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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AM
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  • It used to. I mean, at least the way corporate America used to try to use inclusivity in order to reach a broader market. It was just natural to reach out to as many people as possible.

    That's not how it works anymore since attention spans died broadly and "engagement" is the new currency. Everyone has realized that the new, hot form of marketing is to recast a famous movie in a way that makes everyone mad or shoehorn some social issue into an unrelated story, and then amplify the worst voices on either side of any controversy and then you will get free exposure online as millions of people argue bitterly if recasting General Custer as a black lesbian trans catgirl was okay to do or not. (I mean, I'd watch the fuck out of it.)

  • We can legitimately level a lot of hate at Hollywood and a large swath of "content creators" online for escalating the very idea of "woke" into positions so delusional or terrible that I'm still not convinced it's not just psyop all the way down. They made the idea of progressivism and social good seem cringe, socially out-of-touch, ham-fisted and unrealistic.

    I'd love to see less "recast famous story in new races for controversy and profit" and more original stories that show actual struggles that various groups face because of their ethnicity or other identities. (I'd love to see a superhero movie that goes after corrupt healthcare company CEO's but someone already tried to make that story on their own.)

    They shot themselves in the dick for the express purpose of creating drama and engagement while trying to appeal to their mental image of "liberal america" in pursuit of profit, not ideals.

    Honestly, the new Superman movie is a bit of a breath of fresh air, it delivers a powerful social message without falling into the tired tropes and doesn't sugar-coat it, you know EXACTLY who they're targeting and who they represent. But they're also not trying to pander to both-sides. They kept Superman consistent to his values and showed that bad things are in fact, bad. And bad guys exist and are bad. (And they're usually the wealthy elite.)

  • In addition to what the others said here, it's worth knowing that despite all the manufactured contention around this race, Mamdani is heavily favored to win no matter who else enters the final race. The news and youtubers love to find the edge-case weirdos and hype up the drama around it being "BATTLE OF THE CENTURY" because our country's brains have collectively oozed out our ears.

  • Yes, Dems have to get flushed, but other than that, this is fantastic news, this is another hubristic blunder by narcissistic political demagogues.

    This will guarantee some level of split vote from the people that were going to vote for Adams again or some Republican challenger, whoever that was going to be. And there will be a lot of brainwashed median voters who have no clue what's going on just hear the facebook warnings that Mamdani is going to enact Turbo Gay Muslim Socialism that will force everyone to stand in breadlines to get their gay muslim rations.

  • Yeah every single cut here will fill your mouth with red onion gas like a WW1 trench fight. The bottom right is possibly acceptable depending on what it's going in. Top left could work in some salsas. Rest are just "chunks of onion."

    Some people love it, but if you want to turn a first-timer away from fresh red onions for life, give them large ass chunks that overwhelm the rest of the dish.

  • Massive waves of unemployment as AI takes most office jobs, and continues to develop to take many service industry jobs.

    It won't make anything better, we will just have a greater stratification of society, more poor people and the smaller number of rich people get much, much richer.

    These rich people will divide the world into power-blocs and the beginnings of techno-feudalism will really show as different oligarchs and corporations become more outspoken in their political and social goals.

    Society broadly will be even more distracted and less involved in a system that will be far too chaotic and full of misinformation and fakery that no human will be able to sort through anymore. We will escape into more wonderous virtual lives and feel more depressed as a result. Suicide will skyrocket as depression, homelessness, health problems and extreme weather events make everyone's lives more miserable. We will start to see the impact of our falling birthrates which will start crashing even faster in the next couple decades. Governments are going to incentivize raising families with short-term subsidies but it won't be nearly enough for most people who still see no hope for the future and have no social skills anymore.

    In under ten years we will be having our first major "problems" with widespread AI control of systems and governing functions. They will be trained and made by above-mentioned oligarchs who have their own agendas, and will behave unpredictably as a result. People will be misled and influenced to be loyalists to varying positions and narratives with SHOCKING ease as these AI systems figure out ways to utterly hack human motivations.

