Over the past year, an ongoing and severe drought has parched most of Mexico, draining reservoirs and leaving parts of the country grappling with an acute water crisis. Since mid-March, scorching temperatures have led to at least 26 heat-related deaths, according to the nation’s health ministry. The double-whammy of weather...
For many years now, almost the only way to find tech-related answers was to add the word “reddit” to your search. Before the Rexodus ofc.
Nowadays a lot of people go straight to where they wanted to find info - Wikipedia, StackOverflow, IMDB, etc. - and search from there.
Google itself has admitted how bad it has gotten, and in response they decided to voluntarily reduce their profits and return everything back to when it all worked… - no I’m just kidding, they said wait a bit and AI will save us all, somehow (from ourselves?).
One tip is that most of us “use” Lemmy a bit differently than Reddit. Most niche communities (with some exceptions ofc:-) here aren’t as active as they were on Reddit, so many of us end up spending more time in the generalized ones - e.g. !technology rather than specific ones like r/OnePlus or even r/Android.
Another is that Lemmy requires more “curation” than Reddit’s r/all or r/popular did. If you subscribe to the communities you want then your Subscribed feed should have good stuff, but that requires your attention first, and many of us just surf the All feed to make sure we don’t miss things, and then block communities that we will never ever want (sports, highly specific locations, foreign-language ones that did not set their language preference, etc. - all of these can be viewed while logged out but then when you log in they won’t fill your All feed).
Another aspect of curation is that this place is fairly diverse & varied - think like r/conservative and r/liberal. So you may want to block some Fediverse “instances” that your own instance has not yet, to maintain your own sanity - you would do this in your Settings, Blocks, scroll down to Blocked Instances and add the name there. With you being on Lemmy.World, the main one lemmygrad.ml is already pre-blocked for you, but you may consider others that you want to add. Hexbear.net is another extremely common choice, if you don’t like that style - hint: the word “consent” seems to mean little to them, and my experience on the Fediverse improved 95% after blocking them. Sadly I recently blocked Kbin.Social too, despite that being my first Fediverse instance, b/c the owner has been MIA for so very long and also refuses to share administration duties with anyone, so all of the spam that I was seeing on the Fediverse was spreading from defunct communities there that mods had abandoned and the admin did nothing about. And just to be comprehensive, the other instance that many people block is, ironically given that it is where this post is, Lemmy.ml. I am not advocating for that one, and I don’t block it myself, just saying that many people do - and I get it, b/c 80% of the time when I get the most batshit insane replies, it is from that instance; though there is good stuff there as well… sometimes:-P, and it is just a large instance so it is going to have a lot of bad as well as good actors on it as a result.
For myself, I am enjoying Lemmy way better than I ever did Reddit - this is perhaps what Reddit used to be, before I visited it, and before it killed itself. I hope you find ways to enjoy Lemmy for yourself too!:-)
An “Appeal to extremes” argument specifies that extremes are all that exist - no middle ground allowed. Similarly, the “No true Scotsman” one says that likewise, nobody truly disagrees, at least nobody who matters. Next, why would we consider it okay to use slurs, even/especially against bots - it’s not like saying anything like that will change their minds, but literal children are watching the exchange, and it could change theirs?
Anyway: they will do their thing, but what you are responsible for is doing yours, so your response to them is 100% on you. Do with that what you will.
I have a question, seriously: why are we looking to the President - the Chief Executive Officer - to define our policy? Isn’t he supposed to only implement the policies that have been enacted by Congress? Despite how Rs tried to portray Obama, and how Trump would act if given half a chance, the role of President isn’t identical to that of King - just how much leeway does he even have here? When tRump tried to insert himself in the opposite manner way back in the day, we impeached him - the President can propose but not define policy, right?
