sp3ctr4l @ sp3ctr4l @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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4 mo. ago

Anywhere in MA I can rent a studio apt for ~$700 a month?

Probably not lol, I'm on SSDI, but an actual proper city/town sounds great!

Uh, in a few words:

Great Depression 2.0, potentially worse.

The dollar has lost roughly 10% against all other currencies, because we are a debt laden nightmare that is either going to or beginning to default, going to not be the world currency / favored safe asset nation for bonds.

And we produce basically nothing tangible, we import a lot, so... everything gets more expensive.

Also we functionally just fired all our construction workers and farmers via ICE raids, so food goes up in price a lot, probably shortages, ie, famine... and we can't actually build any new houses or warehouses or office buildings or anything without much higher cost, from both imported materials and higher labor costs...

Oh right and the dollar tanking generally means oil, gas goes up in price, so anything involving logistics is now considerably more expensive.

Oh and basically everyone in the bottom 2/3rds by income distribution is in massivr amounts of debt, so, garnished wages, reduced consumer demand...

Yeah, I could go on, but I am quite serious when I say this could actually be worse than the Great Depression.

... I hope to god you didn't buy in roughly the lower 1/3rd of the country, almost all of those areas will be uninsurable within 10 years due to more frequent and more severe climate/weather events.

SoCals gonna burn down, Florida's gonna sink/melt into the ocean, get washed out by hurricanes.

Possibly the only possible bright sidd is that if you have significant stock investments of some kind, those might 'melt up' to roughly keep track with the devuation of the dollar, so you may have a chance at at least treading water there...

... but basically everything else is going to be a shitshow, business can't afford to pay the wages that would be necesssary for a worker to survive, amped up to 11... rents will probably start to trend down after a while though, as housing values nose dive.

Or maybe they'll just say you need to have ridiculous income level to qualify, but we'll give you 3 to 6 months of free rent.

They tend to do literally everything other than just lower prices for as long as they can.

I'd fuckin watch that.

I agree with your specification.

The kind if mixed use, areas that are walkable, have seating, various kinds of shops... usually only in a few districts of a few fairly large towns or large cities.

There is seating, sometimes, in like... restaurants in basically a strip mall type set up... but they're like islands, surrounded by acres of parking lots.

All the way up and down the West Coast, multiple times, over the course of more than 2 decades of being driving age... from Bellingham WA down to LA / San Diego... many, many places in between... also many places all the way out to South Dakota via I 90.

If I gave you a full list, I'd have to rewrite Johnny Cash's "I've been everywhere"... I've actually been to a good number of places in the original lyrics.

Basically yes.

We don't do that in the US anywhere near as much.

Maybe a park will have a table and bench, maybe some certain restaurants in certain parts of certain cities will have them.

But its much, much less common, as our society is designed to be unwalkable, designed for cars and parking lots and air conditioning.

Ubuntu.

Oo boon too?

Oo bun too?

Pretty sure the correct pronunciation is the first, but a lot of people say it as the second.

... lets just name the next big FOSS thing 'Uranus' and watch everyone disagree about how to pronounce that, very loudly.

I'll say it that way sometimes, haha!

I also have a tendency to shorten 'good night' and 'good morning' and even 'good to see you!' into just basically g' with a glottal stop, haha.

What you're saying is true, that not knowing how to pronounce aloud a word you've only ever read is not some kind of 100% surefire sign you're a bigot or anything like that.

It just means, as you say, that you've never heard it said aloud.

But... that also means you never bothered to look up how it is pronounced (its on wikipedia, the actual Godot devs have videos of them saying it, etc)... and it does also mean you presumably are also unfamiliar with Waiting for Godot.

So I would say you are also 'uncultured' in that way, but of course, simply being uncultured doesn't make one a bigot.

You could just not have the time, money, etc, to have seen the play before.

That by no means say anything else really concrete about you, or any other person, if that's like... the only single datapoint you know about them.

In all seriousness, I do strongly recommend seeing the actual play, probably you could find a dramatic reading / radio drama version of it somewhere on the net, or even a full video captured performance of it on a forgotten youtube channel or the Internet Archive.

I... don't know that its ever been adapted as a proper movie, perhaps a film snob can appear and call me uncultured, haja!

So... I actually tinker around in Godot.

