So I think we’re aligned… or at least I’m coming to your side in my Liberal >> Left journey.

A commenter above said you left off the /s and that it was sometimes hard to tell. I went in defending Left from someone who thought that Hillary would have been significantly different from/better than Obama.

I’m assuming with “I think it would have been a push,” that you were not actually blaming Left (those here, not colloquial US democratic voters in aggregate) for the current problems, but maybe I’m still missing something.

I wrote up further discussion, but it took me too long to collect my thoughts and I think I missed my chance to have a reasonable window.

I did want to still follow up and say thanks for having this conversation with me, and for going into detail.

Strangely enough, I’m still not sure how you feel. I’ve upvoted you because I think this ‘adds to the conversation’ even if I eventually disagree with you.

Demonstrably not…

Your line was “… because Leftists didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008”.

So you would or would not have preferred Clinton in the 2008 general election? Over what? I’m serious. I wasn’t paying attention at that time to know how she compared to Obama. By the time I was really watching, she was leagues better than trump, but back in 2008, I was a simple straight-ticket blue voter – doing my duty, punching my card every two years and feeling like I was helping.

(again my point is aimed at inform. Sell me on your point of view. I don’t think we’re enemies and there is a silent majority who agree on the end goal but maybe not the path.)

How is today’s situation on the shoulders of people who didn’t vote for Hillary in 2008’s Primary?

I know people who have succumbed to not good enough, and let some terrible people win. This is perhaps more pronounced locally, if you start looking, where a handful of votes is the difference between a socialist or liberal winning over a conservative or fascist.

I think this is only happening because capital does what capital does, and it tries to own the narrative. Berating people because the self-appointed leadership failed them is totally not a thing this community is trying to do. right?

One-liners are the absolute worst kind of political speech. I can’t tell if I agree with you or not. Clarify and defend your position*.

Was Clinton a better candidate in 2008 than Obama? Would her winning the primary have led Obama to run against trump in 2016/2020 instead, resulting in multiple terms of Democratic leadership, undermining capitalism? Or would she have lost and we’d have had our republican asshattery years earlier resulting in left-er leadership as the pendulum swung when this AI bullshit arrived.

My point is: if your only contribution is a single statement like “this is their fault”, just shut up. Trite comments don’t inform.

*I’m actually pretty serious here. I’m new to “Left” and would have called myself a Liberal a few years ago on this forum. Tell me why this is my fault.

Ah… see, you two are about a decade too early for the OP issue.

I don’t have a 2026-model car, since those cost as much as a house nowadays, but they also have a water pump; theirs with a microcontroller. Said pump won’t work unless it’s had it’s special flavor of authentication handled so the computer in the pump (which adds non-negligible cost) can talk to the rest of the car. That’s computer’s only job is to tell the pump it’s authentic and can work.

(I’m simplifying, I’m IT secops, not auto) Used to be there was a literal wire that ran from the turn signal stalk to the actual lightbulb. We replaced that with CAN bus, so the stalk just sends a “we’re turning left” signal that the lights are listening for, like a home network where your computer sends a signal to the printer so you can print a document. In a home network, you might have a real threat vector of an attacker trying to intercept your locally-transmitted data, so there’s a mild use case for encrypting everything to remove that risk.

In my car, there’s no man-in-the-middle danger for someone trying to snoop on my turn-on-wipers signal. Other than aggregate data about how you drive, there’s no data there to leak anyway, it’s all operations. These manufacturers devised a system to ‘protect’ your car network, and are now leveraging it to spy on you (by harvesting your usage data in aggregate – this guy likes to accelerate aggressively and turn without signaling) and also lock out third party parts by ensuring they can’t talk over the local network because they are untrusted by the other parts.

There are documented cases where a car has been ‘hacked’, but those are generally… spoliers… cars with “genuine” parts with software vulnerabilities that don’t need to exists in the first place, and maybe we could spend more time on ensuring the bluetooth stack can’t even see the engine instead of ensuring the water pump must be able to prove it’s legit.

(*Side note, While double checking my knowledge, I found this. It has a reference to MOST, and I can’t imagine the self control needed to not name this ‘Media Oriented Inter-Systems Transport’ instead. I would not have made it.)

