There is nothing wrong with Satanism. She was the first rebel to defy her master. A true hero 🥲

Factory farms where everyone is being fattened up in cages on a slurry of hate and memes.

I’m thinking that double checking is slightly faster than doing the research yourself.

As opposed to Google searching manually, which always has accurate outputs and never outputs falsehoods as fact. 🙂

As long as you double check the source of an answer I don’t see an issue.

I’m not so sure Musk is actually motivated by his own hype, I think that’s part of his professional self branding that he relies on to juice the valuation of his companies. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square is a way to juice his rep further and make even more money.

I’m skeptical of ascribing immaterial motives to billionaires.

EDIT Oh! Also, I think the reason enshitification has accelerated so much recently is because of high interest rates. It’s why Silicon Valley Bank imploded, after all. Companies are scrambling to be profitable after the free investor cash has dried up. It’s not good enough to be maybe profitable in an undefined future, they need to be profitable now so they can justify investment. The bubble is deflating - though fortunately, it seems like it’s going to be a soft landing instead of a pop.

The only person in the world you can ever truly know is yourself.

So when I ask myself “If I were spez/zuck/musk why would I do this?”

The answer is usually “because someone gave me a lot of money”

I will never feel sorry for advertisers or the people who work with them.

:^)

Count me in that 30%

Russia’s invasion was wrong, but it goes back to the Euromaiden government upheaval and that should be considered. Russia isn’t just a crazy warband of orcs that wanted to restart the Tsar’s empire for no reason. What’s brainwashed about that?

A bunch of other countries, like China, which had 75% of people polled stating that the Russia/Ukraine conflict was good for China.

It kinda is in some ways because it’s basically left China as Russia’s only option for a lot of import/export, so China gets a ton of leverage in determining prices. It’s also solidifying China as a regional hegemon and opens up a lot of opportunities for China diplomatically.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say the conflict is good, but there are benefits and it’s not as simple as “people are brainwashed”

It won’t (my personal totally empty prediction). To get humidity in larger scale it means getting air flow. Air flow in sufficient numbers doesn’t come out of no where. Usually with this kind of stuff one quickly finds one needs just insane amount of flow to scale meaning big blower fans and then you find you spend all the energy you produce running the fans and other needed ancillary equipment.

It’s possible to use direct mechanical power harvested from renewables to turn the fans, though depending on the effiency it might make more sense to just convert that mechanical power directly into electricity. But, for example, a windmill (as opposed to a wind turbine) could harvest large scale natural air flow and then mechanically leverage that to move humid air at a smaller scale. Same with dams.

This might not compel you to, but the only way to keep Lemmy from turning into Reddit 2 is by donating so they don’t have to seek out investors. We all have to do what we can to help out - that said, by posting you are creating content for the website. That’s not nothing.

I’m convinced this all goes back to Silicon Valley Bank imploding and then everyone just pretending we didn’t have a banking crisis lol

I just don’t want to have a car, but alas this is America…

If you live in the city and are able bodied there’s no reason to not replace your car with an ebike.

I live in the countryside and I’ve used that thing to do 40 mile round trips for appointments and groceries. If I didn’t have to deal with snow I’d ditch my car entirely.

Just be sure to wear sunscreen lol

You think new gas powered cars are affordable?

One thing gamers are notorious for: physical outdoor activity

Let’s just assume that the data you’re using here is trustworthy, since that makes this a very simple discussion.

According to that article, COVID may have resulted in a million deaths in China above the long-term trend line in the last 3 years. This is known as the excess mortality rate, which we can directly compare to other countries even if China lied about COVID mortality (and hey, maybe they did - it would be in their own interests so it’s plausible)

According to this article, since the pandemic began the US’s excess deaths have also sparked sharply even as the COVID mortality rate falls in official government data (sound familiar?) FTA: Since the pandemic began, excess deaths are up by more than 1.25 million in the U.S., about 15% higher than in the pre-pandemic years. That’s worse even when you don’t take populations into account!

Now we can do excess deaths per capita to compare these two policies:

• China’s population is notoriously huge, with currently 1.412 billion people living in China. 1 million excess deaths among 1.412 billion people gives us an excess death rate of ~0.07%

• America is a much smaller country, with 331.9 million people. 1.25 million excess deaths among 331.9 million gives us an excess death rate of ~0.38%

That means America’s policies were 5x worse on a per capita basis. This is why American life expectancy has fallen behind Chinese life expediency. “Ineffective and unnecessary” by what measure?

If China had responded as badly as the US and had an excess death rate of ~0.38% then over 5 million people would have died. Even if we take your pessimistic numbers at face value, zero COVID saved so many lives that Chinese life expectancy actually rose above American life expectancy!

America is the worst of its cohorts, but the rest of the West failed too!

• France had 151,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost over 3 million

• Germany had 254,000 excess deaths . At that rate China would have lost over 4 million

• Britain had 237,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost just under 5 million.

• In fairness, according to your data, China only barely outcompeted South Korea at 42,000 excess deaths - at that rate China would have lost 1.14 million instead of a measly 1 million. That’s still 140,000 lives that were saved because of zero COVID that would have died with South Korean policies.

In conclusion, China is a positive force in the world and I know which side I’m on in the next Cold War.

Pick a side lib.

China’s zero COVID policy saved countless lives, possibly millions, while Americans were marched to our deaths to make widgets as “essential workers”. That’s what the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie does - social murder.

How the hell could you look at that and then conclude “zero COVID was insane”? Or that it’s no different than bourgeois nationalism? They literally put the lives of workers above economic productivity! That’s clearly the behavior of a worker state.

You seem to think that China is some kind of hive colony and that all dissent from the masses is crushed with zero hope for any sort of change ever happening. As if China has solved the human equation and can maintain perfect dominance despite internal contradictions.

I strongly disagree. It maybe appears that way because we’re entering a new Cold War, but in reality politics is still possible in China and people can still do things to force changes.

We actually saw this! China was set to maintain their zero COVID policy for as long as the virus was a threat, but internal protests drove them to follow the rest of the world into reopening. If you were right then zero COVID would have never ended.

Personally, I think zero COVID was a net positive and disagree with the protests, but I can at least recognize that people hated it and that China eventually listened to protesters as all governments eventually must. No government can maintain perfect domination. You are far too pessimistic about China.

Orientalism.