One issue is that lemmy is too anonymous and that leads to it not attracting content creators that don’t actually want to be anonymous and want to create a presence
That's not an issue. Reddit was equally anonymous yet it did just fine (relatively speaking). The different users' usernames that can theoretically appear the same can be fixed by making it mandatory to show your instance next to your username, rather than hiding it if you change your default username. But even without that anyone can hover over your profile name and see which instance you're from, so really you can't actually deceive people regarding the nature of your account.
Kind of, lol. But you can see the difference in the type of hacking. The objects are only meant to hack your own, private reality. That's what the picture is meant to address, that aspect of our lives that can't be translated into external and/or mechanical utility.
Besides, the issue of energy scarcity that the replies are working off could be fixed or at least minimised through realistic technological and political/economic solutions, with no need for magical objects that defy the laws of physics. But no law or real invention can be guaranteed e.g. to give you good dreams.
I do have to admit it's a bit disheartening to post that pic, and then people react to it by looking how to use the objects to 'hack' the nature of reality.
Forgive me for the rather mechanical, utilitarianist formulation, but do you honestly think killing 19 people is merely "slightly worse" than killing 1 person?
I find it very, very hard to believe that there could be two catastrophic famines in the SSSR, and yet that there were no deaths or food issues outside of those two periods (there absolutely were). I only used them as examples, not as a list of all food issues in the Union, while you're implying the latter.
Multiply how many people die of starvation or malnutrition a year by 29 (the length of Stalin’s reign) and you’ll see that I’m right.
The same trend occurred nationwide, with malnutrition deaths more than doubling, from about 9,300 deaths in 2018 to roughly 20,500 in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Let's take the second, significantly bigger number, for the sake of the argument. If the number of malnutrition deaths is multiplied by Stalin's reign, it gets us 595k deaths. At the time, SSSR had (very roughly) half the population of current USA, so to keep the numbers proportional and meaningful to compare, we should halve the US deaths: 300k. Stalin did not actually rule during the first famine I linked, only the second one. The second famine killed at least 5.7 million people (again, taking the lower number, in favour of your position).
300k is clearly a smaller number than 5.7 mil. Since the numbers are only relative, we should judge by the ratio: the 1930-1933 famine was 19 times worse death-wise than the current food issues in the USA.
If you have some different, better numbers (though I tried to pick those that are in favour in your claim), or if I miscalculated something, let me know.
Because blahaj.zone doesn't count the downvotes. The -3 downvotes that you see are only those that are counted by the instance you're viewing from (given out by the users of that instance only). Right now, on lemmy.world it has 28 downvotes, on dbzer0 it has 2.
I've read it in high school, many years ago :D It was one of the 2-3 assigned readings that the class clearly enjoyed over all those four years (along with Decameron and Crime and Punishment).
As far as I remember, it parodies the philosophical (or theological) idea by Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds, which is supposed to explain why God allows it to be apparently so shitty - it's still the best you can get. IMO it's not really fair to just describe it as "everything is going to be ok", as you and Voltaire do, because the original idea is not really optimistic or pessimistic with regards to what you can expect of the world, it is in fact just deeply apathetic (and a bit dumb).
The difference in the meme here is that "everything is going to be ok" is not a hard philosophical law, but a conspiracy theory, going aginst the accepted or obvious knowledge. It suggests some active, nefarious force behind the scenes, unlike Leibniz's inertia.
That's not an issue. Reddit was equally anonymous yet it did just fine (relatively speaking). The different users' usernames that can theoretically appear the same can be fixed by making it mandatory to show your instance next to your username, rather than hiding it if you change your default username. But even without that anyone can hover over your profile name and see which instance you're from, so really you can't actually deceive people regarding the nature of your account.