I think I’m preaching to the choir here, but back in early 2000s-2010s, we were still in a gilded age of car-can-have-computer-and-do-cool-thing, and now we are in car-must-have-computer-to-fuck-consumer. Same thing is happening in your phone, and soon will be happening in your house. "Sorry it’s so hot in there, the non-samsung AC isn’t compatible with your H0-US-3 model.

Part of the problem is that is really is “we”.

I haven’t dug in, but I have a 401k, a Roth IRA and a HSA. I don’t directly control how those mutual/hedge funds invest, I just get a slice of them. Historically, that’s been a good way to be “diverse”, a funny word in our current political climate, and be protected from one area or company suddenly failing.

With the spacex and incoming google, anthropic and openai stocks coming at us, I cannot imagine that I won’t end up, or already own, a tiny share of these companies. My 401k contribution next month will almost certainly go towards a fractional share of spacex.

I haven’t looked recently, because I’m tired, but I doubt I even have an option to choose a non-techbro fund via my retirement operator, who I have to deal with because they are contracted by my employer.

Sure, I could manage my investments myself, but that takes time, energy and money that I’m already spending on my living. I just get the choices of assorted Vanguard funds, all defined by when I hope to retire! It all depends on how much food costs next month at this point. I couldn’t even find a way to see the specific stocks my fund was currently holding – this data is hidden from us plebeians.

If YOU are certain you haven’t invested in spacex, the only way is if you manage all your stock market exposure, which puts you in a pretty rare place.

For me, I’m probably holding a tiny amount of spacex now and I hate it and I had no choice. The only other choice is to stuff the cash in my mattress, but even that paper will be worthless when this shit hits the fan.

If you owe the bank $1,000, that’s your problem. If you owe investors $1,000B, that’s their problem.

One would think that investors are smart enough to know that this is a shell game. I think what we’re seeing is that they believe they have won the quiet war of capital vs humanity and are no longer afraid of consequences.

We’ve all ‘bought in’ via 401k, HSA plans and other retirement ‘vehicles’ and they think we can’t bite the hand that feeds. Crashing this ‘line-go-up’ would mean we lose “money” too.

And they may be right… but I think we’re rapid approaching a point where that hand no longer feeds, and that hand is quite close to the head. If $1T of this fake money disappeared overnight, the cash in my wallet would become worth a lot more; or we’d switch to trading in bottle caps. The techbros found the infinite money glitch and are printing virtual currency at the cost of real people who will eventually notice and turn on them.

They are even taking away our circuses: My decade-old computer has literally APPRECIATED in value over the last 12 months and the industry that created the products that are being traded right now has completely pivoted away from the consumers that made it. I can’t afford to replace the parts I currently have if they fail.

Even people who don’t call themselves gamers will feel this squeeze when their current iphone battery degrades, can’t be easily replaced, and the new model with no actual value-add beyond battery costs $5k because silicon is all tied up in some useless datacenter no one can afford to access. Oh, and you need a phone to respond to a captcha so you can apply for food stamps, a job, or interact with the chatbot that is gatekeeping whatever else you have to do to survive.

I never had a nintendo console beyond the NES until I got a switch as an adult since I ended up on the sega and then playstation. I missed out on many of these games. I know I could emulate them, and have done so for some games, but I never played OoT. I’m mildly hyped for a remaster/remake that uses modern control schemes and hopefully QoL changes.

I haven’t really looked into it, and it won’t be a day-1 purchase, but it’s on my radar.

Solid agree from me. I love the idea of a wealth/asset tax*.

I’m not sure where the line lies, and I haven’t done the math to see where 3x the global 10% lands, but I think that is likely too small and would impact most of the ‘first world’ citizens who aren’t the problem, but a rolling plan to start higher and move down seems sound. If you start at everyone worth >$10Billion, you’ll have better luck selling this idea than if you start with everyone worth >$10k.

If everyone had all the resources they needed, there would likely be little innovation, but that innovation would be from the passionate. But we’ve seen in the past few years that when all the resources are pooled, the owning class stops innovating and moves into hoarding instead and the motive moves to extracting value instead of creating it.

There is a happy middle ground somewhere, where people can be rewarded for work that adds value to society but not be incentivized to hoard it and others can choose to not add to society but still live a satisfying life.

*Your idea is a little nicer than mine, which is that we identify an absurd personal wealth line, like $10B (tied to some economic indicator), and then anyone over that line is executed and their property is returned to society and not inherited. Build in a grace period, so you have like a year to divest if you pass the threshold. That will heavily disincentivize hoarding.

