Due to the inherently competitive nature of living in a society that competes for resources, many people assume that a kind, upbeat person will be easy prey for someone tough and pushy. They lack the emotional intelligence to understand that you can be both kind and assertive.

In reality, you catch more flies with honey. Pretty much every study of game theory concludes that nice but assertive is the optimal strategy in any ongoing interaction. A nice person with a backbone is likely to have healthier boundaries, lower stress, and better relationships with people.

The lobster tank may make things awkward.

I’m not a huge fan of his, but I don’t entirely disagree.

If someone genuinely wants to pass universal healthcare, tax the rich, or has a great plan to drive down the cost of living… I’m significantly less concerned with the specifics of their ideology than I am with their policy goals.

People generally vote around kitchen table issues.

Unfortunately for Pete and the DNC, everyone currently in office has demonstrated that they will actively oppose any policy that would help the working class. They’ve burned through all their good will.

If I see one more DNC hack yammering about how city run grocery stores wont work, I’m going to loose my grip. Maybe they will, maybe they wont. But people would rather the government fail trying to help common citizens than succeed at fucking us over.

It is a bit of a utopia for a privacy minded Linux fan. Most social media I’ve had to find my community. Here it is THE community. It would take an effort to avoid it.

And you have a nice day too.

Context matters quite a bit here. Not all boycots are created equal.

I used to be the guy who wandered into Target every other week to get one thing and left with an $150 cart full of junk I didn’t plan on buying. I joined the boycotting over their DEI policy shift. I wouldn’t judge someone for continuing to shop there. Though I would encourage them to spend less. I view that boycott as an important lesson in respecting all stakeholders and not bending the knee to authoritarianism, but hardly an existential crisis for anyone or anything but Target.

I’m not sure if I’m technically boycotting Tesla because I’ve never done any business with them. However, it’s my firm conviction that someone who buys a Tesla today, is a piece of shit. Someone who knowingly invests in Tesla is a piece of shit. If they’re someone I continue to interact with after that they’re very likely to hear about it.

Tesla, in my opinion, is complicit in everything Elon does. It has proactively financed, and propagandized oppression and undermined democracy and the functioning of a government that is supposed to serve and represent me. Anyone who buys a Tesla today is also complicit.

Just say you make bat soup. Don’t try to make it sound fancy.

She’s not an idiot. She represents idiots. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Her and Susan Collins with their “oopsie… I fell for it again” routine. I don’t know who it’s for at this point, but they’re both still in office so I guess it’s working.

There is so much of that kind of marketing at this point, that it had not occurred to me until reading this discussion that “Liquid Death” was intended to ironically over the top.

Even if there isn’t a document with a big header that says “Client List” and firm documentation of what crimes were committed, we know there are flight logs, there are victim statements, and there are records of financial transactions.

That is absolutely enough to bring charges against at least some of these people. We are accepting a false narrative that there has to be some chiseled in stone singular document listing bad actors.

The problem with banning it all together is that there are hundreds of critical applications for which they’re really is no alternative for PTFE, PCTFE and various derivative products.

Could we get by without Teflon pans, stain resistant fabric sprays, and consumer spray on dry lubricant… Sure. I’d really like them to take it out of food packaging. That would be nice.

But the world needs to interact with incredibly strong acids, and cryogenic temperatures and all sorts of other things for which human lives depend on having an absurdly inert material.

Medicine has improved by leaps and bounds. We have greater life expectancy and mostly a better quality of health along the way. Child mortality is down globally.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?time=1996..latest

Improvements in our understanding of neurodivergent students has resulted in better educational and quality of life outcomes for millions who in past decades would have fallen through the cracks.

The proliferation of environmental lead from paint and gasoline are WAY down, and the hole in the Ozone was just about peak in 1995.

Open source, public domain, and freely available knowledge have democratized education, technology, research, and product development in ways that would have almost been inconcievable in 1995.

We are able to communicate more globally, even with total strangers, often across language barriers, and for free.

Video games, films, and television are able to create visions that would have been technically impossible 30 years ago. And technology has reduced the barriers for people to gain entry into those industries.

I carry around a tiny super computer with instant access to all the world’s knowledge. That would have been a dream in 1995.

There are of course many things that are worse. It’s a harder time to be starting out in life. “Luxuries” are dirt cheap and necesities are unaffordable. We’ve traded our sense of community for a paranioa of “others” even as the world has gotten safer. Globally the world has been swinging toward extremism and it constantly feels like capitalism may collapse and we don’t know what comes next if that happens. But failure to see how much is better and for how many seems like too much doom scrolling and too narrow and outlook.

It’s just consumption in general. It predates capitalism (as we know it). For thousands of years humanity has been using beer and wine to cut the fat, sugar, and salt on our palate so we don’t feel too full or sate and can eat more.

This was my first thought. This sounds like more of an issue for a shrink than Lemmy.

I can’t recommend it because I don’t own one but I’ve been looking at this.

Beelink me mini

6 m.2 slots with dual 2.5 gbps running on an n150 for 200 bucks. And it has a 64 gig emmc so you don’t have to load the OS onto any of the storage drives.

There are a few fundamental flaws I see with this argument.

As others have pointed out it’s a false dichotomy.

There were hundreds of years of profitable content creation and distribution prior to invasive data collection or targeted advertisement. People were fine paying for every movie they saw and every periodical they read. The idea that it’s financially untenable unless I tell Mark Zuckerberg my financial situation, medical conditions, and kinks is silly.

It’s an uneven transaction. I read an article for one minute the platform gets to bombard me with ads for one minute… that’s fair and equal. No notes. I read an article for one minute and Mark Zuckerberg gets to stalk me like a prey animal accross websites, circumventing protections against tracking, even if I don’t have a FB account, then he can keep my data in perpetuity and sell it as many times as possible, to any party, anywhere in the world without my knowledge or explicit consent… that’s less of a balanced transaction.

I didn’t make it through that movie, though it’s very well done.

It wasn’t so much a tear jerker for me. It just left me feeling sick to my stomach.