Why do we depend on one small group to challenge these things. There should be unbridled community outrage. Crowd fund the legal challenge.

Most importantly though. Vote these rejects the fuck out of office. Shut them out for good.

Yeah they need the community for that. They needed the community for everything. And you know what? Go on that site right now. It’s just endless dribble. Reformatted TikTok videos posted by bots. People endlessly repeating the same shit over and over again. Bots copying those endlessly repeated comments on the subsequent reposts. Where’s the stuff that made Reddit special? Has there been a chuck testa meme or noteworthy cool event like a good ama or the Christmas exchange that’s occurred recently? Is there content coming out of the site that’s making the news like it once did? Is the spark there? No

Now it’s just another corporate whore of a company where a bunch of sparkling water drinking pussies with erectile dysfunction sit around trying to figure out how they can best game the system to exploit their pageviews.

The ceo of this company comes out embracing Elon Musk, whines about how the community is cutting into his bottom line, and we are supposed to sit around continuing to provide this man with the content he needs to keep his website alive?

Fuck that.

I think the people who create the gold that makes the internet what it is have sort of scattered to the ether and they’re waiting for the next thing to pop up. When it happens you’ll see that spark come about once more. Actual interesting content. Good topical memes. A fun atmosphere that doesn’t feel exploited by some pretentious pricks.

I want it to be lemmy and the fediverse. We are lying to ourselves if we think this caught all the people stepping off the sinking ship. But I think with some collective upgrades and a way better ui that can be marketed to the average person. This could and should be it.

Here’s hoping we see that happen.

Polls are completely unreliable, especially this far out. They predicted trumps loss the first go around and we endured 4 years of that POS. They predicted red waves the last 2 election cycles and it never manifested.

Its a problem with the techniques they’re using to gather data I guess. Whether it’s the cold calling or what, I don’t know, but it clearly isn’t effective to get honest assessments anymore.

That being said it will never not blow my mind that it’s even slightly close. Last election millions of Americans sat through 4 years of trump and said yep that worked out great for me. Everyone I talked to who was in that camp had various incorrect reasons but you don’t need to be right, you just have to feel like you’re right.

I think the reality is that Biden is not and has never been a popular candidate. His age works against him. Kamala is equally unappealing and doesn’t help things either. The biggest problem right now is that Biden has come out very strongly pro Israel (which every single president has done including Trump) and he has not done enough to condemn the Israeli genocide. Millenials and Gen z are at the very least anti genocide and largely pro Palestine so that’s not helping his case, although they’re short sighted if they assume Trump would be the better answer here.

If Trump wins our democracy is over. ‘Oh you’re overreacting’. Yeah they said that to me before Trumps presidency and I was correct then as I am correct now.

We have to get through 24 and not have a deranged traitorous lunatic take the reigns of the country again. We can discuss the next steps in the post Trump era but we won’t get the option to discuss it if Trump somehow wins.

Vote like you value this country. Convince others to vote. Apathy is a vote for Trump. Choosing not to vote for Biden because you’re anti Israel is voting for Trump, who is also going to continue right along supporting Israel.

Frankly I don’t care. The US wastes trillions of dollars on military spending. We have the most advanced military in the world by a mile but all too often it ends up using it to defend someone else’s financial interests or to pad the pockets of people that make their money through a war economy.

Russia can get fucked. Every cent spent on the defense of Ukraine is a fully realized fuck you to our enemy. Ukraine did what we could never do. They essentially removed Russia from the equation. Yeah they have many poorly maintained nukes but they know we will fuck their ass if they touch them. They will not be posing a real threat to anyone for generations.

We aren’t spending this money on the American people and we never were going to do that anyway. Our choices are we fund people actually fighting for their life or we allow that money to get sucked into the military industrial complex for no real return. They’re already getting theirs out of this, the only question that remains is do you back Republicans that have made up a nothing burger about this money because they’ve arbitrarily decided this is the 96th hill they’ll die on, or do you you want to see the money you pay in taxes actually get put to a meaningful purpose.

Also for hospital systems it’s wildly unprofitable. You make your money in two places in medicine, elective surgeries and in the emergency department. Mental healthcare is slow, in the extreme cases you’re dealing with unpleasant patients that are hostile to the care you’re trying to provide, and you often have to house them and feed them for extended periods of time knowing they don’t have any money to reimburse you.

That’s why the hospital I’m working at has built a multimillion dollar cardiac surgery tower (not a unit, not a few floors, an entire tower), but scrapped the plans to rebuild the aging and woefully inadequate inpatient psych facility.

If we can’t squeeze every cent from you we will only do the bare minimum that the CMC requires from us.

