most of America

One American in five.

I wish more MCU Democrats and Punisher Skull Republicans would read this.

Oh yeah, we’re absolutely getting a fucking measles epidemic before the end of his term.

At some point he needs to be able to physically enact proposals. Like, it’s one thing to say “Build a wall” and it’s another to get the land rights, hire the contractors, do the work, maintain it on competition, etc, etc.

You can go down to the border now and you’ll find this rink a dink bullshit that’s falling over in a light breeze. Then you’ve got spools full of razor wire tossed into the steadily shallower Rip Grande. People got paid tens of millions to put that garbage in the ground. And that was under an ostensibly competent administration.

I agree we’re going to get a ton of shit policy. Police violence under Trump is going to skyrocket. Vigilantee violence is going to jump. Border guard violence is going through the roof. But, like, is he going to build anything that can last? Or is he going to get the Americanized version of Neom? A bunch of scammers delivering invisible clothes to prance around in.

I guess we’ll find out.

Between 2017 and 2021, things got pretty bad. Riots, wars, a plague, economic crash, and it ended with a mob breaking into the nation’s capital and trashing the place.

Can’t imagine a repeat will be better.

The infamous examples of $500 hammers, for example, were anti sparking hammers for working around flammables or munitions, hence requiring special materials, certification, and low production runs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Commission

I’m not one to praise Reagan, but the Packard Commission picked off some incredibly low hanging fruit. The $435 hammer ($1235 adjusted for inflation) was a boondoggle by any standard. That it was overcharged by a factor of 2-3x instead of the sloppy journalism implying a 100x markup doesn’t refute the fact that these contracts were corrupt on their face.

While a soap dispenser having an 80x markup seems absurd, it might be more reasonable than it seems at first glance.

Either the equipment could be purchased wholesale much cheaper (as was often the case even for industrial grade goods) or the production should have been insourced to the department that had a bespoke demand.

The fact that Boeing exists at all is absurd, given the degree to which government monopsony and security concerns force them to act as a department within the public sector. But the extortionary rates illustrate the fraud that is the reason these public-private relationships exist.

Republican screaming from the rooftops for the last twenty years have simply been bamboozled.

That’s right, folks. The election is winnable, but only if you can capture the critical immigrant concentration camp swing vote.

Israelis don’t believe it is their land. That’s the rub

Joe Biden confirmed it by repeating it over and over again. Why would I need more evidence than that?

I’m willing to believe he asked ten of his VPs and nine of them agreed with him. Also, that he’s currently looking to fill a newly opened tenth position.

Amazon policy is to stack rank all of its employees and regularly fire anyone in the bottom tranche. So any kind of deliberate slowdown would need to be incredibly well-coordinated. Even then, there would inevitably be a ton of attrition as the automatic Fire Everyone triggers started kicking in.

Its not enough to play by the rules with a company as vast and encompassing as Amazon. You need to take it a step further and start sabotaging the anti-organizing functions of the company. Start shoving monkey wrenches in the employee monitoring systems. Start dismantling the automation that allows the business to function at such a breakneck pace. You’ve got to get in there and break the machine before it breaks you.

Finding the right Discord can be hard. But when you’re in a community where people are pinning things to channels and wiki-ing / linking them out, its a fantastic source for info.

They’re an idea that big forums are actually awful and you’re better off in smaller communities.

Mostly, it’s a pain because it can be hard to find some escoteric bit of knowledge or expertise when you don’t have a Reddit sized forum to troll through.

But that’s where spaces like Discord excel. Nice, tight communities of hobbyists and specialists who are routinely online and regularly churning out useful content.

As a tool for forming communities, Lemmy’s mechanics work just fine.

But the process of federation - combined with the prickly nature of certain administrators - means you can have a lively and robust community in (hypothetically) the far-left transgender tankie community that pioneered the application. But then that gets abruptly cut off and squelched in a more popular forum by some late adopters who hate their politics more than they enjoy their technical savvy.

Lemmy.world has a bunch of memes and political screeching because that’s the kind of user its admins choose to encourage. Other communities have more practical interests. But they don’t draw the same kind of crowd, so you won’t see them on the front page of this site, particularly if you only browse Local.

Really looking forward to this shit showing up in AI-edited Wikipedia citations in the near future.

I don’t think Iran will need to wait that long. This looks like the US/Israel are planning a joint operation counterattack on Iranian facilities. Which will trigger a retaliation in turn as Iran escalates in kind. Etc, etc.

The big difference now is that the US military will officially be getting its hands dirty in the region, much like we did in Desert Shield / Storm and in Libya. Very possible that the ghost of John McCain finally gets its long-sought-after bomb bomb Iran.

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.

Look to my home country Denmark and see how many left leaning parties exists. None of them are Communists btw

Western bloc countries purged their governments of explicitly communist parties back in the 50s and 60s, during the hottest years of the Cold War. The parties that formed in their wake had many of the same ideological inclinations operating under different monikers. So you’ve got Red–Green Alliance and more left-leaning voices in the Social Democrats talking about public housing and land reform and a worker-lead democracy, just like explicit Communists in Cuba and Vietnam and South Africa and Korea and India were seventy years ago.

Similarly, “conservative” parties organized under UKIP, National Front, FDL, or the AfD espousing all the same racist, ultra-nationalist, imperial expansionist views common to 1930s European fascists. None of this shit is new in the material sense. It’s just fresh paint on the old frame.