Depends on who wins. They’re only insurrections and riots when brown people and leftists do them.
The next J6/Charleston will be covered more favorably than the '64 March on Washington was, now that Bezos et al have shown their colors.
You live through enough of these “Most Pivotal Elections” and the effect is muted.
I remember Bush winning in 2004 vividly, the soul-crushing realization that Americans were ready to continue the relentless slaughter of Arabs for another four years with a fuck-you kicker to anyone LGBT looking to come out of the shadows and get married. (Nevermind the shady vote counting in Ohio).
That was after the 2000 election was stolen in full view of the public by a nakedly corrupt court.
“How could so many people be so blaise about this shameless disregard for democracy, civil rights, and rule of law?”
But then 2008 rolls along and suddenly I’m surrounded by conservative revanchists who want to talk about secession, because a black guy just won the presidency. And it begins to occur to me… “Oh, I’m just living in a fascist country”.
Now, having familiarized myself with US history a bit more, another fascist winning in one more corrupted and propaganda soaked election cycle makes perfect sense.
It is now easier to identify political whackadoos and disengage
I would have said that four years ago, but between Elon’s Twitter and COVID anti-vax hysteria, it feels like crazy people are coming out of the woodwork.
People who live in apartments are generally less well off and have problems with crime and anti-social behavior.
There are apartment buildings in my city of Houston where the base units rent for north of $10k/mo. Housing is cheaper (relatively speaking) but you don’t get the kind of access or amenities that these spaces provide. If there are criminals in these units, its all white collar crime. Nobody is stealing catalytic converters to pay rent at the Riverway Plaza.
Live in a nice upscale spot and you’ll enjoy the apartment lifestyle. Live in a falling over money pit and you’ll hate home ownership.
Moved back to my parent’s house and then was lucky enough to be able to buy a house.
The great thing about parents is that they’ve already paid off their mortgage (or near enough) that they financed on a property purchased decades beforehand. But the down payment on a house costs more (even in PPP adjusted dollars) than the whole unit would thirty years ago.
That’s not a rich-guy / poor-guy problem, its an old-guy / young-guy problem.
Tell me you’ve never been poor enough to have to use a shared washing machine
Literally every college kid ever. Lots of apartments and dorms have laundramats. They save space within the units, you can do two or three loads at once, and when you’ve got one per floor its never really a problem except on the day after exams when everyone is cleaning up and shipping out at once.
I used to believe in dense housing in cities until I had two sets of psycho upstairs neighbours and no thanks
In my experience, a little insulation goes a long way. A couple of extra inches of wall thickness transform shouting/cheering/screaming kids into faint muffles. Meanwhile, anyone that’s had to live in an HOA community knows the annoyance of getting a nasty-gram from a neighbor down the street who might as well have had her ears shoved up against your window in order to complain that you had a party.
Folks in the suburbs somehow manage to develop Superman hearing and still complain about everything. Folks in midtown townhomes experience night-and-day differences when they get double-panned glass. Nice apartments have thick walls (good for heating/cooling as well as sound-proofing) and let you enjoy your privacy as soon as you shut the door.
Apartment living sucks ass. I’d rather live in the suburbs.
Live in a nice apartment. Makes all the difference.
The suburbs are horrendous. Everything is five miles away, you’re in gridlock when school starts or lets out, and the only social activities are pay-to-play. Spent my childhood in the suburbs and it was miserable.
We can’t hear each other normally.
Lived in an apartment for ten years and I couldn’t hear a peak from my neighbors, because the walls were wide and padded. Moved into a townhouse with single-pane glass windows. Neighbor’s kids were practically in my living room until I upgraded to double-pane a few years later. Insulation is a total game changer.
Past that, anyone who lives in a neighborhood with teenagers will hear those teenagers. As soon as someone gets a motorbike with a cut-out muffler, everyone on the block knows what time they get home.
Generally think private homes are a giant waste, both in terms of wasted physical space and energy lost due to poor insulation.
Living should be communal. No residential construction should hold less than eight housing units.
After you do this, you can consolidate a bunch of an amenities - washing machines, parking, central heating/AC, pools, gardens, outdoor grills, wet and dry bars, basements, rumpace rooms, home theaters.
It all gets so much nicer when it’s a communal living space.
Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.
On the flip side, Truth Social is a Mastadon instance, and it’s trading with a market cap of several billion dollars. Seems successful enough to me.
