Fuck. This is clearly a stunt meant to appease people with a tiny discount on a single bill. They’ve pulled this before, and it’ll do nothing to lower our bills.

I’m a single guy with a TV and a computer, and when I moved to California less than a decade ago my energy bill averaged around $70 a month. Now it averages around $150 a month. Same behavior, twice the price. That’s unacceptable.

Reminder that at least one utility company in CA is a convicted felon for causing the deaths of multiple people in wildfires. They’re bad companies operating in bad faith.

I’m also using paid Proton VPN and have issues posting comments every day. If I stick to non-American servers things generally work, but if my random connection picks anywhere in the US, my comments won’t post until I switch and switch and switch and find a random server that works. I’ve rage-deleted quite a few comments after they refuse to post. It’s really pretty frustrating, but I won’t stop using my VPN to make Lemmy work better.

I think it’s worth picking this apart a bit to show just how complicated it all is. Your motivation seems right, but there’s an inherent contradiction in your suggestion. One of the purposes of DEI best practices is to have BIPOC people in the room at all levels of the organization, in decision-making roles, and normal worker roles. It helps everyone feel welcome, heard, and equal. Often this feeling is intangible but has very real impacts on how works gets done, how coworkers interact with each other, and how satisfied the workforce is. If you have a meeting full of diverse staff, its much less likely that the white folks will spew microaggressions and make everyone else uncomfortable.

That means yes, interviewers should absolutely be diverse themselves, because they’ll typically hire a more diverse workforce. But how do you suggest that we require interviewers be diverse to avoid bias? We need DEI training and enforceable policies for that. So we’re stuck in a vicious cycle.

My parents used to use AAA TripTiks to plan our trips. Granted this was decades ago in the olden days of paper maps, so I have no idea how good they still are, but apparently they still exist. Worth checking out.

I did a cross-country move about 8 years ago, and just planned each leg of the trip separately. I chose where I wanted to sleep, planned the route to get there, and then did the same for the next leg. There’s really no wrong way to do it as long as you connect the dots and go the way you want to.

Same. Maybe I’ve been here too long and it’s time to fire up an alt on a different instance.

You mixed and matched a lot of different sources in your summary, and did a fair amount of editorializing, it was honestly pretty confusing. Ed Snowden, for example, isn’t mentioned in any of your links, but you tossed him in with RFK and Musk, which misrepresents his ideology pretty seriously.

I’d suggest keeping it simple, post one link and one summary of it if you feel the need. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but this post doesn’t feel right.

Project 2025 is pretty clear that family separations are a feature of mass deportations. They affirmatively want this, the door is wide open. If they say otherwise, they’re lying.

The leading Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, stated that mass deportation was a top priority. Mass deportation is mass family separation. Project 2025 seeks to rip apart American families, not limited to new arrivals; the plan seeks to target the 80% of the undocumented population who have called the US home for more than a decade, including the Dreamers, TPS holders, and immediate family members of U.S. citizens. Source

Honestly, dictation is pretty much the only use of LLMs that I’m comfortable with right now. Not “let the police cut corners and rely on it” comfortable, but this is the one thing LLMs are consistently good at.

Of course the police will abuse it, like they abuse everything and everyone, but let’s regulate this shit and make it a useful tool. Then maybe they can have the time to solve some crimes. Oh I always forget, that’s not really their job.

No problem! Multiple sources is never bad, but one thing I struggle with on Lemmy is the disparate spreading out of convos across posts in the same community. I wish there were better tools to minimize this without generous posters like you having to keep track of every single post before submitting something new.

Yeah I think I’ve seen that usage, but I’ve also seen it used as a negative put down rather than an affirmation. I just have a lot of trouble with this one for some reason. Anyone know where it comes from?

We already had a good conversation about this over on this post yesterday, in case you missed it. Pretty sure it’s in the same community. Shittier source on that one (I hate Newsweek), but I think it’s better to join in on the existing discussion?

I pretty much agree with you, with the small caveat that nearly every single US president has been a total monster with their foreign policy decisions. Doesn’t make it right, but historical context is super important.

Since we don’t have the option to vote for someone who wouldn’t be a monster with their warmongering, we unfortunately have to vote for the person who would be a little less monstrous, and right now that’s Harris. And who knows, once Biden is out of the picture and Harris can make her own decisions, she might turn out to be better than we’re expecting. Probably not, but anything will be better than Trump.

And every time I think I understand what people mean by it, I’m wrong. This one has got to stop.

Wow that hurt my head. I read the rest of the Wikipedia page and I think I understand, but damn, I’ll need to read the judge’s full opinion to see just how creatively he applied that principle. Tort law is not for me.

Judge Simpson said that “there is no direct link between the warrantless entry and Taylor’s death.”

What?! How does that make any sense? If the cops didn’t illegally enter her apartment without a warrant, Breonna would still be alive today. Cause meet effect. How is that not a direct link?

Ahahahaha now I feel dumb. I didn’t translate OF to OnlyFans, I just assumed it was some new-fangled internet slang used by the youngsters.

The AP apparently took the article down, but this talks about it.

There was at least one “JD Vance did not have sex with a couch” headline that had to be changed, because how could anyone possibly know whether or not someone has fucked a couch? Journalistic integrity dictates that you only make statements like that if they can be backed up by facts. I could be fucking my couch right now and no one would ever know.

Do these freaks really not remember what it was like to be a kid? Kids do crazy shit, it’s how we all learn about ourselves, our boundaries, our values. Punishing a kid for playing around like this will not help anyone, it will simply make it more likely that this kid acts out later because their sense of what’s socially acceptable and what’s not will be completely skewed by these absurd rules.

I played finger guns in school all the time (before active-shooter drills were a thing, to be fair), and it’s part of how I figured out that I hate guns and violence. Punishment first has never been effective, we need to trust ourselves and our kids a little more.

I’m no dev, so I can’t speak to the codebase or mod tools, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to get much better than this right now. Lemmy has its issues for sure, but the community has been surprisingly stable, with little growth spurts here and there, and more healthy engagement than I expected. I get frustrated every so often, and there are accounts that make me want to scream, but that’s normal in any place where strangers interact.

I’m curious what other folks have to say, because if there’s a better alternative that I haven’t heard of, then I’m all in, but it’s been pretty hard to keep Lemmy as active as it is. It sounds like you might be a dev? If so, would you be willing to build the tools you want to see for the services you mentioned? It’d be awesome if folks with skills worked to improve existing open source stuff like Lemmy rather than building whole new ones that don’t have any active communities.