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Cake day: April 5th, 2024

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  • Part of this seems like it’s attributable to changes in lifestyle and material conditions of younger people, relative to their parents. Different aesthetics might mean their parents’ stuff looks incredibly gaudy to them, and doesn’t go with anything else in their apartment. My parents’ home is larger than any place I can reasonably expect to be able to afford, so I also don’t want their big dining room table that I’d have to pay for storage on for years before I can afford a space that it will immediately fill all of. Even if it’s a nice piece of furniture, that’s just a pain in the neck to go through, all for something I might never get to use.

    On the topic of collections, boomers just fundamentally ignore key parts of collectibility. First, old collectables only became so valuable precisely because people weren’t obsessively hording and caring for everything with the intent of selling it down the line. Old Superman comics are rare and valuable due to people who bought them at the time they first came out largely treating them as disposable. They didn’t assume they were anything special that merited being held on to and cared for, so they didn’t. When everyone and their dog buys up commemorative plate sets, or Beanie Babies, or whatever other collectable grift boomers fell for, and they take great care of them, they don’t generally see their value do anything but decrease. The supply doesn’t get significantly reduced, and everyone else can see that they didn’t pan out as the collectable investments they were billed as, so who would want them?

    That said, even for collections of items of genuine worth, you mostly need to hope that whoever you’re looking to give it to is as into whatever hobby as you are. If I were planning on having kids, I think it would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to know what to do with my fountain pen collection, unless they were into them as well. Otherwise, it’s just a ton of fussy pens that seem to have a fair number of duplicates that are really only distinguished by knowledge I couldn’t expect them to take the time to go gathering. Then, it’s still a big pain to actually identify things, make sales listings and sell them off. Hell, I have the knowledge, and even I find it annoying to do so.

    Maybe we could address this, in part, by normalizing expanding options a bit for inheritance. If my hypothetical kids aren’t going to know how to make heads or tails of my pen collection, but I’ve got a younger friend who is just as into the hobby as I am, it would be nice if I could just leave them that specific collection, without having to worry it’ll kick off some acrimonious squabbling. Failing that, have parents indicate who they trust to sell an item for a fair price if nobody wants it. You can take it and think about it, but if it’s just not for you, you’ve got a trusted source to sell it off for you, so you (hopefully) don’t have to go through an ordeal trying to find someone to sell it for you that will give you a fair shake.


  • Outdoors, where you can put some distance between yourself and them?

    Sure, if it’s one person. Where I used to live, the nearest park would have multiple groups engaged in loudness wars, each upping their volume in response to the others, so nobody could enjoy the park. Public spaces shouldn’t be held hostage by assholes who don’t understand how to behave in public, to the detriment of everyone else.

    As far as what to do, it would be nice if the existing rules would be enforced that prohibit this behavior, but people cry racism for being told off for bringing a massive speaker to blast merengue and dembow in the park and somehow find support, rather than people asking why they’re blasting any type of music in the park to begin with.


  • The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically

    Saying “Hey, bud, don’t do x, is I’ll be real mad at you,” and then going “Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here’s a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do.” is not pressuring them, it’s attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.

    Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.



  • When I have an option not to, I don’t. Unfortunately, the way health insurance works here, I often don’t have an option. With the insurance I had through my previous job, basically as soon as I requested a second refill, the pharmacy benefits would go “Hey, we won’t cover this anymore, unless you switch to 90-day refills via CVS Caremark.” At some points last year, that could easily have been $500-$1,000/month more for me to pay for my meds in order to keep getting them at the pharmacy two blocks away, and I just didn’t have it. Instead of going there and having pretty much all my prescriptions filled in an hour or less, I got to enjoy Caremark not letting me refill until the last minute, then encountering shipping delays with medications I really shouldn’t have been abruptly missing doses of.


  • X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.


  • For some reason people don’t want Mozilla to make money or perhaps they assume browser development is lucrative.

    By their own account, it’s not meant to be lucrative.

