One difference though is social media. Reddit was able to gestate and grow without that massive clusterfuck sucking up all the internet’s oxygen. Nowadays with all the social media sites proper plus Facebook groups AND let’s not forget Reddit itself, there’s just massively more competition for attention online. The old 1.0 web forums are still around, many of them, but they’re small and relatively static. That could also be Lemmy’s fate.

Digg had a large viewer base and there was a lot of skullduggery going on amongst people who figured out how to game its algorithm, get on the front page, and direct traffic to some URL. But without actual data I would venture to guess that Digg and Reddit had roughly equivalent bases of actually genuinely active community posters and commenters and a lot of people were on both. Once Digg got taken over by the spam posters, it died off and Reddit remained. Reddit definitely inherited its mantle and probably many community members, but not the massive viewer audience.

I was on Reddit when it was small. So you never know.

Perhaps the lies of a serious politician are more significant than the ramblings of an insane clown.

I mean it’s literally right there in the Constitution without room for interpretation. If the Supes pretend to just throw that out then we’ll have an actual civil war on our hands.

With turnout being the decider in our elections, I think it’s of critical importance if a candidate scares the shit out of the other side. Hilary Clinton for whatever reason definitely pushed conservative buttons and got them to the polls. The Trump phenomenon was happening at the same time, but we can’t discount the anti-Hilary energy.

While the right certainly doesn’t like Kamala, their hatred is nothing close to what the left feels for Trump. Between that and Roe, if we can’t activate voters and take this election, then we really have lost the country, and Trump’s second term will only dig that hole deeper.

No pressure, America!

This is a subtle question, so feel free to answer “none of the above.”

But in your circles, is this gender bending explicit, as in “I’m a female Wolverine” or is it just someone who’s female going as Wolverine? And in the latter case, I don’t mean that she’s pretending to be a man, just that she’s not changing the character, simply embodying it as, herself, a woman.

A boy at my kids preschool wanted to be Anna from Frozen. His parents dressed him as Anna. I don’t think they went out of their way to feminize him - he had no wig or makeup, for example. But he was in a dress, because that’s what Anna wears. Was he a “male version of Anna?” No. Was he going as a female? No. He was just the character. Similarly, if a little girl puts on an iron man suit, is she a “female iron man” or some kind of “Iron Woman?” No.

So when you say “a male version of a character” I hear that you are not just going as a character who happens to be the other gender but you are putting a specific twist on that character. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily. But it can definitely go wrong depending on the character and how you handle it. We’d just need more information. It’s one of those things that doesn’t have bright line rules. Like all issues of content offensiveness.

I like that Lemmy doesn’t have stupid levels of auto-moderation happening. And I like that threads don’t constantly get locked merely because people are engaging with them.

I’m also a lefty and often find myself going against the extreme grain here. The narratives about everything being a scam designed to steal your balls, the generational hatred, the cynicism and fatalism… That shit isn’t just more liberal than me, so I hesitate to even call it leftist extremism. I’m not sure what it is. Nihilism, maybe.

This is the idea behind direct ballot measures. Instead of working through representatives, just let people make actual decisions. Of course, there are problems with it. You wind up looking at a ballot with 10 different bond measures on it as if you’re in any position to decide on the budgets for 6 different agencies. And all the voter guides scream contradictory things at you from the pro/con positions, leaving you thinking “gee, maybe politician is actually a profession after all?”

I’ve seen people go off their meds for no other reason than that they are ashamed to be on them and want to see if they can “make it on their own.” It’s always turned out badly.

I’ve also seen people find just the right meds for them and say they love their meds and owe their life to their meds. Those people are happy.

I can’t define better. But I can tell you who can. The people around you that you trust can tell you when you’re better and when you’re not. They will not tell you you are better drunk or on meth. (unless they are also drunk and on meth - that’s codependency, not trust).

If you’re really, really lucky you will find a life partner who knows you top to bottom and will tell you when you’re better, and be patient enough with you when you’re worse to really know the difference.

It’s entirely okay to use medication to improve your mental health. There are serious things like depression, anxiety, and mania out there that are chemical in origin and there is nothing wrong with using chemistry to get rid of them.

You should do this with the help of a good doctor and trusted people who can help give you perspective on how you’re doing. When you say “take drugs to make yourself a better person” I can’t tell if you are looking for permission to get high or addressing the topic of mental health meds in earnest.

I think these guys get addicted to the power. Sure Mark Zuckerberg could spend all his time learning to cook Thai food or surfing or traveling, and we all love to do those things. But very few of us know what it feels like for him to walk into a campus of thousands that he commands and make choices all day long about what to do with them all.

I’m not saying that anyone would do the same in their shoes. But certainly the kind of person who likes to build a giant company will like being at the helm of it too. It’s not about more billions.

No man read the top dozen voted root comments and you will see the narrative: rich people are using their political access to fuck you and get richer. The OP doesn’t even acknowledge progressive tax brackets. The entire system apparently is specifically designed to direct money out of starving people into the super wealthy. That’s the narrative. It’s right up there with “CEOs don’t do anything” and “you shouldn’t recycle because it’s just a scam cooked up by Big Plastic.” It’s actually hard to be a good liberal when those around me are dripping with this kind of horseshit nonstop.

Yeah words have special meanings in special regimes. There are a lot of regimes these days, with so much known about so many specialities. We could spend all day noting use of words that make sense within a particular science or engineering field but would be funny in casual conversation .

Yeah I think we may only differ on degree, and yes some of my confusion about your post came from phrasing. There are still some phrasing points I’m struggling on.

I think the logical thing is to have those who most benefit from the infrastructure our taxes pay for

The poor benefit from roads, schools, firefighters, Medical/Medicaid, and utilities as much as anyone. But I think you had the super wealthy in mind. “Those who benefit from infrastructure” is an odd way to pinpoint the super wealthy.

be the ones who contribute the most.

This part is already true. Progressive tax brackets have them contributing the most as a proportion of pay, and far and away the most in absolute numbers.

And those that are seeing the least benefit be exempt.

The entire lower 50-60% of the economy is an extremely inclusive notion of “those who benefit the least.”

Again, phrasing.

The standard deduction should be at least the median income…? Wouldn’t that mean that half of people would pay no income tax?

You might say this is what we should do, but I think it’s far from obvious.

If you earn $40k and the first $13k is untaxed, then you’re paying no taxes on about the first third of your income. And from there you begin paying in the lowest bracket.

If you make $100k, and the first $13k is untaxed, that’s the first 13% of your income, not 33%. And some of your income will be taxed at levels higher than anything the $40k earner pays. I just fail to see how this is placing the burden on the poor. It Is structured to do the exact opposite and give them the most breaks.

The fact that there’s one standard deduction for the whole country is insane, since $13k means something extremely different in different places.

But across the board I’d probably agree that the floor on the deduction should come up, and we should raise taxes on extreme wealth to make it up. But at least in its most essential form, income tax is already progressive.

So I don’t really get your question. But who am I fooling? I’m going to be downvoted into oblivion for going against the popular narrative on this.

Also private investors from around the world are buying US property. Americans think of their homes as wealth building investments and it turns out that they are not the only ones thinking that. Housing markets elsewhere are too regulated or volatile or stagnant but snapping up US housing has in a way created its own motivation. The more people do it, the better the returns are on doing it. It’s a bubble, in other words. However that bubble has resisted popping because historically, housing has never been priced according to its true value. These days we’re seeing prices rise on things like food and housing because shit, what are you going to do, not live and eat?