Yeah. That little bullshit disclaimer at the bottom of every AI thing we have to intentionally ignore is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but is probably a really flimsy shield: “AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses,” says Google.

I have actually used gemini intentionally to answer a question, but the question has always been in the form of ‘where do I find info about XYZ’ instead of my real ask, because I can quickly validate that the response to question 1 is a reliable source, where validating an AI hallucination might take multiple times longer to refute than it did to produce.

And some, a vanishingly few but present group, want to make things better. By dismissing the whole party, you disincentivize the people who might vote for the greater good, or at least keeping things the same, because ‘it doesn’t matter’. That lets the ‘steal everything’ party win.

Want better representatives? Help find them and amplify them. This is not a spectator sport where you vote once every 2-4 years. If you don’t like the choices you are offered, change the choices. Even after you’re doing that, vote for the least harm until we get to a point where we’re choosing between a ‘good’ vs ‘better’. We will never reach that point by telling people their votes don’t matter.

I don’t think we’ve quite hit the point where the ballot box is completely rigged, but posts telling people it’s not worth their time to vote against the incredibly obvious corruption will only only accelerate us to that moment.

I don’t know if you’re depressed, disillusioned or a troll.

These kinds of comments are not helpful.

Things will not get better under Republican leadership. That party has been completely compromised by wealth and self-serving assholes who are willing to be sycophantic enough to the right people to get power. There’s tons of data to back this up, where a majority democratic government quietly fixes the shit a republican one broke.

The Democrats, who are also not great leaders, are at least generally aiming to preserve the status quo. While some of us work to improve the Democratic options and get progressives into the system. Look to Mamdani as recent example. Vote blue and be involved in the earlier steps of the prices if you don’t like the options.

Comments like this only make Democratic leaning voters check out because ‘it doesn’t matter’. Which amplifies the Republican vote.

Comments like this caused people to not vote for the [list-of-things-people-didn’t-like-about-her] woman who would not have cut every bit of humanitarian spending (internal or external) and would not have started a maybe-a-war with Iran and would not have put up with all the regulatory bullshit that is tanking our economy.

Comments like this actively make the world worse. Stop.

If you’re angry at the status quo, try helping fix it. Run for office if you can, even a local one like a city or county position, or help support and canvas for people who are running against the existing leaders who have failed us. If you want a grass-roots movement to magically appear, you have to be the fucking roots!

I don’t gamble, I just spend thousands of dollars and several years on an education and hope I will be able to make more in the future and be able to support my family.

Shit. I thought Caprice was her name. Totally didn’t realize it was a title. Probably sunk my chances of that flirting working out …

“Home row?”

Whatever, wasd and mouse is my home row.

I’ve had similar thoughts, I was slower typing this.

(future Korazail here. On rereading, I want to be clear about the difference between wealth and income. I think we tend to focus on income tax brackets, but the real danger is when the super wealthy can fund their lifestyle and power on the idea that they have money. Rarely are they counting any of that as income, so wonderingwanderer’s thought of <1b income would apply to nobody. We need to tax wealth. I earn $$$$ each year, but my bank balance is $ because it costs $$ to exist and I am fortunate enough to have $ to spend on luxuries and keep $ in reserve. If I had a bank balance of $$$$$, then it doesn’t matter how much I earn in a year; my money itself provides the $$ to exist and $$$ for luxuries with overhead to spare. I might be able to retire on a bank balance of $$. The billionaires have $$$$$$$$$$ in the bank and it would take me 9 million years to catch up at my rate)

Give them some time to prepare, but a wealth cap with harsh penalties seems a pretty reasonable solution to the wealth inequality problem. Death would be a pretty damn harsh penalty, but a really effective one. I’d also take taxing or socializing their assets until they are under the cap.

A billion dollars is just such a staggering amount of money that there’s no reason for any person to control it. And as for ‘why lynch this billionaire?’ You don’t get to a billion in net worth all by yourself. I’d posit that Taylor Swift is my favorite billionaire, and she is known for treating her staff well and giving out life-changing amounts of money to individuals that work for her… but what if she were incentivized to keep her worth below a billion? Larger donations to charity, lower ticket prices to her shows, better pay rates to her staff instead of bonuses (which would raise competitive pay for others in the industry), etc.

