Personally, so far I adore it. It doesn't scratch that... Endless content consumption itch that Reddit did. There are a lot less users, so there's a lot less "fresh" content piling up on my home feed for me to scroll through and huff air out my nose at.
It's been a bit of an adjustment, but now that I'm more used to it it's definitely a welcome change. I find myself actively engaging more instead of just scrolling by, contributing instead of lurking.
Give it some time the content will come. Also make sure to post that content yourself too. Posting and commenting are very needed right now to attract more people and the more people get attracted the less posting and commenting you’ll need to do to maintain everyone engaged
There's a search function for a lot of it. The easiest way to discover communities currently is https://browse.feddit.de, and you'll want to copy the full URL of the community into your instance's search bar, i.e. if you wanted to follow the Pokemon TCG community you'd search for https://lemmy.ml/c/pokemontcg and it should bring up the community from there.
There's a technical reason why that is, due to the way federated servers work, but i'll defer to someone smarter than I for that explanation.
90s: corporations make everything plastic and disposable while people are told to recycle
It’s worse than that: the plastics industry tells us to recycle – even going so far as to plagiarize the recycling symbol into the resin identification codes – despite knowing from the beginning that recycling plastic was mostly never going to be a viable thing. They did this purely to shift blame to consumers because the only way their business model worked was to not be held accountable for their waste.
If you don’t need to, don’t produce something. Chocolates don’t need to be all individually wrapped inside of yet another wrapper. Transport should be mostly by public and active transport (though we also need better city planning to help enable this), and private motor vehicles can, at this point, mostly be converted to the less-polluting EVs. That kind of thing.
If it’s been produced, rather than throwing it away, find ways to reuse it. Coke should be taking in glass bottles, washing them, and putting more coke back in it, rather than producing new bottles all the time.
If something has been produced and cannot be reused, we should try to find ways to recycle it. You’re right that recycling is bad, but that’s mainly true of plastics. Glass and paper are far more easy to recycle, if collected effectively. Which is also why the move from glass and paper products to plastic is such an environmental disaster, brought on because companies don’t want to spend the larger cost of producing those products, or collecting them in to effectively recycle the glass.
This is absolutely right. It’s reductive of me to say that recycling is bad for the environment; intentionally reductive.
People generally have a very hard time absorbing the fact that plastic recycling is a scam, so it’s hard to start nuanced to actually get the point across.
But you definitely nailed it. I would argue that if it was reduce, reuse, revolt, the environment would be in a much better place.
Recycling was actively brought forward as a solution by the oil companies to push the blame of plastic use onto consumers.
So while recycling rare metals is always valuable, plastic is definitely not. Almost all plastic gets buried in landfills, and the only way to make this not happen is to not make products with plastics.
By creating and marketing plastic recycling as a solution that the consumers must take onto themselves, it allowed them to rake in profits by moving everything to cheap plastic alternatives.
We are now literally made of microplastics as a result.
What I don’t understand is why burning plastic waste and using the generated heat (for example for district heating) is not discussed more often. I think recycling offers very little benefit over simple burning of plastics due to the amount of oil still being burned everywhere compared to the amount of oil used for plastic production.
I guess I’m surprised we don’t do it but we all know that burning plastic is gonna end up directly in the lungs of some poor people who have to live by the pollution factory
100% right. Individuals know best what their own gender is. If you have an ideology prescribing acceptable gender expression for others, you are a danger to society.
It’s just so weird how they swing from “Biden old and inept” to “Biden is this massive 4D chess master rigging football games to make Taylor Swift rig the election”
… Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. …
Eco does make a point of clarifying that the presence of absence of any single trait he has identified does not prove a thing is or isn’t fascist.
But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
(The full text of the feature I quoted above)
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
It’s pretty fantastic. In 2020 (only just beginning my journey of recovery from a conservative upbringing), I decided I should understand what fascism actually was. I found that dictionary definitions were terribly imprecise but eventually found Eco’s essay. I understand there are other methods–of similar scholarly integrity–used to define fascism, but I have not spent the effort to find and compare these other works. It is my (uninterrogated assumption) vague understanding that Eco’s definition isn’t regarded as opinionated.
I don’t brag about it. I fear each winter that it will happen again. Or that we will be woefully under prepared for natural disasters when they do strike.
Right. What happens to Texas if it secedes and is subsequently hit by a substantial hurricane? Fuck those people in particular I guess. That’s the general stance of our state government.
There is no safe season in Texas. It gets tornadoes in Spring and hurricanes in Fall. And because every year is getting hotter and hotter, Summer in Texas is probably also gonna get pretty rough soon. And every time ERCOT struggles, the price of energy soars because of their bullshit predatory small print. I truly don’t understand why anybody would choose to move to Texas these days.
