There isn’t always a catch. Governance is often based on compromise and corruption runs rampant, so often there will be shitty things thrown in to appease corporate donors and conservative politicians, but sometimes the government just does something good without also doing something bad.

I fully agree that politics have changed, I’m just arguing that having a sympathetic President and Congress in office makes it significantly easier to get legislation passed by protest.

It played a role. Because the Democrats and President Johnson were in charge during the Civil Rights movement, we got the Civil Rights Act. Because the Republicans and President Trump were in charge during the BLM movement, we got jackshit (on a federal level). This stuff matters.

It seems like a difficult thing to regulate. I hope that this can be a starting point that will be potentially expanded later as needed, but we’ll see.

What’s currently happening is that advertisers are pulling their ads from X/Twitter because Elon replied “This is the full truth” to a neonazi posting the Jewish question. I think if this is censorship, it’s a form I agree with. What advertiser wants to be associated with nazis?

From what I can tell, China has a low rate of hate crimes against queer people in general, though the culture still has issues with enforcing conservative gender roles (as does basically everywhere else, this isn’t a China-specific problem). For happiness, the data I could find generally pointed to the United States being happier, but I think that measuring such a thing is difficult and rife with systemic issues (Source). China has significantly better homeownership statistics than the United States, I agree with you on that. The United States and China seem to have a comparable number of doctors per capita, with the United States having significantly more nurses. Healthcare in the United States is significantly more expensive, though I think that’s a somewhat unfair comparison as the United States is uniquely bad in this regard; there are other nations with similar political and economic systems to the United States with significantly better healthcare.

I think saying that Biden is failing is an overstatement. Biden has made very unethical decisions regarding Israel in recent times but has also been a very pro-labor president, his NLRB has been possibly one of the most pro-union iterations of the institution in its history. Biden’s approval rating is poor, but that’s typical of modern U.S. presidents. In terms of the general election Biden is polling fairly evenly with Trump, but this far out from the election that could change drastically, and Trump himself is drowning in legal issues that are drastically reducing his ability to campaign. I’m not sure how the 2024 election is going to go, but I think Biden has a decent chance.

A mixed economy is viable, in fact, it’s probably the best type of economy. Most nations that are economically successful have mixed economies. My main problem is that China claims to be a socialist economy when it is not. China has private companies, which are owned by a private owning class. China has a stock market with major stock exchanges, and though its government exercises greater control over private interests it still has private interests. An economy that would at least be far closer to socialism would be one where private ownership of corporations was illegal, all corporations would either be employee-owned or state-owned and within employee-owned corporations, there would be regular elections to determine upper management and to make important decisions. There are other models of how to build a socialist economy, but none of them involve private ownership of economic structures. Beyond the non-socialism of the economy, I also believe that China is not a proper democracy. The only roles that are directly elected by the Chinese people are local legislators, who then vote for the legislators above them and so on. I am strongly against this form of democracy, as it leads to enough abstraction that by the time you reach the national legislator there is a strong chance the local people don’t even know the people being elected. In my preferred model for a representative democracy, the voters vote for every level of the legislature.

The Soviet Union did not kill all those nazis out of the goodness of their hearts, but rather because they were in active warfare with Nazi Germany and thus needed to kill a large number of nazis to win the war. Throughout history, authoritarian “socialists” have backstabbed, betrayed, and otherwise killed anarchists and democratic socialists. I absolutely do not trust tankies to fight against fascism in the United States or Europe in any effective manner. Russia and China are not friendly countries to queer rights, though being gay is legal in both countries they do not have any anti-discrimination laws that apply to queer people and the reason there are fewer hate crimes is simply because they don’t count them. Russia and China are also not socialist, Russia is an explicitly oligarchical capitalist Presidential republic and China has a mixed economy that heavily relies on markets with private owners. This is honestly a good part of the reason I’m suspicious of tankies, the United States sucks but that doesn’t mean that every nation that opposes the United States is automatically good.

Indeed. Swamps and bogs experience significantly less decay than other biomes, a dead tree will just sink into the bog and stay there a long time.

Of course I own a car, you need to own one to get anywhere where I live. That doesn’t mean I have to support car infrastructure or be against public transit. I advocate for making public transit services more common and easier to use, and I would use public transit if my supported policies were implemented.

I would be inclined to agree with you if they didn’t get rid of Premium Light. I think charging users for avoiding ads is completely reasonable, we live in a Capitalist country and video hosting isn’t cheap. Even still, axing Premium Light shows a desire to screw over users in order to achieve more profit, which in my mind makes YouTube scummy.

Yes. Making videos is a job and the creators need money to eat and remain housed, it’s reasonable for them to want to be compensated for their work.

It probably used some weird webview shit they routed through Edge, so when you uninstalled it the entire system broke.

Maybe it’s Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia? They would be using Australian dollars, with $ as the currency symbol.

It also shows how detached some of these billionaires really are. A VR system is not yet affordable for the majority of Americans, and the technology has much more development to do before it’s as widespread as video game consoles, never mind PCs.

Not really, but it would still be more helpful to explain how it’s better.

I completely agree. I’m personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it’s fixed.

Unfortunately, this isn’t far from the actual rhetoric they use.

The people on the top have a variety of internal justifications for what they’re doing. Some say that the world is “dog eat dog” and that they are the only ones looking out for themselves. Others say that what they’re doing is for some grander good that will come once they acquire enough wealth and power. Some are deluded enough they have convinced themselves they are telling the truth. That and many more justifications fly through the heads of the ultra-wealthy and powerful as they continue spreading misinformation and enriching themselves.

It truly is disgusting that they’ve made this model. Tinder has always been severely flawed in my opinion, but this makes it several times worse.

Mastadon (and the Fediverse in general, to some extent) has problems with discoverability and the average user finds federation confusing. People tend to either use microblogging to see what’s going on with people they’re interested in or to broadcast their activities to a large group of people, and Mastadon currently doesn’t fit that niche very well.