paris

paris, 1 month ago

It’s probably not a bluff. They’ve pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there’s not much room left to grow here. It would make more sense to focus their efforts on growing in other regions where they have plenty of headroom to increase their userbase and monetization. Depending on how things play out, they could match their current revenue in a matter of years and still have room left to grow. There’s also the potential to re-enter the U.S. market down the line. Why would they throw that all away and essentially create their own competitor by selling their core technology and diluting/confusing their brand with whatever U.S. company they sell to?

paris, 1 month ago

For anyone who doesn’t know, Moms for Liberty are honest to god Nazis. They made the news a while back for coughing loudly during a moment of silence for the Holocaust and they’ve repeatedly quoted Hitler.

paris, 3 months ago

The entire time. Obligatory “what Hamas did on October 7th was horrendous,” but if you look into the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, it’s pretty understandable (although not justified) why something like that happened. Israel has been the bad guy from its conception.

Israel has been particularly monstrous the past few months, but this is something it has been working towards for decades. Only recently has it felt willing and able to go this far without its allies pulling their support.

paris, 3 months ago

what does this mean

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/832771595914838017.webp

paris, 3 months ago

you ar(ul)e alone in this

in all seriousness, i dont mind. i think it was a rule on the subreddit that you had to have it in the title

paris, 5 months ago

I had to look up what “holy shit two cakes” was referring to. I thought I recognized it but I couldn’t remember off the top of my head what it was.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/22b40ffd-1a05-447d-9148-a600909efc6f.jpeg

paris, 5 months ago

And since they’re travelling along predetermined routes without human intervention, we could even give them their own dedicated lane that’s more direct. That would free up traffic for normal people and streamline deliveries for these trucks.

And while we’re at it, if they’re already going on dedicated roads, why not make those roads more efficient? Rubber on asphalt damage is expensive to repair. Steel wheels on steel tracks are even more efficient and better to maintain.

And since steel tracks can handle so much more wear, we could actually make the trucks super duper overpowered and have them tow like 100 boxes at a time instead of just one or two.

And since steel tracks are conductive, we could actually electrify those rails to power the super duper overpowered track truck so it doesn’t have to stop to refill for gas. Now we’re combatting climate change at the same time.

At scale, humans are a lot like cargo actually. We could have dedicated track trucks to move large amounts of people from core parts of cities to other core parts of the same or other cities. Then we could reduce car and plane usage too.

Track trucks is a bit of a dumb name though, so maybe we should call it something more relevant. There’s an Old French word “trahiner” that means “to pull/draw” so maybe something like that? Trainer? Or maybe just train? I think train sounds cool.

Too bad nothing like this exists or will ever exist 😔

paris, 7 months ago

Can’t wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.

paris, 7 months ago

This seems to me like an exception that would realistically only apply to the CIA, NSA, and sometimes the FBI. I doubt the Department of Housing and Urban Development will get a pass. Overall seems like a good change in a good direction.

paris, 7 months ago

I think it’s an anti-joke referencing the go ahead fucking die bike lane meme

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/a25afc70-2c05-476d-9461-63144550ce0d.png

paris, 8 months ago

Leftist wall of text incoming

In my experience, a lot of tankies are former conservatives who grew up brainwashed by their evangelical parents. When you realize everything you’ve ever been taught is a lie, you search for something to anchor yourself to. Lefties who properly shed their right-wing tendencies tend to anchor to data. It’s a lot harder to slip back into right-wing tendencies when you follow the data.

But brains like shortcuts. They’re just built like that. And when you’re searching for something to anchor to, sometimes you find a shortcut there too. I think a lot of tankies anchor to the shortcut “america and its allies bad, everyone against them good.” It’s a comically simplistic worldview, but it’ll get you surprisingly far, especially when you look to history and our involvement in Latin America.

But being a shortcut, it doesn’t always work. That worldview breaks down (or rather, leads you to draw bad conclusions) whenever America & allies aren’t the bad guys (Ukraine) or even sometimes when they are (Israel).

Brains like to understand stuff. Sometimes they find it easier to pretend they do than to actually understand something. We see this in religion and astrology — abstract the world into something that’s easier to grasp. Doing that and dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance is often easier than properly getting your head around something. There’s no moral condemnation here; brains just work like that.

Anecdote time

When I started becoming a tankie at 17, the cognitive dissonance was pretty heavy. Tankies were the first leftists I could interact with when I was shedding my conservative evangelical upbringing. It felt like I was learning how the world actually worked but part of me was reserved about the way things were presented by them. Overall I was genuinely learning and understanding the world more though, so I kept listening to tankies.

That part of me that was reserved decided to start watching Vaush since they seemed to really hate him for reasons that I felt didn’t scale well to how vitriolic they were. The way he presented things felt a lot more grounded in reality and I didn’t have to upend as much of my existing knowledge or worldview to “make it make sense.” I was worried at the time that that might be me taking a mental shortcut, so I still mostly listened to the tankies I hung out with online.

