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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I don’t really agree with this article. The argument seems to rest on the idea that a representative democracy is a compromise on direct democracy. In reality, even though I have the ability to meaningfully participate in every election a direct democracy would entail, I have no desire to because I have other things I would rather spend my time doing.

    Similarly, even if I have the ability to run my own instance (admittedly I do not, but many of us early adopters do), I do not want to. I’m happy to let other people do it as long as those people seem like broadly agree with my morals. I don’t need an close relationship, just a trustful one. This digital forum inherently has even better benefits than real life; if I realize I dislike my current instance, I have the option to move to another instance or create my own. In real life I can only move to another district or hope to vote out my current rep.




  • I work in this space (food processing) and deal with this negative public perception all the time. I really think it’s misplaced. The degree to which something is processed is not a good indicator of it’s healthfulness. Tomato paste is a highly processed food, those tomatoes go through the ringer to end up in a little can you can use year round. Those little packs of peeled and sliced apples they sell to put in lunch boxes are a incredibly “processed”; in order to keep them fresh the entire composition of the atmosphere inside those little bags has to be modified, and the bag itself has to be semi-permeable so it can deal with the ethylene gas that the apple slices release.

    All that to say that processing makes ultra-unhealthy foods possible, but I don’t think it’s a good metric that we should base policy off of. If we want to regulate the area it should be of the nutritional value of the products. Of course that’s harder to legislate because people get mad when you try to restrict what they can eat, unlike restricting processing which most people don’t know anything about.




  • In case the email analogy doesn’t work for you, let me let me try to explain. You’re on kbin, you can tell because your username ends in @kbin.social, which is a kbin instance. Instance is just another name for a server. Due to federation you can view and comment on threads from any other federated instance. You can also join maganzines (called communities on Lemmy, groups on mastadon, and subreddits on reddit) from any other federated instance as well. The only thing I don’t think you can do is become a moderator on another instance. Note, the content is being brought to your kbin feed because we are federated, if you go to to the original instance you’ve left the website and thus won’t be logged in. There’s nothing to stop you from making another account with a Lemmy instance, but there’s not really any reason to because you can see the same content.


  • you’re on kbin, you can tell because your username ends in @kbin.social, which is a kbin instance. Instance is just another name for a server. Due to federation you can view and comment on threads from any other federated instance. You can also join maganzines (called communities on Lemmy, groups on mastadon, and subreddits on reddit) from any other federated instance as well. The only thing I don’t think you can do is become a moderator on another instance. Note, the content is being brought to your kbin feed because we are federated, if you go to to the original instance you’ve left the website and thus won’t be logged in.




  • Well, I don’t think I’m a “musketeer” and I’m certainly not a conservative, but I have been a fan of Tesla for a while now so maybe I’ll take a stab at this.

    I want to start by saying Elon has always been an asshole. He’s incredibly intelligent, and clearly doesn’t give a shit about most people. Even among his own kids he only seems to act like a real father to one of them (the one nicknamed X). To me, that wasn’t much of a problem when he was just running Tesla and spacex. You don’t need to be friendly to run a manufacturing company, and Tesla is doing what every other company has so far failed to do: transition light vehicles away from fossil fuels. So despite Elon’s personality I support him running Tesla. Even now that other companies are finally making EV’s seriously they are moving far more slowly than Tesla is at ramping production of EV’s.

    Second, before he bought twitter, almost everything he said there was him trolling or joking. You had to take everything he said there with a grain of salt. If you wanted to hear his actual opinions on things you needed to either listen to shareholder meeting or watch one of the many interviews he does.

    Combined, these two things have created a problem now that he’s purchased twitter. He’s still using the platform for jokes and trolling, but he’s also using it for all of his communication, and he’s still an asshole. I think being an asshole is a problem when you’re running a social media company, I mean that’s why I’ve left reddit. You call him Machiavellian, and I think that’s an apt description of Elon. Machiavellian describes him to the point that as a long time fan, I find myself wondering if his sudden shift to the right is him trying to get conservatives on board with actually doing something about climate change. But I think that might be too optimistic of me.