    It's not looking good. This is the optimistic path.

  • We all hem and haw endlessly about how bad the climate change problem is, but by not collectively DOING something about it, we're leaving it up the countries that actually have the biggest populations and have the most at stake in taking drastic action.

    In America or Europe we are talking about building sea-walls and flood control systems, spending billions or trillions on preparing for rising sea levels.

    What about India? China? Southeast Asia? They have far more to lose from extreme weather and wet-bulb heat events and far more people with lives at risk and less resources to put into massive concrete walls around their coastal cities. How are we going to feel when they start seeing extreme, unilateral options as viable? If they decide to do drastic geoengineering projects like shading the earth with aerosols or orbital shields, we could all suffer if those projects have unintended consequences. (The climate is complicated, yo.)

  • Don't be obtusely literal.

    If someone is in trouble, you need help and you reach out to anyone and everyone you can to get that help. Don't trust the police to be your friend always, so don't go spouting incriminating shit about how you and your friend were getting high or something, don't approach them belligerently, but give it every attempt to get someone's attention and take it seriously. The idea that someone has to be missing 24 hours is a myth if you have good reason to believe they're in trouble. Be respectful and coherent and provide as much evidence as you can. The only time they start investigating even the people reporting the crime is if they determine a crime has occured, and it has to be a bad one.

    If you think you look really sus in this situation for whatever reason, try to make an anonymous call from a payphone (I think they still have those) but also shop around for a lawyer because if the person really is in trouble or something happened to them, they will likely approach you either way.

    Look, I don't like cops either. But the couple times I've dealt with home invaders, there was nobody else I rather see coming down the hall as I was wrestling the intruder. We need a new system and overhauled oversight and management of law enforcement, but we also still need law enforcement. The two things can exist simultaneously.

  • I love every time a politician introduces another bill to "make crime illegal" when they can't think of ANY other way to make the public think they have a real or valid job in the state.

    I'm reminded of the recent Florida bill that "bans airplane contrails" to appeal to the absolutely smooth-brained conspiracists. (The bill imposes a fine of tens of thousands of dollars to any company found to be spraying mind-control chemicals to turn your children into trans frogs. Take THAT Illuminati!)

  • Don't worry, the Supreme Court just gave the okay for slashing 1400 education department jobs and reducing funding.

    In no time at all, our population will be so dumb that it won't matter what words we use to describe anything!

  • I watched my own father illicitly borrow millions of dollars by bullshitting other rich boomers, acquire vast acres of property across the country, promise the family he would pass it all down to us and our futures were set, then have everything taken away by courts as he and and the rest of my family drank themselves to death after snorting away every family assets on cocaine and other drugs.

    I lost everything I owned after investing my time and energy into being there for my family and they just crashed out without any accountability to their next generation. Starting over in the middle of my life from nothing. I may never own property of any kind. I probably will never retire.

    I feel like it was all just a microcosm view of what's happening broadly. The legacy of the boomer generation is going to be crushing us for a century to come or maybe forever.

  • Even the most "shocked" right-wing pundits who were screaming "COVER UP!" during the first few hours have now pivoted to "If there are secrets in there that could destroy corporations, we HAVE to trust daddy and protect the identities of the child rapists. We may not like it but preserving economic stability is more important than the lives of children."

    Not even kidding on this one.

    It's already over, the dust just hasn't fully settled as a large segment of the population is now being told all the moral outrage over "pedophilia" was just for when other people do it. If you're a big businessman or political leader, well that's just the cost of preserving the system that treats us all so well.

    The party of morals, christianity, small government and individual rights everyone.

  • People connect with him because he feels relatable and "genuine" and if that boggles you, we who can type and read words vastly underestimate how powerful this kind of "don't give a shit how stupid people think I am" persona really is.

