Should people come to Mastodon instead? Of course.
Are there far bigger concerns at the moment? Absolutely.
Whatever Bluesky may or may not turn out to be, the important thing right now is to get people off of X, which we already know is a nazi controlled space. We don't sabotage that goal by being high and mighty and telling people they're not leaving to the right place.
My main workstation desktop that I use for most of my heavy lifting was bought in 2016. In the years since, however, it's been maxed out on the RAM that the motherboard can support, the ssds, the video cards, etc... So while it's now hit that bottleneck of "can't upgrade anymore because it's at the limit of what the motherboard itself can handle", I don't consider it outdated because it can still comfortably do what I want it to do.
A close second would by my Lumix G7 mirrorless camera. Old, yes. But still works perfectly fine. Records in 4K and still produces a better result than smartphone cameras because it uses actual proper lenses rather than digital software trickery. With mirrorless and DSLRs, the lenses are far more important than the frame (to a certain extent), so I don't see a need to upgrade that anytime soon.
If the U.S. doesn't want to be a part of NATO anymore, than they can get their military bases off of NATO territory and European countries can (and should) up their spending to re-man and re-arm those bases under the flags of countries that aren't dickheads.
I don't think Trump understands just how much of America's global exercise of power relies on the good will of having countries willing to have them in their territory.
Because -isms exist in a binary world (sexism, racism, etc...)
Any increase in visibility for whatever minority they happen to hate, is a decrease in visibility for them (in their feeble transactional little minds) and it drives them bonkers.
I think (my own personal opinion) is that Big Trouble in Little China did something so crazy and wacky that no one actually recognised it at the time.
If you look at the film from a certain perspective, Jack Burton was the sidekick, and Wang was the main character. And they just filmed it from the perspective of the sidekick who thinks he's the main character, which is a conceit I've always adored.
Rated 5.7 by people who had no clue what it was saying at the time. I feel like if it was released in today's pop culture environment it would fare far far better.
It's far more satirical, clever and funny than an Archie adjacent bubblegum pop movie has any right to be.
That's what I mean. We should give the individual a fast-tracked opportunity to prove that they can meet those standards instead of blanket rejection because they came from a school that did not.
For example, if I...at 48 years old...decided to return to University for a marketing degree, I have the opportunity to audit a number of my classes based on my own life experience. I can preemptively take the applicable tests to prove that I don't need to take the class again. It's a fast track based on the fact that I've spent the last 25 years of my life working at least tangentially in marketing, so that has to count for something.
There's no reason that they can't do a similar thing with skilled specialists who happen to come from so-called "sub-standard" schools. Test them and audit them on an individual basis rather than just telling them "too bad".
I don't disagree that we shouldn't compromise our standards, but a school based accreditation process doesn't allow for any sort of individual appeals process. (ie. Doctor "a", who is really talented, gets universally shafted because he comes from a school that was deemed "unfit", even though he himself could blow any of our accreditation tests out of the water)
Let the specialists come here and fast track an accreditation instead of saying "sorry...you school sucked, welcome to Tim Hortons."
Because when he says "Wealthy again", he doesn't mean you.
Tariffs essentially mean you're paying more for everything that you buy, which then goes into the corporations coffers, and the billionaires/robber barons get richer. THAT is what Trump means by the country being "wealthy again". He means the billionaires. He doesn't care if it's his own middle class paying for it.
Writing: Specifically fiction writing in terms of structure, POV, plotting, etc...
History: Especially early societies and how much everything really stays the same, despite the advance of technology. No matter where or when you go, humans are gonna human.
Russia doesn't want anything from the the U.S. except what it's already doing. Fucking shit up on the international stage and thereby destabilizing NATO.
Any decrease is Western Hegemony is good for Russia. It doesn't matter whether they achieve it by tossing some people out of windows, or by helping an orange toddler ascend to the highest office in the U.S.
More and more every day...