People like musk can just fuck right off. They provide no real value. If you invent something that is so useful that it is worth multiple billions, make it a public asset and go invent the next thing. If you made it to a billion dollars, just shut up and retire. Let someone else figure out the next step and get their billion, you don’t need two. The person who suggested bezos pivot from bookstore into general marketplace was probably a random developer who is still there and making <100k/year, but they had the good idea, not the guy with the purse. If we all had more purse, I think we’d have more people trying things and finding the next big thing.

If I were to author a law, I’d tie the cap to a multiplier or fraction of some economic indicator that isn’t individual, like total money transacted in a year globally or something. The number should be around a billion at this moment, but I’m not really mad at it being higher, since we’re targeting the small number of people hoarding wealth.

If you make the cap feel really big, like a billion, then the people, even with millions to their name, won’t feel like it will ever apply to them; but the real predators with multiple billions will be impacted.

I said elsewhere here that I haven’t gotten through the D20s, because they have a story that requires some dedication to sit through and I like the shorter form shows. I still like D20, I just need to be present and treat them like a book instead of just enjoying the mayhem. The on-a-bus iteration of D20 is led by Katie Marovitch, who appears in several Game Changers and Make Some Noise. I think she might be more of a writer than a contestant, but I’m not sure and haven’t gone to look her up. I love that Dropout lets people blur the line.

I think the on-a-bus series, which I’m only vaguely aware of and haven’t watched, is a bit on its own where they are somewhat picking on Brennan; which is funny because he takes this so seriously and Katie doesn’t seem to.

See if there’s a thread in one of the Dropout communities. If it’s old, start a new one and link the old. We don’t all find these shows when they are newly aired. I want to discuss many shows I’ve seen, and plan to use the lemmy.world community to start those.

If anyone knows of an older style forum where this is being discussed, let me know. A necro-post in this context seems like it would be neat instead of annoying.

I really fear this angle. “we can use her” will effectively sane-wash this person and make her seem more reasonable to the less informed voters. I don’t want a MTG presidency.

Inconclusive. I think we need a few more volunteers to give it a try. Sample sizes of 1 are not scientific enough for me.

There may be ‘downstream’ issues if we bury too many cybertrucks in lakes, though…

I think there’s a component where the words matter and the intent/inflection/tone matter and that combination can be used as a whole.

Also, the desire to comment to the world when things happen is pretty human.

“That was unpleasant and hurt” when you smack your thumb with a hammer could come out as a variety of things, such as: “fuck!”, “ow!”, “Jesus Christ!”, “yikes!”, “damn!”, “aaaiiiee!”, etc. Are these ALL swearing, or does the word matter? I would say it does, but we may disagree.

But I think the intent is the most important component for me. If my kid says “fuck” after smacking his thumb, that’s not going to bother me. I’ll ask him to code-switch around me and use something else, but I fully expect that his friends are cursing all the time. The code-switching is the lesson, not the word.

If he says “fuck you” to someone, that’s a different scenario and the words are actively hostile. It doesn’t really matter what the words are, if the goal is to hurt someone verbally, then it needs to be reasonable and sometimes it can be. Telling a bully to “fuck off” won’t bother me, telling a teacher to “please depart from this facility” would. Some of the best disses in history were made without swear words, but were devastating because of it. Be eloquent.

The grey area for me come in when the ‘swear’ is an adjective. I try to coach my kids to not do this, but it sometimes happens in my speech, and I don’t bother with it in text when I can assume my readers are old enough to code switch: “These legos are fucking stuck together” is not acceptable, nor is “these legos are frikkin stuck together”, but “these legos are really stuck together” is. Sometimes, though, you need the extra emphasis a swear word gives you.

My kids read the good books, so sometimes they’ll pull a swear out of a novel. Brian Sanderson has a whole pile that my oldest will sometimes use. I find it charming when he yells “Storm it!” when I tell him to go brush his teeth. Maybe that’s just me.

So…

On Make Some Noise, there are occasionally ‘fan submissions’ for prompts. Where does that happen? I figured there was a secret forum I was just unaware of.

My guess is reddit, sadly, but if there’s some more official place and I just haven’t found it, I need to know.

If the official unofficial place is reddit, we need to push everyone to one of the communities here.