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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The US has a problem of representation. Specifically and especially since the Citizens United decision, corporate interests can easily flow money towards politicians to make them do just about anything they want. This exacerbated an existing problem with the corporate tax rate and has now brought it into laughably low territory.

    That’s all an oversimplification of course, but it’s not that Americans haven’t “figured it out”. It is far more complicated than that.


  • At one time it would have sounded like a conspiracy theory, but you don’t get here without a massive disinformation campaign.

    Trump’s supporters have been so programmed to accept everything he says at face value or, in some cases, just to ignore what he actually said in favor of the party’s updated spin. In all cases, they believe it is impossible that he could do any wrong, so any semblance of incongruity or poor leadership or any negative aspect of Trump at all must be due to lies of his opponents – even if that means the entire system would have to be rigged against him to an extremely unlikely degree.

    The last time the world saw these tactics used to such an extreme extent and with such success required a widespread campaign of so-called “denazification” after a very prolonged war.


  • I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.

    For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.

    At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.




  • The goal was always that the user would be the product. It was less clear at the beginning, because the advertising was far less intrusive (if you even saw an ad at all, in the early days), and the service was “free” at a time when the internet was comparatively young. So it gained a lot of popularity from novelty and being an actually useful communication tool.

    But the communication tool portion was always a side effect of data collection. Any “free” service is ultimately just getting value from you in different ways. In the case of Facebook, once it had amalgamated enough data, the flood gates opened and the enshittification was extremely rapid. It will never go back to the way it was for many reasons, not the least of which being: it was designed to be the cesspool it is now.

    Ultimately, all these seemingly random posts are an attempt to get you to continue to interact with the platform. If you read through comments on such posts, they do tend to drive engagement, even if it is just a user going “why is this in my feed?”











  • We had a tremendous office culture in the 1950s. Since then, we have had numerous – very numerous – improvements and innovations in the telecom space, in the office assistant space (think personal digital assistant, or rather all the ubiquitous tools that do what those used to do), and other general improvements which empower significantly enhanced productivity.

    To say people still need to be in the office is to say there have been no improvements. The fact is, we can be at home and be more productive than in an office. Anyone who tells you otherwise has ulterior motives.

    Company is too invested in real estate? Sounds like an issue that the C-suite caused and that they alone should fix. Middle management needs to feel useful? Maybe they should find a career that actually has a need for their micromanagement instead of forcing other people into an obsolete box to appear useful. Show me a company against remote work, and I’ll show you a company with outdated goals, more outdated methods, and leadership which should be replaced en masse with people from 2024.