I’ve been tracking the comments on all of this across various websites to see what people’s thoughts are. This genuinely might be the most contentious issue of our age. There are people who are vehemently pro Palestine and can dismiss the loss of civilian lives as’ what do you expect when people are pushed like this’ . Then others are hugely pro Israel and see this as an unprovoked attack by a terrorist group and any retaliation is justified.

I think everyone’s shitty here. Hamas is a terrorist organization. They use terrorist practices and target civilians. That’s a terrorist organization. There’s no discussion on that point. Israel is a right wing authoritarian state that regularly commits war crimes. The total Palestinian body count far exceeds the death toll from this attack by orders of magnitude so we can’t pretend like Israel was minding its own business and was attacked.

I don’t think you can point to one or the other as being the true hero or the true victim. It’s the greatest grey area of all time.

I absolutely condemn the Palestinians and Hamas for this act. I absolutely condemn the Israelis for their continued mistreatment and violence towards Palestinians. One will say they only act this way because of the behavior of the other. But at this point where does the original blame for all of it start and end.

The only thing that is certain is that there will be far more blood shed and every dead Israeli will be met with 10 dead Palestinians. I suspect this will be the turning point for this ongoing conflict. And in the future there may no longer be a Palestine as we know it. With the US protecting Israel no other Arab countries will dare intervene militarily. If the Israelis occupy Gaza it’s going to quickly become a quagmire with a never ending insurgency. It will be costly and in ten years Israel will be more unsafe then they were today.

There’s no good answers or good parties here. Just disgusting human nature and the consequences of half baked racist geopolitics from the 40s.

I just want to point out of all the things here this is the least alarming, although context is key. Trust me when I say your medical professionals are googling and YouTubing all kinds of shit. I’ve watched doctors google procedures before attempting them, especially if it’s a rare procedure. YouTube actually has hundreds of hours of manufacturer hosted content designed specifically for this. Now again context is key. They say someone died after they attempted the thing they were searching. That’s def a problem especially if it were some procedure they should be fully competent to perform.

If your mechanic is googling how to change some obscure part on a car he rarely works on, mmmm that’s reasonable. If your mechanic is googling ‘how to turn on windshield wiper Toyota Camry’ we got problems.

I remember sitting at the nurses station one day and someone asked the ER doc if she was familiar with this extremely rare genetic disorder. She goes ‘how dare you ask me that question I am a MEDICAL DOCTOR.’ There was a bit of a pause and she goes ‘ haha just kidding I have no idea but I’m gonna look it up’ .

Well this is certainly a thing that someone typed once. I’d counter that it’s not simply that people are innocently attracted to children and therefore deserve sympathy. I’d say there’s more involved in that attraction. You can’t reasonably engage in any romantic or sexual abuse encounter with a child without there being a totally lopsided power dynamic and a high degree of exploitation. I’d argue that for all such people this is what draws them to it. Within that context it’s not some innocent ‘miswiring’ of the brain but instead an individual that is completely unhealthy and mentally unwell that is entertaining the idea of grooming some child. That’s the part they are after.

I know there’s a movement to try and see pedophiles as anything but what they are and you can sit and have thought experiments about ‘the ones that act vs those that don’t’ but at the end of the day you are left with a deeply unwell individual that desperately needs inpatient psychiatric treatment, psychiatric medication, extensive counseling, and total separation from any children.

Well I wouldn’t say that exactly. GTA 5 had a huge budget and a huge team and it’s objectively a better product if you compare the two (which is only to say they’re both great games but the bigger budget game has and does more).

It’s a matter of the motivations of the developers and their financial backers. If your goal is to make an ok game that maximizes profit focused mechanics, most of these AAA developers are hitting the mark perfectly. If your focus is to make a good game like it seemed to be with the BG devs, they absolutely hit the mark and are being rewarded for it.

This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do. If a game is shit people will abandon it even if you poured millions into that product. The recent battlefield game is a prime example of this. Even something as guaranteed as a new battlefield game isn’t enough to overcome a shitty leadership team emphasizing the wrong things. The community bailed on their product and they’ll never get them back. All those millions in guaranteed revenue are gone forever.

I got my username from one of these and have been using it ever since.

Preach! There’s a good opportunity here to keep this space free from the greedy hands of a bunch of rich assholes. People are so eager for there to be a ‘new twitter’ but haven’t even raised one question about whether threads has fundamentally addressed the problem that has lead to the downfall of twitter and Reddit. Meet your new boss, same as the old boss. Why the hell should we keep just hoping that some billionaire ceo will do what’s right. Even if that ceo does the right thing, they will eventually be replaced.

There can be a place on the internet free from capitalist exploitation for profit. Communities can exist solely for the sake of the community. Not every goddamn thing needs to be monetized. Send a clear message that past tactics will not fly here.