I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers
Generally speaking, you’re not on these services to follow strangers per say. You’re on there to interact with D-list celebrities and other highly niche personalities. Or you’re on the system to self-promote and become a D-list celebrity/niche personality. Webcomics artists, semi-famous musicians, podcasters, and political bloggers are all over my feed. I’d never talk to these people IRL. And I’d never interact with them if they were even slightly more popular or famous. But in this space, its a cozy little “oh let’s check in on what the author of AtomicRobo Comics is up to?” fan relationship that’s fruitful and fun for everyone involved.
But Mastadon is shit at putting indie fans in touch with their focus of attention. After that, what am I using this for other than a stripped-down Discord or glorified group-SMS? Pointless.
One reason why Truth Social was able to work stemmed from the fact that it was a single magnetizing D-list celebrity that drew people in. But even then, you’re talking about an audience in the… thousands? Even as a one-stop shop for all things Donald Trump, it’s low energy and lame when compared to Twitter.
the same kind of power tripping neckbeard discord mods
I’ll never understand the intense and visceral anger some people on the internet have towards facial hair. Also really leaning into the 4chan-esque Everyone Online Is Dudes trope.
Was very confused, because I thought this was Rodger Sterling from Mad Men for a minute.
Read the Manga, they say. The story is so much better, they say.
You monster.
Levels of white-on-white racism not seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Talking about “Other Product” in the “Product” sub and getting banned is a tale as old as time. So obvious that the mod community is overrun with corporate accounts and their influencer subcontractors.
There was an abstract conceptual theory of system agnostic game add-ons. It isn’t… completely inconceivable.
You could work with a relatively prolific engine, like Unreal, and set up a standard character model dummy with designated hard points for attaching accessories and certain default movements. Then any accessory could simply scale to the environment - Master Chef could swing a keyblade while the Elden Ring guy gets to wear Iron Man armor, because these are all “human” models with well-defined structures that could map to the associated equipment. The blockchain becomes a universal registry for these assets that a platform can read from to render the art.
The problem is that nobody ever actually implemented this universal protocol. They all just ran off making jpegs of weird animals and running fake auctions to create the illusion of a secondary market. You had zetabytes of data being processed so some Baked Alaskahole could claim his Kumming Koala was worth $40M.
I don’t even strictly begrudge “the blockchain” as an idea for licensing and data storage (just please don’t ask me to think about who is generating the licenses or storing the data). But it was all vaporware. None of it was anywhere close to being created, much less delivered. People were throwing billions with a b of dollars at entirely empty promises.
Why, Linux?! It is said that you would destroy the Blockchain, not join it!
Block me or I’ll keep saying forbidden things
It’s quite shocking to compare a foreign superpower with an advertising company
Glances at Coca Cola, United Fruit, Disney, Ford, and IBM
Yes, but not for the reasons you imply.
China has state-coordinated schemes to both suppress its own internal population (which may not concern you if you aren’t Chinese and never go to China) and to manipulate people globally (which everyone should be concerned about).
While it’s true that all countries collect data for the purposes of propaganda, China does so at a scale and with a level of precision and control that pretty much no other country can reach.
Is there any actual evidence that the Chinese state spends more money or man-hours attempting to collect, analyze, and manipulate public opinion than - say - The NSA? Or, for that matter, Google AdSense?
You should be trying to limit the amount of data that ANY group gets about you, but some groups will do more nefarious things with it than others. Google for example just wants to advertise to you.
Firstly, isn’t that the entire threat that this data analysis presents? A malicious actor wants to accrue enough information about you such that they know exactly what to say in order to manipulate your behaviors and beliefs. That’s advertising in a nutshell.
Secondly, why is the threat of a domestic advertiser somehow less existential than that of a foreign one? Does Sundar Pichai have more of my best interests at heart than Zhang Yiming purely by proximity? Or is this purely a “Chinese people think evil, American people think good, its just in our natures” thing?
Thirdly, if Chinese investment in American technology is such an existential threat to our freedom of thought and rational action, why is the American military industrial complex so glacially slow in their response? You want me to believe that the Chinese government is brainwashing Americans en mass with their evil TikToks, and we’ve got proof, but we still want to let them keep doing it until November (squarely in the middle of election season) before they’re forced to divest or stop serving content?
This all just strikes me as xenophobic hysteria, especially given the blaise attitude towards domestic advertisers (oil companies lying about climate change, crypto shills lying about their financial risks, Joe Rogan/Alex Jones types pushing phony nutrition supplements, political mega-donors lying about one another’s platforms, outright scammers just trying to fleece you).
I don’t think the police or the military are particularly divided on who to support. A coup maybe.
But liberals won’t be putting up a fight once the media starts labeling them Hamas/Hezbollah and you can’t post your pink pussy hat on Instagram without getting put on a list.
There’s always Ireland. Mexico is looking pretty good right now, given the flood of cheap imports and the resurgent manufacturing sector.