I always thought it was funny while studying for my Cisco certification that their operating system was also called IOS. I had no idea there was actual drama behind it!

The only way that could conceivably work out is if everyone collectively protested their student loans together since it’s such a massive problem for so many people. Even then, the government would probably buckle down and try to destroy half the country’s financial viability before they caved and admitted this toxic industry preyed on kids that didn’t know what that debt meant when they signed up for it.

The most effective ads I’ve seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don’t remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry’s Razors for all I’ve heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.

Lmao, unfortunately not. Thanks for catching the typo.

isn’t**

Oh it definitely happens. I’m a young millennial and I have a friend my age who deals with mental issues because he ate lead paint leftover in their old house as a child. Lead was so prevalent at one point that getting rid of it all isn’t as simple as flipping a switch.

Edit: [wasn’t -> isn’t] There does not in fact exist a switch that we can now flip to remove lead. Thanks @[email protected].

I think it’s easier to understand net neutrality as something ISP’s can’t do rather than something they must do, since we’ve never seen them really act on it before. It just means they can’t speed up or slow down your internet based on what websites you’re visiting. Under net neutrality, there can never be a deal with Google to give people faster speeds using Google searches than Bing or DuckDuckGo searches.

How a person reacts to being asked about the version of these things most close to them is telling. If they get defensive and deny the event happened, I would hesitate to trust their opinion on other things. Clearly that person bases their opinions on what they want to be true rather than reality. That’s the kind of person whose ideology would likely lead to another event to be ashamed of. If, on the other hand, they admit it was a horrible thing and agree that people should be educated on it and that steps should be taken to prevent it from ever happening again, then I’m more likely to take their opinion seriously and believe that they can be part of the conversations we need to happen to create a better world.

No worries. You’re right that it’s absurd that we need to fight so much for our government to protect us from blatant corporate for-profit schemes. There was a time when even the US government at least did us the honor of pretending to not take bribes like this. The Intuit tax return money machine is such an obviously fixable problem. All my 20-something friends in the US know that this problem only exists because of lobbying. It’s disgusting to watch elected representatives become so comfortable with their positions that they feel safe enacting policies that hurt their constituents like this.

For context, the reason I’m hating on Intuit and H&R Block and encouraging people to use FreeTaxUSA is because the first two are the main culprits behind the extensive lobbying that has led to the US government continuing to require people to file their own taxes rather than modernizing and making this process free and easy. My “gushing” is in pursuit of changing the broken system you’re pointing out.

I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I’ve used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I’m also a bit of an urban design nerd and there’s a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.

Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.

What I don’t like about this argument is it feels like the government trying to pass off their own responsibility to someone else. Like, if guns are so dangerous in purpose that manufacturers should be fined for shootings, then government officials should just be regulating gun ownership to begin with. Like, imagine if instead of criminalizing tobacco because of its dangerous health effects, the government said that anytime a person is caught smoking it tobacco companies get fined. At that point you may as well just outlaw the company itself. Which is fine. I have no problem outlawing gun manufacturing. But this is just an unnecessarily roundabout way of doing that. What are we actually accomplishing if we allow people to be shot and then take action and milk money out of the situation? A responsible government isn’t trying to point fingers after a tragedy like a mass shooting and they certainly aren’t trying to make money off of it. No, a good government takes the necessary direct steps to prevent those tragedies from happening again, especially if it’s a common occurrence. No need to dance around a solution instead of tackling it head on.

My brain is powered by memes. Memory? More like memery.

From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it’s actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they’re circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we’re going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren’t available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that’s going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.

Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy’s small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn’t even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don’t know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society’s views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.

I think we’re all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000’s era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010’s and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010’s. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.

With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.

Does this mean that Canada is always expanding?

Yeah. Like saying you believe that companies beyond a certain size should be legally required to seek a vote from their employees before implementing certain types of changes is a real policy to argue about. Call it democratizing business or whatever you want. And then that’s an actual concrete issue we can argue about. Or if you believe in the government buying out businesses beyond a certain size, that’s a specific conversation we can have and we can discuss the hypothetical implementation of that. Call it business seizure or whatever. Just saying “I believe in socialism” doesn’t dig enough into the details of how you perceive socialism or how you would implement it. And frankly, I think it hurts the socialists or communists or whoever is trying to persuade the current culture away from what we have more than anybody else. Ideas grow when you make real, concrete proposals. These exceedingly large scale labels usually end up killing a conversation rather than feeding it. Someone gets mad at a label and then everything shuts down on that sticking point.

I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to “socialism”? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say “well that wasn’t true x”. And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I’ve been mostly telling people I’m a “social democrat” or that I support “capitalism with heavy regulations”. But even those words can get picked apart and don’t really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.

Growing up in Wisconsin, drunk driving was a serious issue. Especially on New Years and the Fourth of July. The joke was that every little town throughout Wisconsin always had a church and a bar. There were so many alcoholics that would spend every day at those bars. It’s a tradition that probably goes back to the idea of public houses and having bars be a central location where your community gathers. Many people take the drinking part of that too far though and so the anti-drunk driving PSAs were necessary.