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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • They should be held accountable.

    I would like everyone to be held accountable. How does letting Trump win help the country? Is he going to hold them accountable for anything you’ve listed?

    This sweeping under the rug because of “blue no matter who” mentality shares more similarity with right wing extremities than with normal people.

    Keeping openly fascist tyrants out of power isn’t sweeping it under the rug.

    You act like preventing neoliberal dems from winning an election will “teach them a lesson” or “hold them accountable”. It won’t. Every time a Republican wins an election it pushes democrats further to the right in an attempt to be the reasonable centrists. Look at the last several decades and tell me that isn’t what happened. Corporate Democrats don’t get more brave and try to capture the leftist’s vote, they cower and try to claw more independents as the Republicans push more to the right.

    The answer isn’t to not vote or vote third party. The answer is to get involved and fucking make them more left. Be the third party and start local, protest, make your voice heard.



  • I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.

    1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
    2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
    3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

    A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.

    Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:

    Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.

    I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.


  • To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…

    1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
    2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
    3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

    Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.


  • Despite Public Radio being creates by an act of congress, good old Ronnie Reagan slashed it funding in 1980. Currently, it gets ~25% of its funding from the government, but only a fraction of that is direct funding. Most funding comes through member stations getting funding from state or Federal sources, or from state funded universities. That means it needs corporate or nonprofit sponsors that can impact the incentives of a media organization.

    PBS gets a bigger chunk, ~40% if it’s funding from State, Federal, and educational sources. Still more dependent on external funding, such as corporate advertising, than internal.



  • Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices

    Assuming you are in the USA, it’s fundamentally because our politics is fueled by private money. The “haves” spend lots of money to make rules that protect and enrich themselves at the expense of the “have nots”. The rich get richer, and the rest of us get a larger share of the burden.

    The rich then spend more of their money convincing everyone else that some minority group of their fellow “have nots” are to blame and let us fight amongst ourselves. They starve us but leave us with just enough left to loose so that the price of doing something about it is too high (quitting, losing insurance, getting arrested at a protest, etc) for most of us to bear.

    how can we change this?

    Get money out of politics. Get the public to stop blaming their fellow have nots and demand change from the haves.

    How does one person even start to address these issues?

    Have empathy for and help your neighbors if you can, especially when they take the risks required to push for actual change. Talk to people. Organize. Support/start unions or a mutual aid organization. Go to local government meetings and make your voice heard. Run for local office.

    Its easy for a small group of wealthy organizations to tilt specific elections or politics in their favor. It’s much harder them to do that in 1,000+ small communities across the nation.


  • Fundraisers and charities, when you have a lot money, are rarely acts of charity. They tend to be PR campaigns and power plays.

    Honestly, even when the acts have good intentions, they are often quite damaging. The involvement of the wealthy in charity is very similar to their involvement in politics. Their wealth buys influence and gives them a disproportionate say that allows them to ignore and overrule the will of the people and sometimes even reality.

    For example, look into the impact of Bill Gates’s “acts of charity” in the education space. He poured money into charter programs that negatively impacted public education. Later studies showed that his programs were not particularly effective.

    Let’s say, hypothetically, that a very rich person is convinced by some charlatan that they found the a means to produce free energy. The wealthy person throws tons of money at the idea. How many talented people will be taken from other legit programs because the paycheck at Bullshit Energy Nonprofit is better? These rich people are successful and think they know bestr. Their money ensures they get treated like experts because money makes things happen whether or not those things are helpful.


  • My point is that people like Trump aren’t looking to help the weak. Trump is looking to exploit them. The only “problems” be wants to fix are barriers to more easily exploit them.

    By blaming the minorities, he creates a scapegoat for his base and others to blame for their problems. This distracts them from the fact that him and people like him are the cause of their problems.

    Sure, some of them are racist but I honestly think most of them are just hurt, angry, scared, ignorant, and desperate. If they had more exposure to minorities most of them would change their beliefs.



  • In maybe third grade I brought my collection of x-men trading cards as part of a sort of show and tell activity. It was in a sizable three-ring binder with those 3x3 slot cars sheets. I had a number of highly valued “foil/hologram” cards. The binder was gone when I got back from lunch. I was devastated and learned to never leave anything of value not locked up if I’m not watching it.