    Why should we be at all surprised when people like Joe Rogan and Donald Trump himself are so popular with people for their "charisma." Charisma doesn't mean suave and smart, it means you can charm some certain segment of people, particularly those who can't tell the difference between confidence and dimwittedness.

  • While some might trash this take for sounding "boomer" you're not wrong, on a very deep level the profound decline in American and European reading comprehension has led to nearly a quarter of our population being functionally illiterate, and the problem here is much deeper than reading scores or being well-read, the problem is without a robust, developed language system, your brain is far less capable of organizing and contextualizing even basic kinds of abstractions about our world.

    We use words in our minds to create dialogues and monologs to explore meaning and synthesize ideas and understanding about complicated topics. Without words to create these narrations it's much harder or impossible understand anything beyond what you immediately feel and see and hear, you become highly linear in your thinking and also highly reactionary.

    You're seeing people walking around like blank-eyed zombies because the number of blank-eyed zombies is literally increasing.

  • There's nothing "rosey" about the struggles of pioneering communities in early European settlement in the Americas, nor in the way that people pretty much had to shelter together for the last million years before America's founding, my well-agreed on thesis is that community is how our species has survived and the idea of single-family homes and individualism is not only a new thing in our history but antithetical to our very nature as a species, which is why "social death" is a mentally and physically harmful condition that we're all vulnerable to.

    The "American Dream" was for people to make their own way, and at the time it was groups of people who settled and built communities, it was the drive for wealth along with the sudden vast tracts of land that came with America that encouraged people to start spreading out into single-family homes and leaving one's community or family system. If you curl your lip at the idea of staying with your family through your life, that's understandable, but that's because families and our perceptions of family has changed. It's not something easily reversible nor am I making a prescriptive statement, I am describing how things have changed and if I were to prescribe anything at all, it's that we need to work harder at renormalizing actual socializing, at making and preserving friend groups so we learn and understand emotional intelligence, so challenge ourselves to new ideas and re-learn compromise and compassion, something not just missing from the worst people, but broadly through all ends of the political spectrum. Understanding that our current state of loneliness and depression and anxiety is not a natural part of our lives is an important fact that we can't lose.

    We are not living how we've been adapted by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and it's having profound impact on our collective mental health, and it's allowing the atomization of our political perspectives to disastrous consequence.

  • First partner is fine.

    If you're really concerned about security, you should know people can often crack this one pretty easily if you have public social media accounts. It depends on how much you have at stake. I don't think it would matter for your Netflix password, but if it's an investment account with tens of thousands of dollars or more, you should be aware that "hacking" is really just a very organized process of digging into data leaks and social media accounts to scrub as much information about a target as possible.

    To this end, your childhood friend should be (237#0Je<-)Banana39999_willywarmer, and the street you grew up on is Jupiter's radiation belt.

  • Funny, but no.

    We are trapped in our own cultivated echo-chambers. You are a victim of the same cognitive control mechanisms as the right if you think there is at all a large enough wave of regret and "realization" going through the general conservative or even median voting population to effectively produce change.

    This is still not enough. If you want to understand why, spend a day watching FOX or even CNN or MSNBC. Right-wing news is already moving onto other bullshit topics like trade and trans athletes and immigration successes. The other networks are using this latest drama to squeeze the last traces of pus from the emotional pimple from a population that wants to read a feel-good, satisfying "We got 'em!" story so they can get back to their comfortable lives.

    The only way this will turn into anything with actual political action is if enough people actively serving in politics right now organize and use this to affect actual political decisions. Investigations, evidence, articles and coalitions. We were led to believe that the Democratic establishment was supposed to be doing this, as there really isn't any other sizeable organization working in politics who can, but the sad truth is that most dems are just working as cover for the fact that the entire establishment, republican and democrat, has been bought or is actively being attacked and dragged out of the picture for not being bought. (See: Mamdani)

    You want this to mean something? Go get involved in your local political groups and work on getting rid of the foundation of this pyramid of slime that supports our congress and senate.