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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • As another LGBT person who grew up during the advent of the internet and learned that there were words for things I had felt for years thanks to the internet (despite living in a very liberal area), I completely agree with both of you.

    However, I want to make one counterpoint that reframes these movements to where I think these people are coming from: People like us here on Lemmy, who are aware of FOSS projects and the like are a minority group.

    I see these groups as a reaction based on the belief that you either have to deal with the corporations or give it up entirely because nobody else can offer what they do, and the corporations need us a lot more than we need them. They’re effectively a general strike against the nightmare of corporate walled gardens that the internet at large has become in order to force a correction in the ecosystem, and I think if these groups were made aware of the alternatives out there, we’d probably see a large swing in adoption.


  • I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn’t mean that it’s the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

    I simply was saying that the “Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke” narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.


  • Your timescale is skewed. You’re either young, pushing a narrative, or both, so let me describe how things look historically from a sample size that actually matters. 2 presidents is not a big sample size.

    Starting in the 80s, the American economy began to decline and the national debt began to rise under Reagan and politicians like him - trickle down economics had begun. In the late 90s, a president balanced the budget and actually began reducing the national debt (by cutting funding to social security and other less than stellar actions). That would be Clinton. And then along came Bush Jr and the post 9/11 forever war in the Middle East. Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the national debt has risen like an ICBM. I remember when news channels talked with disbelief about Bush possibly doubling the national debt within a year.

    So it’s 2008, Bush just finished up his second term, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything in the 2008 depression (except for Bush’s rich friends. They got government bailouts and made bank buying up all the poor people’s houses). So, what now? Now, a black man who runs on a campaign of changing things for the better wins the election in a landslide, and tries to do most of what he promised. The economy sees large amounts of growth and jobs added, and the spiraling of the national debt slows down. However, Republicans vow to never let a black man do anything in the White House and the Democrats capitulate before the fight ever starts, so Obama is hamstrung and despite trying, ends up being forced by Republicans shutting down the government to not fulfill any of his campaign promises in his two terms (except for installing a healthcare system that Republicans fought tooth and nail against because it makes it illegal for health insurance companies to kick cancer patients off their health insurance and then refuse to cover them for having a preexisting condition: cancer).

    Now it’s 2016 and a man who ran on a campaign of undoing everything the black man before him did and the promise of kicking out all the politicians that he’s been friends with since his big business days in the 80s has been elected. And what does he do? He spends the first 2 years largely going line by line and undoing every single thing that the black man did while in office, and then spends the next 2 years mostly giving tax breaks and government money to the friends he said he would kick out and “drain the swamp” while the national debt once again rises like a tide in a swamp and the economy stagnates. Then 2019 hits and the economy collapses again under a worldwide pandemic, just a month after he got rid of the office the black man set up to prevent a pandemic.

    So now it’s 2020 and the country has just elected the old guy who was the black guy’s right hand man. He campaigned on not rocking the boat and keeping the course. Nothing exciting, but we’ll see what happens. True to form, 4 years of stabilization happen. The debt slows down, the economy sees jobs come back, and things are looking a little more calm.

    Then, in 2025 the old guy who was so upset about the black guy comes back and his swampy friends are right behind him. The debt begins to balloon and the economy starts to shudder under the weight of global tariffs and worldwide uncertainty of a possible trade war against friend and foe alike. And that’s just in the first 3 months of the year.

    Tl;dr: the economy consistently grows under democrat presidents and the national debt slows down. Under Republicans, the economy shrinks and the debt skyrockets. This stays fairly consistent the farther back you go, but Reagan is an important point in this because he started trickle down economics and showed the Republicans that big government can be good for them, too, so long as they hold the purse strings, and Bush is the other important point because he’s the tipping point for when the debt went from manageable to using a sink to try to put out a burning building.


  • makes me wonder if people will go with whatever works well enough and for the least amount of effort.

    This has always been the case. People want something that just works right out of the box, and familiarity will keep a lot of people from considering anything else.

    I’ve been talking for a long time now with a friend of mine about how sick we are of Windows, and more recently about how I’m planning on installing Linux on a spare HDD I have before making the commitment to getting rid of Windows entirely, and he’s decided to go to 11 despite hating it because he’s afraid of trying something new and having to learn a new system.

    And it’s not just a computer thing. People can and will hurt themselves by repeating the same mistakes because it’s the familiar habit and doing something new - even if it’s for your own good - is scarier. Been there, done that, plenty of times.







  • People are more likely to be interested in who you are as a person than your country’s politics.

    The current political state of the US is just the icing on the shit cake. When I was a kid traveling abroad with my parents 30 years ago, Americans were considered fat, ignorant, and egotistical. That they expected the rest of the world to speak English, accept USD everywhere, and give them special treatment. That they were loud, obnoxious, ignorant, and rude.



  • Ironically, Windows users have generally felt that way with every new Windows version after 7. Vista was painful for a lot of people and 7 was basically Vista but with the problems finally fixed, and every version since then people have complained that the newest version feels unfinished.

    And in a lot of ways they have been. In 10, there are at least 2 different UIs for navigating the system and settings. Some options have been migrated over to the newer one, some only exist there, and some still only exist in the old version of the settings. And then 11 made it even worse by moving a number of frequently used options in the right-click menu into a second menu that you have to open after you right click.

    People hated 10 at first, too, but by now they’ve gotten used to it and Microsoft has ironed off most of the rough edges people hated. But it’s been building for years and this pattern has seemingly hit some kind of breaking point with the present-day circumstances.


  • The full quote is even more something out of a movie too somehow.

    He had just been asked if he knew how many mass shootings had been committed by trans people, to which he responded “too many,” and was then asked if he knew how many mass shootings happened in the past ten years, where he responded “with or without gang violence?”



  • So it’s always had a negative connotation to it? Because that’s what I’m saying. That Google is using the word by its correct definition, but adding to the original definition a subtext that side loading is a bad thing. Hence, they’re twisting it from its original meaning to a negative connotation to the average person (who has never heard the word before).

    It’s like Windows’ UAC popping up with a warning when you try to install just about anything. To the average computer illiterate person, they’re going to second guess whatever they’re installing as “dangerous” while the rest of us are like “shut up Windows, of course I want to install the Nvidia drivers, that’s why I clicked on the damn thing.”




  • Google is twisting the word to justify their purpose of preventing people from installing anything that isn’t from their walled garden. So anything that sounds even close to support for that motive is going to be met with pushback, even if it is a word that existed before Google’s use of it. Google’s implicitly saying that installing something from anywhere other than their store is something nefarious or otherwise bad/risky. Google is trying to perform the same kind of security theatre as the US with the NSA at airports.

    Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me where you install an app from because you’re simply installing it. Whether that’s from Google’s storefront, Apple’s, or somewhere else, you’re installing an app. The circumstances where I’d need a term to specifically say that I’m installing an app from outside the default app store would also be covered by simply saying “I got it from GitHub (or wherever).” It takes the same energy to answer the question of where you got it from regardless of whether you say that you installed it or you side loaded it.