Whilst looking around to see if anyone had, or was developing an extension I would find useful...

I discovered 'Redot'.

Basically, there is a small but very vocal group of people who are very, very angry that a Godot community manager made some pro LGBT, inclusive twitter posts, turned that into a culture war flare up on twitter...

And then forked Godot.

To make the anti-woke version of Godot.

Their youtube channel has, as best I can tell, absolutely no descriptions of any substantial differences from... you know, an actual game engine feature set perspective.

Beyond of course being behind Godot now, lol.

What they do have is a bunch of rants about politics and edrama for their 'non-political' game engine.

Also... they pronounce Redot as Re-Dot, hard t.

Godot is Godot as in Waiting for Godot.

Go - Dough. God - Oh.

The t is silent.

... of course these idiots are literally uncultured and have never read the screenplay or seen the stage play, so they have no idea how to pronounce the word.

Could have gone with Re - Do, or Re - Dough, those would have been closer, the first at least an obvious allusion to them being a Godot fork.

But no. Re Dot.

smdh

So basically you don't commonly use loose as a verb, I do, and always have, and this makes apparently me a sealion.

Dialects exist within English.

You are evidently not American, as in USAmerican.

I am.

Where I come from, using loose as a verb is fairly common.

Stop being an intolerant ass.

Was this written by Thor?

My guess is 30 to 40 % Reps leave, 5 to 15 % Dems leave, and a whole bunch of 'independents' join as well, various libertarians and crypto/techbro type people.

EDIT:

Yay, I don't have to do any too much math, they actually did most of the math.

Apologies for shitty cell phone image, here's the whole poll (3rd link in the article, by the way):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R4pZVo0ZnrQyElZQzdNtt7CQ1zwTypuS/view

...

So, ballparking a 50/50 male female split:

Likely to Join Elon's Party:

Republicans

Very likely: 23 + 14 / 2 = 18.5%

Somewhat likely: 34 + 29 / 2 = 31.5%

Not likely: 31 + 30 / 2 = 30.5%

Independents

Very likely: 18 + 11 / 2 = 14.5%

Somewhat likely: 29 + 26 / 2 = 27.5%

Not likely: 35 + 36 / 2 = 15.5%

Democrats

Very likely: 7 + 5 / 2 = 6%

Somewhat likely: 15 + 16 / 2 = 15.5%

Not likely: 54 + 48 / 2 = 51%

...

So, if you say half of the 'somewhat likely's actually go for it, then you get this:

Republicans who join Elon Party: 34.25%

Independents who join Elon Party: 28.25%

Democrats who join Elon Party: 13.75%

...

So yep, my ballpark guess was indeed in the correct ballpark.

...

Worth mentioning:

There are more Dem voters, than Republicans.

But there are also more independents than either.

Roughly 32% Reps, 33% Dems, 35% Indp.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideology-of-american-voters/

So, throw that in with those previous calcs, and you end up with:

Reps: ~21%

Dems: ~28.5%

Elons: ~25.5%

Indps: ~25%

or, normalized to remove remaining Indps:

Reps: 28%, Dems: 38%, Elons: 34%

So... theoretically, the Dems are still the largest, Elon is now second behind them, and the Reps are now a third party, less popular than having no solid political affiliation.

... if this actually happened, which it could, Elon has enough money to single handedly start a party, though he'd have to find some actually competent people to... do anything other than spend money...

I think you end up with a good number of corpo Dems leaving the Dems, so the Dems now have an easier time shifting to the left.

The Reps lose 1/3 of their voters, and basically just become a cult of idiot racist nazis, paleocons, theocrats, MAGA nutjobs.

Elon party ... basically becomes the 'centrist'/libertarian/ancap/corpo party.

... and everyone would now have to figure out how to do politics in a much more complex kind of paradigm.

I... don't think a roughly even balanced 3 party system has ever existed in US history with any kind of stability, that endured more than one or two Presidential elections, 8 years.

Two roughly approximate examples:

The Civil War.

Teddy Roosevelt going Bull Moose Party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_eras_of_the_United_States

But uh yeah, not stable.

And these numbers are close enough that a 3 party system might not implode quickly... or it also could.

Especially if the President just gets to remain as functionally a dictator as the last months and years Supreme Court rulings have made him.