On that note, he did try to halt funding to Israel. Republicans in Congress overruled him. Ofc the reality is far more complex than what I am portraying here, b/c while he must enact existing policies, again he also should propose new ones too… which he isn’t doing much of. But how could we even tell the difference between Biden attempting to “work within the (existing) system”, set forth by our behind-the-scenes overlords and Congress + Supreme Court (heavy sidenote: with its current make-up, that Trump put into place), vs. him not really caring that much about the issue at all? Or really, at the end of the day, is there even a functional difference between them?
I don’t know. I truly don’t know. All I know is that while Biden may not be as liberal as people would have hoped, tRump is actively anti-liberal. And those are our two choices. :-( If we want better, perhaps we need to put forth some effort to make it happen. Like step up and actually run for office - and then dodge all the literal death threats + attempts that would result from conservatives for doing so. Otherwise, we get whatever they offer to us - they meaning those who will actually act rather than simply talk. Which remember, Biden is one of them, and he even has already made it to the short-list of the only two candidates who matter, which isn’t nothing!
Can he though? Well anyway, he definitely could do more, no question about that.
What bothers me is this entitled thinking, like “we deserve better candidates” - okay, yeah, obviously, but we won’t get those until we make them. AOC, Bernie, there actually are several who are good, but apparently for some (whatever) reason they aren’t “viable”? Hence why Biden is there, instead of one of them.
(And you even ran - damn that’s impressive! To be absolutely clear, I am not calling you one of these “entitled thinkers”, b/c you actually stood up and tried to DO SOMETHING about it, first-hand - kudos!)
Biden offers the good that can be done, rather than what should be - to use the Batman phrase, the politician that America needs, rather than the one it deserves… or whatever?
There is also that phrase, attributed to Otto von Bismarck, that “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” Put another way, the whole thing is a matter of pragmatism, instead of idealism.
And in every other situation, Biden has been the pragmatist. Gas prices, unionization of railway workers, inflation, etc. So I wondered if he’s doing something similar here too, even if it looks like 10-D chess to us, and based on his other past successes (that the media refuses to highlight, b/c they are “boring”), I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But my knowledge on this matter, especially lately, is shaky, so I could definitely be wrong there - perhaps this issue truly is the dividing line. I need to stop talking about that until I read up on the matter some more.
Though one thing that won’t ever change is that in the next upcoming election, we still only get the two choices though - Biden vs. Trump:-(. It’s like: imagine a robber steals your wallet, and offers you either the cash or your ID cards back (apparently the credit cards aren’t on the table for negotiation), but what they want in return is for you to say “please” - what do you do? Take one, or the other, or just walk away and leave both behind? Fighting the US government does not seem an effective option. We can cry about it, maybe go away and train for decades (as Batman did:-P) with the thought of perhaps getting revenge, but in that moment, our choices are limited. As I understand it, that is pragmatism.
Not in its current form at least - this pot is boiling over. Then again, climate change may end human habitation in most areas on earth by then too, so there’s that to consider as well:-P.
The brutal heat in Mexico is causing howler monkeys to drop dead from trees (wapo.st)
Over the past year, an ongoing and severe drought has parched most of Mexico, draining reservoirs and leaving parts of the country grappling with an acute water crisis. Since mid-March, scorching temperatures have led to at least 26 heat-related deaths, according to the nation’s health ministry. The double-whammy of weather...
Using Google whilst Duck Duck Go is down. How long has Google been this bad?
So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It’s been some years....
Goodbye Reddit, Hello Lemmy!
Today I deleted my Reddit account....
New Dehumanization Tactic Dropped (lemmy.cafe)
If everyone I disagree with is a bot it permits me to curse them down and to call them slurs, right?...
Conservative Owns the Libs by Paying $4,000 a Month for His Ford F-350 (thehardtimes.net)
Someone stop the ride, I want to get off (midwest.social)
Harassment of scientists is surging — institutions aren’t sure how to help (www.nature.com)
As researchers increasingly face many kinds of attack over their work, there is debate about how to support and protect them....