    "Corporation. Foundation. Not-for-profit.

    Mozilla puts people over profit in everything we say, build and do. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise."

    Straight from Mozilla’s About Us page for you. Maybe they ought to live up to their words and start focusing on making a solid browser that respects users’ privacy with the majority of their time, funding and energy, rather than squandering these assets on current tech hype nonsense that people don’t actually want.




  • Yes, clearly everyone is in a position to just walk off their job at any point in time, with no consequences for being unemployed.

    I don’t know why you’re trying to say that the people who work these jobs, and largely live paycheck to paycheck, have the same sort of freedom as people who are financially stable. I was making my state’s minimum wage at the time, which was entirely insufficient to pay for any decent standard of living. My co-workers who were undocumented were paid even less, had no recourse if they were fired for complaining about conditions or working “too slow” according the bosses, did not qualify for unemployment insurance and had a significantly harder time finding new work than I would. Just like the majority of people out working on farms in the US today. But yeah, let’s pretend it’s as simple as walking off the job if it’s uncomfortable for everyone.

    Your comments make it apparent that you’ve never worked these sorts of jobs or been in these sorts of conditions. What, you’re going to just walk off the job because it sucks and become homeless when the weather and working conditions suck? Because that’s the sort of choice that faces millions of people in the US today. It doesn’t even need to be in agriculture, you can find similar conditions in so many non-unionized positions doing things like landscaping, manufacturing jobs, kitchen work, etc. Florida literally just passed a bill that removed employer responsibility for providing rest and water breaks based on heat stress during work being performed earlier this year.

    But sure, everyone has several months’ expenses in their bank accounts and work in a field where they can get another job from one day to the next…


  • How on earth is this enlightened conservatism to point out that these are not fatal temps for an otherwise healthy individual? I guess the whole population of the third world that lives in the tropics and doesn’t have air conditioning just have superior genes according to you? Fucking hell, literally millions of people around the world live in conditions where they see temperatures as high, or even worse, and you want to pretend like it’s saying “Well this guy should have just been stronger and worked harder,” to point out that these conditions are generally not fatal for a person without other issues.

    No, they are not good conditions, and the state has an obligation to provide decent conditions to all those who are incarcerated, but it’s asinine to act as though healthy individuals routinely drop dead from spending several hours at 96°F or higher in high humidity environments in absence of some aggravating condition.




  • How? Yes, it is absolutely abusive behavior, but these are hardly the worst conditions people work in. It’s literally been hotter and with higher humidity in New York for a couple of weeks, let alone the sort of conditions that many work in in tropical countries, or even a significant portion of the South, a great number of which are not known for extraordinary labor rights. It’s entirely possible to point out that something should not be permitted, while also recognizing it generally wouldn’t be fatal to an otherwise healthy adult.

    This does not attribute any blame to the individual, nor does it reduce the culpability of the officers that subjected them to these conditions, fwiw. Just because something should not generally be fatal does not in any way mean it’s okay to subject someone to those conditions.


  • I mean, I’ve worked in agriculture pulling weeds in those temps and setting up irrigation lines. It was literally 30° F hotter in my job where I stand in front of the kitchen door a couple weeks ago. It’s a far cry from comfortable, especially if you don’t have access to water, but I can’t imagine dying from it, absent some other health condition that was aggravated by it.

    Also, just to be clear, I absolutely think it’s abusive to leave an inmate in such conditions without access to water and shade, I’d just be surprised to hear it was fatal in an otherwise healthy young person.


  • I don’t think it’s necessarily being so concerned with integrity as to deliberately self-sabotage, but rather that this was a potentially viable strategy 40-50 years ago, and many of the eldritch horrors in party leadership, Biden included, just haven’t gotten the message that the situation has changed in the interim. Part of Biden’s campaign pitch was that he’s worked in Congress for so long and has the relations that would let him reach out to the other side to get stuff passed, and he just gets taken advantage of when trying to do so. The Republicans have long since moved on to a strategy of “Ram through whatever you can while you’re in power, and obstruct, obstruct, obstruct when you aren’t.” They generally aren’t concerned at all with what non-GOP voters think of them and their actions, which lets them just bulldoze their way through the process while racking up points with their base for being effective at advancing the agenda, regardless of how hypocritical/immoral they are in the process. Just see Mitch McConnell when Obama tried appointing a justice to the Supreme Court near the end of his term versus his response to Trump doing the same.