???

Yes, thats the 'independent voter' cohort the Dems have spent 20+ years making concessions to.

They also grew this cohort by being very largely ineffectual, and allowing education, wealth gap, general quality of life... to all get much worse, such that more people are now more stupid, angry and exhausted.

Ok then, if you're unwilling to be just ever so slighlty more flexible with idioms and general examples of the flexibility of loose in English, and a brief overview of the etymology of the evolution of 'loose'...

...let me be more direct and precise:

...

Loose is a verb, in addition to being an adjective.

Loosing is when that verb is formulated into the present tense.

Loosing as a verb has multiple meanings, including:

1. Expelling something away from you physically.

The archer is loosing an arrow.

2. Letting something escape from you, or move away from you, either temporarily or permanently.

Tom is loosing his dog.

3. Unleashing something from within you, outward, often speech or emotions, but it could be something physically tangible.

Shush! Anna is loosing her real feelings on John right now.

4. Allowing something to affect the world in a broader sense, scope, or scale.

ChatGPT is loosing upon the world a dark age of widespread illiteracy.

5. Making a connection, a binding, a tether, etc, constrain something in a less restrictive manner.

By loosing the knot around the cleat, I am loosing the boat from the dock, but only slightly.

...

I really don't see how it is really that much of a stretch to take some of these uses of 'loosing' as a verb, and see that either one, or multiple simultaneous of these definitions, and interpret the phrase 'loosing my social connections' into something that essentially means... 'letting them slip away'.

I do not really think it is thus 'grammatically incorrect'.

I will give you that usage of loose or loosing as a verb is nowadays fairly uncommon, to the point of possibly being considered archaic...

But then if that is the case, as it is with many words and phrases from 100+ years ago or w/e...

...well then you'd be doing a bit of extra interpretive work anyway, not really that distinct from just being a bit more idiomatically flexible with the range of current meanings of 'loose/loosing.'

...

Perhaps I am simply older than you, and/or have read more older books, watched older visual/audio media where 'loose' is more commonly used as a verb.

I am not trolling.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/loose

Go down to the verb section.

Loose is both a verb, and an adjective, and nothing I have said is incorrect.

You can very much 'loose' a friend, as in... to project them away from you, or put more distance or slack into the proverbial rope that connects you two together.

Sure, probably OP made a spelling mistake, but the comment I am responding to is saying that the usage is more or less entirely unjustifiable.

It isn't.

You can loose, or loosen a knot, or lasso, or if you are rather good with ropes nets and knots, you can actually do that to an entire net, give it more or less slack, grid density.

I guess its just become far less common for people to have practical, hands on experience with knots and ropes... its pretty important if you want to moor a boat to a dock, or make your own fishing net as humans have done for millenia...

Same goes for knitting, weaving, making clothes and garments of all kinds.

Ever loosened a waistband, or tightened one?

Less and less people have actual hands on experience with any of this, so I guess the metaophors/analogies aren't as obvious anymore.

Heck, loose, as a verb, just like that, also basically means 'to throw' or 'to project away from you'.

You loose an arrow, or a javelin.

You let loose a hail of bullets, ie, throw them downrange, away from you.

You loose a dog, to set it free, or perhaps to go run off and chase/attack something.

Which is differenrt from losing a dog, which is when it fails to return from you loosing it.

A compelling argument.

I disagree:

The phrase 'tight-knit community' exists, and is fairly commonly used.

A 'loose-knit community' would have... less direct ties, less overlapping ties between everyone to everyone, would be more... islands of people connected by a few inter-island connections... maybe less frequent interactions between members...

A social network is often mathematically/academically/professional ly described as a bunch of points, clustered, with connections between them.

Even the very word 'network' is etymylogically derived from a net, an interwoven mesh.

You very much can literally loosen or tighten a net, make one that is more pourous or more dense in terms of threads in any given surface area.

Hey there ya go, even Threads is an actual name for a social network.

I think the metaphor or analogy of social networks being described by other terms that literally apply to an actual net or fabric is... actually incredibly common.

... You've never heard a person being described as having 'loose ties to (other person/group)?

Have you never watched any kind of detective show, a 'stop the terrorists' political action thriller?

(with that inane, corpo, fake-happy whistling song)