    At work we have a kitchen/break room. I’ve had shit stolen from there a lot. Utensils, cups, bowls. Wash it after lunch, put it in the drying rack, come back in an hour to get it and it’s gone. Once my department had a leftover pizza from an event donated to us. I brought in a baking sheet to reheat it in the oven for a lunch morale boost for the team because we had to work that weekend. The sheet, left in a drawer and not visible to any casual observers, was gone by Monday. That was actually the first item I’d had stolen there but I thought I was just s fluke.

    I’ve literally bought upgrades and utensil sets for the kitchen (maybe people “stealing” my utensils just forgot to bring a fork, borrowed mine, and brought it home by accident?). Stuff like drying towels, soap dispensers + large refill bottles, a microwave food cover… all stolen. I’d keep getting frustrated with, for example, people leaving the sponge wet in the sink. I’d think “its been a year since I last donated something, maybe it’ll be different this time…” and I’d buy an OXO sponge holder or something and within a week it would be gone. Everyone in my office, including secretaries and cleaning staff, gets paid at least a living wage with great health benefits. Some make well over 100k. I just imagine someone making twice my salary seeing a nice soap dispenser and taking it home… lost a good bit of faith in humanity and affected me way more than it should have.

    I found a solution though. Whoever was stealing this shit couldn’t deal with the shame of being reminded that they stole it. I started labeling the donated items using my organization’s acronym with a permanent marker in big visible letters. None of that’s been stolen. I was going to engrave my utensils/dishes but decided instead to look like an asshole and bring my own towel when washing my dishes, drying them immediately, and taking them back to my desk immediately.


  • If Democrats follow that playbook it only legitimizes it, giving a future Republican administration the green light to do it as well.

    I 100% agree in spirit. However…

    giving a future Republican administration the green light to do it

    One of the many problems with American politics is that the Republicans do not need legitimacy or a green light. They’ll fucking do it anyway. They’ll also cry foul if they catch a whiff of a democrat thinking about doing it. Or they’ll just accuse a democrat of doing it and they’ll just use that as justification for doing it first.

    They know their policies are wildly unpopular and that they won’t even be able to maintain power by illegitimate minority rule, which they have been doing for decades now.

    It’s grab power now or regroup and accept that they’ve lost the culture war. They are not going to go quietly, as recent events and Project 2025 has made crystal clear.



  • There could have been better worlds

    So… because Trump didn’t get unhinged to the point where he started a nuclear war, you aren’t worried.

    • How did you feel about refusing to concede in the 2020 election and creating uncertainty and doubt about the electoral process among a not insignificant minority of voters?

    • How about inciting an angry mob to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th?

    • How about strong-arming the Republican party and installing his family to run it?

    • How do you feel about how his SCOTUS has changed the fundamentals of the US government?

    • The Chevron deference?

    • Bribery?

    • Presidential “immunity” for official acts?

    • How do you feel about the loss of the right to have an abortion?

    Do you think Trump, with the powers newly granted to the office he’s again running for, will act in his second term? Where is your line?






  • to do otherwise means we’re actually a combination of Trump supporting tankies who run socket puppet accounts for Russia, and actually want the country to continue sliding towards fascim.

    Lol

    So yeah, I understand your position just fine.

    LOL. Fucking LOL.

    One last reply and I’m done.

    Yes, I doubt that you are some disgruntled DNC veteran. Yes, in this day and age I can’t be certain that you aren’t just part of some foreign or domestic social media effort to destroy morale and advocate for not voting. However, I only mentioned it offhand and have continued to treat you like an individual. You have not done the same.

    I see you as misguided and angry. I see you as unaware of the consequences and ineffectiveness of the actions you advocate for. You never said anything to deny what a second Trump presidency would look like, besides the extremely simple assertion that he’s too stupid and petty. You act like it will be fine.

    You ignore the damage he’s already done. Women all over the country are suffering, voting is being suppressed, minorities and LGBTQ+ folks are being denied their rights, environmental laws are getting gutted, and good federal agencies are being stripped of their power… because of the justices and judges that Trump appointed. You ignore all this and state you’re going to refuse to vote for establishment candidates in the general election. Why? Because, like a child, you are angry that your preferred candidate didn’t win the primary. So, to “send a message”, you’re willing to risk pushing our country another four years closer to a fascist theocracy…

    Yeah, I’m going to hold my nose and vote with my conscience.