Summer will get rough soon? Didn’t we have two back to back years with heat dome dominated summers and people collapsing on the concrete? I distinctly remember being told by my job not to go outside due to extreme risk of heatstroke. It’s already bad. If ercot can’t handle winter now, they won’t be able to handle summer as AC system loads spike higher and higher.
I have lived here for 31 years. I don’t get the pride I’m supposed to have for being a native Texan. If I weren’t trapped here by the economic forces pressing all Texans down, I would live somewhere with a functional government at least.
Come to Chicago. Rent is fucked I won’t lie, but you can still find some cheap places. Depending on what you do (or are willing to do) there’s plenty of work here. Our city is a far cry from perfect but we have a mayor who actually has the people’s best interests in mind, we’re politically active and quite progressive, there aren’t enough free community resources but far more than most places, we have multiple forms of slightly shitty but fully functional mass transit, and weed is legal. Also, portions of the city are extremely walkable and bikeable.
Because they are so strong and independent would rather funnel money into their own pockets than follow regulation to make sure people don’t freeze to death in winter.
This is exactly it. Because ERCOT is fully contained within the state of Texas they don’t have to follow any of the federal rules that would cover interstate connections in the Federal Power Act. The state can fully manage it without outside influence, and they’ve chosen to fully deregulate the entire market. Because fuck you it makes money.
Yep, a friend of mine there says he calls up different suppliers every year to shop for that year’s current best price because they all regularly jack it up.
It’s a normal thing in Texas. Annual plan are typical. Longer and shorter term ones are available. Never pay month to month. It’s just like Internet plans.
Texas Power Guide does a nice job of analyzing a lot of plans based on your location and usage.
Do NOT use Power To Choose. The electricity retailers purchase positions on that site. There is usually bias in the plans its shows.
Because we didn’t want to follow federal regulations due to cost. Some of said regulations included winterizing measures. It was peak “leopards ate my face” material.
Hilariously, Texas is all about giving people the freedom to freeze to death with their substandard electrical service in the name of “freedom from government oppression”, but they can’t just let trans people decide to transition because it could be a mistake and they might regret it? All while supporting child labor where kids could get crushed or heinously injured in massive industrial equipments? Amazing.
Honestly I wish the proud rigged market capitalists who don’t believe in progressive wealth redistribution, or a society with any equity, would stop calling themselves the “left.”
It’s nice that you support 2 homeless people being allowed to get married regardless of gender identity and live in the same refrigerator box in the same gutter, but the fact remains that no one should be homeless in a society that generates such wealth. This neoliberal mindset shouldn’t pass for left-wing. Our entire effective political spectrum has been reduced to “give rich people all the money and let people do what they want socially” and “give the rich people all the money and torture any non-white conservative Christians socially.”
And yes, i’m voting for Biden to stave off Jerry Lewis Hitler, just as I did last time and Clinton before, full well knowing it solves nothing and only slows the rate of descent into oligarchal madness and dystopia. It’s just voting to keep the water pumps running on the Titanic, it buys time, it is not a path to survival in itself.
USA is a multi-party democracy, and as such laws and programs need to be approved by representatives with opposing views. Currently, republican governors are refusing to accept free federal money to feed children. There is absolutely no way they care about giving the homeless homes. I absolutely agree with you that this is an “orphan crushing machine” issue but unless the GOP implodes we’re not going to have such progressive policies.
Then we will fall to fascism in the near future. Maybe not this election, but soon.
You can’t get people en masse to support you on the message of “Your tangible situation will continue to be horrible, but letting those guys win will cause unimaginably worse horror” cycle after cycle and continue to get them to care, and it is understandable to for them to eventually wash their hands of it, because at the end of the day, voting associates you with this system, and it feels dirty to participate because it makes it feel like you bear responsibility for what a Faustian bargain it is every cycle.
I will keep showing up with a funeral dirge in my heart to vote for the lesser evil and attempt to hold back the bloodthirsty fascist horde yet again without hope for things actually improving, but I’m not the norm. Most sane people will eventually just walk away from it sooner or later because the reality is too unpalatable.
It is. You should try to move to a career where you sell the results of your labor, not the time it takes to achieve them. Easier said than done, I know. Good luck!
Until recent times, I’ve always thought a govt job was a good thing to have.
Still is, but the constant threat of government shutdowns, in the US at least, as of late, make me feel you need to live below your means and keep a decent chunk of 3 to 6 months pay, because you could suddenly be without pay for a good chunk of time because some idiots think they score political points, or will get their way, by hurting citizens.
That’s a very good point… it seems like every time the national budget is up for renewal, those Republican clowns threaten to fuck everyone over. Bastards, the lot of them!
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