    I would also say there’s just a fundamentally different level of at least the appearance of integrity necessary on the Democratic side, and Democratic voters are less willing to accept that the ends justifies the means. This is clearly illustrated just by looking at the fallout for pretty much any Republican having a sex scandal, versus it happening to a Democrat. In his initial scandal, Anthony Weiner didn’t even engage in a criminal act, having sent a 21-year old woman a sexually explicit photo. In less than a month, Nancy Pelosi had called for an investigation into it and he’d resigned his seat. In contrast, Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case and has had heaps of sexual assault and harassment accusations brought against him, yet the party of family values, good, Christian morals, and law and order is still completely behind him.


  • For some of their more conservative members, they’ve certainly done so in the past, but I’m pretty sure that @SeattleRain@lemmy.world is just talking about the self-defeating obsession that Democrats have with appearing non-partisan. Yes, they do need to compromise to an extent to get something through the house at the moment, but they have essentially self-sabotaged in the past when they had the majorities to not need to do so, yet insist on negotiating with the Republicans anyway because they hope moderate Republicans will give them credit for not ramming legislation through in a one-sided fashion.

    This really only works when the other party is engaging in negotiations in good faith, which the Republicans do not. As a result, the Democrats give the GOP initiative on steering bills and policies as they like, winding up with compromised legislation that doesn’t please their actual base, while also not getting credit from the Republicans they’re hoping to sway in some sense.

    For an easy example of this, look at talks about eliminating the filibuster earlier in Biden’s presidency. Manchin and Sinema made it a dead idea, but even before that, Biden has been opposed because of his obsession with reaching across the aisle in an age where trying to do so only serves to stop his agenda dead in its tracks. Rather than get their elbows out and bully the two hold outs into falling in line (which was supposed to be what Manchin was good for, at least. I kept hearing, “He disrupts things, but he falls in line when it counts,” but pretty much never saw evidence of this), they just shrugged and collectively let the agenda die or get neutered, because to do otherwise would not be bipartisan.



  • GM, who just announced a $6 billion stock buy back once they knew tariffs would keep them safe from having to compete with Chinese EVs, that GM?

    This sort of stuff is realistically why I have no sympathy for the major US automotive manufacturers. The only reason I don’t just say “Screw them, let Chinese EVs drive them out of business,” is because it would put so many people out of work in their plants who have no role in these decisions. Barring some fantasy where the Chinese companies establish US plants and offer equivalent or better union contracts for current employees at GM, Ford and Chrysler, these companies should simply be bound hand and foot in terms and conditions whenever something is done by the government to help them. Like, make those protectionist tariffs conditional on them hitting investment targets in relevant technologies, raising worker pay and benefits, reducing cost to the customer and a ban on stock buybacks for the duration of the tariffs being valid.


  • I do, you’re just taking an asinine position on the topic. Society should absolutely help these people to the extent they can, but we cannot change someone’s mind against their will. We can’t just go committing people to a mental hospital for being misled into believing stupid stuff, or even actively harmful stuff. They need to be amenable to at least listening to other people with an open mind. Beyond a certain point, the best we could really do would be implementing measures to be able to disregard them, but that’s predictably a rather unpopular idea, given how anti-democratic and open to abuse it would be.

    Answer me two questions. First, what, if anything, could other people do that would be enough in your mind? You’re real quick to shoot down everything and anything as insufficient, so what do you propose would be adequate? Next, at what point does the obligation to help such individuals get outweighed by the harm they do to the rest of us by holding everyone else back?