I used to work with someone who loved his podcast. She tried to explain the appeal: "He can go from making dick and fart jokes to discussing astrophysics." This person did not know I had degrees in astrophysics. All I could say was, if his dick and fart jokes are as bad as his astrophysics, then he's got absolutely nothing.
And if people would just recommend or advertise instances, and try to grow instances rather than the network directly, there'd be no problem. But every Fedi platform falls into this ptoblem of hiding the host and championing the platform itself, rather than powering independent social websites.
Yeah, but "risk" is just an empty buzz word that means "ownership deserves all the money". The line has to go up. If it doesn't go up, someone else has to pay for it!
Harper ruled for like 8 years. Trudeau bought them a fucking pipeline. The federal government has treated them with kids gloves for decades now, and they think they're getting the short end of the stick?
Fuck. Let Alberta go. Well, the Albertans, at least. The land ain't yours. Get your whiny, selfish, entitled, "exceptional" asses off of it.
I think it's dangerous to imagine people follow these folks, or let them run rampant over society, because they aspire to be like them. That makes it so much harder to really understand why people support them, or even just refuse to tell them "no", and makes it impossible to do anything about it.
People believe that life is a meritocracy. Even when they themselves can look around at the people near them and see that those in positions of power don't deserve it, they still view society as a whole as "fair". Yes, they personally have may have gotten screwed over, but, in general, the people who float to the top got there because they were smarter and more capable. Therefore, we should sit back and just let them cook.
They need some kind of trigger to see the billionaires not as people who have earned their place, but who have stolen it.
I like the part where my fellow leftists don't know WTF a central bank is, and fall into using long-standing Nazi dogwhistles for fun.
Definitely makes me think there's a real chance for the left to ever do anything meaningful, and not just sit around jerking off all day while getting high off of our own farts.
The fact that there has been so much noise over $80 video games makes me question the thesis here. There are a huge number of video games out there now, it's true, but if gamers truly gave a shit about them, I think everyone would be rather quiet about the prices from the big publishers.
All of the noise tells me that gamers will continue to prioritize big name, big dollar releases, rather than actually even glance at their backlog of Steam games. And $80 spent on games you never, ever play is not a better investment.
When they stopped acting and speaking like them. It's not an issue of policy, but ones of community, identity, and trust.
The NDP is really bad at showing different parts of the electorate the side that speaks to them. Rural blue collar folks keep seeing talking points about urban student issues, people struggling with mortgage payments keep hearing talk about landlords. They keep talking about spending money on "everybody else", and give working class people the feeling that they are the ones who will have to pay for it, even now as they feel more squeezed than ever.
Plus, everyone looks so damn prim and proper and lawyery.
The conservatives at least speak to their frustrations and anger. They offer a conduit for it, and a sense of catharsis, even if they have no interest in solving the problem. The conservatives feel better to side with. They don't just tell them that they are right to feel angry, they make them feel safe to feel angry.
The NDP doesn't do that. The NDP makes them feel judged for feeling angry, even while the party tells them that their anger makes sense.
The game prices I'm ok with. When I was a kid, video games cost $70 CAD, and that's almost $200 now. I'm perfectly OK with going back to buying fewer games. I have too many of them I shouldn't have bought in the first place.
I'm wildly upset with the console price, in no small part because Nintendo and other electronics manufacturers seem to be trying to smooth over the shock of Dorito Don's tariffs by increasing prices globally.
The Americans made their own bed. I'm not willing to lie in it with them.
It remains so incredibly alarming to me the number of "business leaders" who looked at consumer spending in 2020/2021, looked at the global context of 2020/2021, and then went "things will now be like this forevermore," even as other "business leaders", and even, very often, themselves, were doing everything possible to force everyone back into a pre-COVID context.
My own employer was one of these businesses, and every time I've brought it up, I've been firmly told "everyone else thought the same thing we did, too".
I didn't have a whole lot of respect for business people before that, but I at least -- naively, it turned out -- believed they knew how to operate businesses. I now have no respect for such people whatsoever, as they've demonstrated completely and thoroughly, even to the point where my dumb ass can notice, that the only thing that ever "qualified" them to "run a business" was having money.
The fact that tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs because the ownership class chose to believe that they'd stumbled into an infinite growth hack is shameful, and these "leaders" deserve to be stripped of all that they own and tossed into the street.
Unfortunately, you weren't the conduit through which he reached all of his fans. And that relationship is damaging society.