace stalls with water closets. I mean, nobody likes the stalls. No one prefers them, and the total lack of privacy they provide is why bathrooms are gendered in the first place. Replace stalls with water closets, everyone gets their privacy, bathrooms don't have to be gendered anymore, problem solved.

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...an ongoing surge in demand from millennial home buyers has steadily pushed home prices higher

The thing is, housing is a universal human need, so as the population goes up, the demand for housing will go up as well.

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I'm just sticking to lemmy.world for now. It doesn't have all the communities I want yet but it seems more open than the others. I don't like walled gardens or gated communities. If I wanted a platform with power hungry, elitist moderators creating circle jerk in-groups, I would have stayed on Reddit.

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I'm sick of these articles telling me what I value. You know what I really value? Stability, security, peace of mind. I don't want a mansion, a million Instagram followers, or a passport full of stamps, I just want a decent, relatively simple life. I just want to be happy and content.

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We believe in the one person, one vote system of elections that our country was founded upon,” Missouri state Sen. Ben Brown, the ballot measure’s sponsor, said in an interview

Ranked choice is one person one vote. One person enters the voting booth and votes once. It's not as though ranked choice voting gives some people the opportunity to vote multiple times, every voter is allowed to rank the candidates one time.

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I certainly don't expect things to turn around in my lifetime. The future I want would require radical, systemic changes, but most Americans don't want anything to radically change. That doesn't mean a majority of Americans are happy with things the way they are, not at all, but they don't want to radically change anything, despite their unhappiness. The majority of Americans want things to get better without anything fundamentally changing. I believe that's one of the definitions of insanity.

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I don't think the US needs more single family homes, I think we need more, or at least more affordable, multifamily housing. Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. What we need to be doing is bringing down the cost of housing in cities, as well as making cities as pedestrian friendly as possible, with walking and biking infrastructure, and public transportation.

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Sorry, no victory laps for someone who failed to beat one of the worst presidential candidates in American history.

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"The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch," NOAA said, "when sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra."

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If we can just get through this election then we can start worrying about the next election.

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“It is imperative that the Senate, in a bipartisan way, comes up with crippling sanctions against the ICC — not only to support Israel but to deter any future action against American personnel,” Graham said.

In this time of political division, it's good to see there is still at least one thing liberals and conservatives agree on, and that is that the US and Israel must be allowed to commit war crimes without consequences.

There aren't enough Christian nationalists to swing the election for Trump. I think people forget it was independents in a relative handful of swing districts that swung the election for Trump in 2016, but many of those same independents swung to Biden in 2020, and I see no reason to think those independents will swing back to Trump in 2024.

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I live in a very rural area and I have very fast fiberoptic broadband, provided by a local, not-for-profit cooperative. Absolutely the best Internet service I've ever had.

I have a feeling that "tragic mistakes" will keep happening until all the Palestinians are gone from the territories Israel wants to annex.

I give the Democrats a really hard time (mainly because I have much higher expectations for them, and so I hold them to a much higher standard than the Republicans), but I can't deny that Democrats, generally, listen to experts and follow their guidance much more than Republicans. I would even say the Democratic party is somewhat of a technocratic party, for better or worse. It is in this light that the apparent "flip flop" regarding unions should be seen. Both parties became anti-union during the neoliberal era because economists were largely anti-union. Their models or formulas were telling them that unions were bad, so that became the orthodox position of mainstream economics, and Democrats trusted in their expertise. Now, many mainstream economists have decided that unions are good, actually, and so Democrats have once again followed the experts. I'm not sure what changed in the economists' models or formulas that made them rethink their position on unions, but then economics has always been a bit of a mess.

I don't think these were the things anyone was claiming we were divided over. Of course if you get a bunch of Americans together in a room and ask them if they support freedom of the press and the right to assemble and associate, they'll say yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't still very divided. Ask them what the role of government should be, whether we should provide universal healthcare and tuition free higher education for everyone, if taxes should be raised on corporations and the wealthy, what our immigration policy should be, etc, I'm sure you'll get a lot less agreement.

This is America. We're all in a zero sum, winner take all contest for wealth, status, and power. It's every man for himself. It's not just that people don't want to pay for other kids to get a good education, it's that they want their kids to have every advantage possible. They will openly admit as much. They don't just want their kids to get a good education, they want their kids to get a better education than everyone else. Inequality is the goal. Inequality doesn't happen by accident, it's completely intentional. When life is a competition, everyone is an opponent. You don't help your opponent, you try to gain every advantage possible.

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Deep in the immigration debate are some dark truths that no one wants to acknowledge. It's a huge problem that a town can't survive without relatively poor migrant workers. It's a problem that people in developed nations can't, or won't, do the necessary work that keeps their society running, so they must rely on there being people in less developed countries who are poor and desperate enough that they will come and do the work, for a low enough wage. If modern society MUST have poor, migrant workers to operate, then that means we MUST keep a certain percentage of the global population poor enough so that we in the developed world will always have a sufficient supply of cheap labor. We can't allow all countries to achieve a level of industrial development and high enough living standards so that their people don't have to seek economic opportunities elsewhere, or else we lose a necessary supply of cheap labor. It's a dystopian reality.

I don't think there are very many people in the US who are "anti-white." I think a majority of Americans are against white supremacism, or a racial hegemony/hierarchy that has "whites" at the top. That doesn't mean I want a hierarchy that has another group at the top, I want no hegemonic order at all. I think most Americans would prefer it if we could all just see each other as, well, Americans.

I realize that's easier said than done in this very divided era. I can't deny that I have a hard time seeing some people as my countryman, because their culture, beliefs, and ideals are so much different than mine. I'd like it if we could reach some kind of consensus on what it means to be an American. I think we will reach a consensus, but getting there is going to be... contentious.