The thing that really shattered the illusion for me was realizing how detached tankies actually are when they called me a pedo for not denouncing Vaush and calling him one. I had been watching him for a little bit at that point and had gone through the Vaush Bad Masterlist™; he didn’t seem at all like the picture they painted of him. I realized that they were just as dogmatic as the religion I was trying to shed, just less absurdly wrong about some key stuff — but still absurdly wrong about other key stuff.

I left the discord server then and there and haven’t looked back.

Conclusion/tldr:

These people are real, and the cognitive dissonance does hurt. I think the best way to help tankies escape is to offer alternative narratives grounded in reality and let the people who can get out find their way out. Don’t waste your time debating tankies all day. Plant some seeds and let them grow. You can’t force progress.

Also a lot of tankies are just teenagers who haven’t finished growing up. “You’re arguing with a minor online” became a meme for a reason.

paris, 8 months ago

Original Twitter post

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

paris, 10 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I feel like every time I see a comment from hexbear, it’s a tankie with the most insane take possible. I often see them use their emotes/memes not to add to a conversation, but to deflect or avoid directly responding to criticism. I also keep seeing entire comment threads taken over by hexbear as soon as one of them replies to someone. Almost like a bat signal goes out to call in reinforcements. I’m sure that’s mostly a product of them being terminally online and not necessarily malicious, but I have to block like ten hexbear users for every one I come across that isn’t like that.

It’s worth noting that most of the hexbear users I see are under politics stuff posted on large instances like .world and .ml, so these issues may be less prevalent or even non-existent on posts hosted on blahaj.zone. But fuck I really hate the energy they bring on. Honest to god I almost stopped using lemmy altogether because of how bad it gets under most of the posts I come across. I’m sure a lot of hexbear users are fine, but I don’t like constantly blocking half of a comment section because the tankies came out of the woodworks to say some dumb shit about Ukraine or whatever. I doubt I’m the only one constantly blocking tankies from hexbear.

I’m mostly posting this to see if others feel the same way or have had similar experiences. I’ve searched for posts about hexbear a couple times over the past week and haven’t seen one until here right now. I’m going through the first post from two days ago and it seems like I might just be coming across a very loud minority from their instance. If that’s the case, then defederating seems extreme and unnecessary. But if this is just what most of hexbear is like, I’d prefer to defederate and let the non-tankies make a new account here or on another instance that we federate with.

Update after two days: I’m officially casting my vote as “defederate from hexbear please god,” final answer. The tankies and trolls are exhausting and I’m sick and tired of dealing with them. Either they can’t be reigned in or they simply aren’t. It’s not even just their politics. Now that I’ve been thinking consciously “is this comment’s bad politics indicative of the whole instance” I’ve noticed that a lot of people from hexbear are kind of just assholes. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. “The good ones” can make another account here or somewhere that we federate with. But honest to god, most of their instance is a drain on my mental health and I can see that I’m not the only one from blahaj zone that feels that way.

I know they come off as trans-friendly, but they also let tankies run defense for authoritarian countries that don’t treat queer people like me well. If hexbear keeps up like this I’m just gonna stop using lemmy altogether. Logging on isn’t worth the excruciation of dealing with their instance. I know Ada wants solidarity with other trans-friendly instances, but I don’t think the tankies and trolls at hexbear care about that, and I don’t think the rest of their instance cares enough to get them to chill out. It feels like they’re taking advantage of blahaj zone’s charitability to keep vomiting authoritarian apologetics and brigading any comments or posts that call out that behavior. Dealing with that isn’t what I signed up for.

In the interest of transparency, this comment was at 38 upvotes when I added this update.

paris, 10 months ago

Fwiw, Denuvo is actually really hard to crack. There’s like one well-known person who is capable and she’s incredibly unlikeable. Agreeable sentiment though; Denuvo sucks and harms legitimate consumers (arguably more than it inconveniences pirates).

paris, 10 months ago

At least part of it is that NASA is good at marketing. They make cool shit and hype up the public so we all know how cool it is too. Soon they’ll be launching a NASA+ streaming service that’s completely free. All their video and live content in one place. They’re genuinely one of the coolest public entities I know about, and part of why I know about them is because they’re so good at marketing their projects to the lay public.

paris, 10 months ago

For anyone wondering, this is lemmynsfw’s take on the situation.

On a personal level, the vibes are off. Their defense seems really defensive and immediately moves to reframe the situation as body shaming. There’s a difference between an adult who looks underage posting porn of themselves and a community dedicated to porn of adults who look underage. Reducing the latter down to body shaming seems like unfair framing to me.

paris, 11 months ago

Moving out of hell is cheaper said than done. Most Americans can’t even afford an emergency $500 expense. Vacancy rates are near historical lows but housing costs are at all-time highs. Finding somewhere to live is hard, especially if you don’t have middle or upper class income. Most of the people risking their lives by not moving don’t have a choice.