In an American vacuum I could see where you are coming from. In comparison with literally the entire rest of the world, it is clearly a flawed standpoint.

The American Democratic party is the oldest standing political party in the entire world. It last changed it’s political stances in the 1960’s and not because they wanted to, but because they needed to respond to the Republicans flipping the entire south in their favor.

Other countries have real leftist parties that actually get government members elected.

Biden was incapable of clearly communicating verbally for 2 hours straight in a debate. I’d argue that Biden stayed in as long as he did to enable them to feel empowered to force another Kamala on us rather than having to deal with a Warren, Sanders or even a Buttigieg winning the Primary. Kamala was 6th in line in the Primary when she dropped out in 2020.

I vote for them, they move right. I don’t vote for them, and vote third party, they move right. I join their party and vote in their primary’s for progressive candidates, they move right.

It’s almost like a bunch of really old, well off, lifetime establishment government folks just actually want to be conservative authoritarians. At BEST they are stuck in a mindset of 1969’s ideas of what progressive politics are because that is when they became politicians.

I mean the issue with TikTok is that they give the data and videos over to the Chinese government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on the US government.

Meanwhile Twitter/X is totally different in that they give the data and videos over the US government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on US citizens.

I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think “Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I’m not the person I act like I am”.

People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn’t have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.

Lemmy’s solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.

When it converts to the profit extraction phase the cutting edge folks will move on. Then the content will slowly become dominated by corporate auto created content. And then eventually the average person will look for the next place to go.

This is just the new cool local bar hangout at scale. This is how human socialization works. It has worked like this for hundreds of years.

I get it, and I agree that most people are not in the right job. This is a big part of why folks want things like a higher minimum wage and socialized healthcare. People often are stuck in jobs because they NEED something from that job and are unable to look around. Then on the other side, sometimes folks find their calling but it pays $9 an hour and they feel a need to try to do better.

I work with a lot of folks for example that got into management because they think that is what you do. They hate the job, they miss writing code, they are awful managers. It’s a very backwards way of living your life.

I am just trying to talk to an ideal and real scenario here. The idea that all jobs suck and that is life is exactly what keeps people down. That is the lie folks believe that keeps them from seeking peace and contentment. We gotta fight that even if we also know that it isn’t easy to find a spot and when you do it might not be viable with the rest of your life.

I am saying yes they would, yes I would. You entirely can find a job that is something you want to do and also not your hobby. Most things folks want to do are someone’s job.

The only place I can accomplish the tasks I’d like to accomplish are at my work. Some tasks are so large that they not only require many many people who wouldn’t normally choose to work together, but a regular flow of resources from others.

People are so lost in capitalism they tie it ALL work to just being money. Even if you remove capitalism, even if you remove money, people still need to work together and resources still need to channel from place to place. Your job wouldn’t go away if money went away. If you look at some of the largest most successful open source free programs in the world, most of the top contributors are all from companies that paid that person a salary for contributing to that code.

They are short about 4 states right now. That isn’t as huge a gap as I’d like. And they have the ability to get the item out to the states.

Yea, if you want more leftist policies than right, vote and work with Democrats at the federal level and try to get Ranked voting in more places. Exactly like Bernie has. Continue to support your third party in local until they become able to actually get folks elected to even a Senate post. As long as the Green Party can’t even manage to get the most hippy district in the nation to get a single House Rep elected you might as well just cast your vote for Bob Ross.

The we made some mistakes but we are proud of our heritage deal only works when you’re not massively losing due to being out of touch with the morals of your base. It’s easier for me to not see the parallels when they are not sending troops to cleanse Gaza. When you look at the votes for them and realize that it is a combination of both the people who want Democrats and the people who just don’t want Trump and they STILL can’t win it is a huge issue.

It’s the oldest political party in the world, maybe it is time to rebuild it in a cleaner image.

It’s cool though, no way that a President that awful would still be ingrained in our modern politics. Well except for the fact that he is the Founder of the Democratic Party, you know… the “good” guys.

The Republican party is policy wise to the right of both National and the NZ First party as a comparison. They will also control all arms of the government and it is potentially possible for them to amend the constitution without any recourse but it isn’t easy.

So to be clear, they could change our Freedom of Religion and Speech to a Freedom of Christian Religions and “Truthful” Speech and there isn’t a ton that anyone could do to stop them just to give you an idea of the level of power they have taken in this election. It wouldn’t be easy, but the fact that it won’t be impossible should be terrifying.

The goals they have of criminalizing providing abortion services in all cases for the entire country is entirely possible. They could round up every person in the country of a certain nationality and put them in camps like we did with the Japanese during WW2, Trump already cited this act as being something he is considering to deal with immigration.

Historically we killed 90% of our indigenous population. When NZ was signing the Treaty of Waitangi, America was executing the Trail of Tears and rounding up 60,000 Native Americans and making them march 100km to live in a desert, a quarter of them died during the move. We’re not even starting in a similar place here and we’re moving far to the right.

The American people spoke and helped clarify what it means to be an American. It’s fair that some folks who last week felt proud to be an American now would prefer to be almost anything else.

We all have happiness, it’s just hard to see it past all the other stuff we got going on in our heads.

Every PC will be using AI as we move forward and thinking they won’t seems as head in the sand to me as thinking the Internet would be a fad. Remember how awful the Internet was in the 80s and 90s? AI is in a similar spot today.

Why would I read a manual when I can ask an AI to summarize it and give me pages so I can confirm? If I’m trying to do a task I know a million people have solved like Python code to translate XLSX and CSV to JSON and back, why wouldn’t I use AI for that?

Trusting AI outright and not reviewing the answers is silly, but doing research with AI is soooo much faster. Also the majority of articles and manuals you find online written in the past year used AI and you can have CoPilot spit it out to you WITH the original sources that the website/blog hides.

The idea that AI isn’t trustworthy is silly, because no one is trustworthy. You should always have been double checking things for yourself, but sitting and struggling through something for 2 days is foolish when AI could do 80% of the work for you in seconds.

Unwrap them and open it and then put them all back so they look used. Write on the box in sharpie “Backups 1/127”. Delete the critical production system at your work. When someone asks where the backups are, hand them these.

For the US the pretty well known policy bangers are The New Deal and The Interstate Highway System both which are not just socialism but Federal level socialism.

All state run armed forces are by definition socialist in nature. Mercenary armed forces have been used many times to great effect but the backbone of most armed conflicts are the most socialist structure you could create.

Every large modern religion (abrahamic, hindu, buddhist) is socialist in nature and got to the level they are now due to socialist policy.