Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.

Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.

Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.

Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

• In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

• In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

• In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

• Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.

I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I moved over to it after the initial Reddit exodus and haven’t really looked elsewhere. It’s not quite a full replacement in terms of content and engagement obviously. It’s good for broader stuff like memes, politics/games/movies/etc in general, but not so much for the specific. There are quite a few games I used to spend a lot of time discussing on their subreddits, but they’re basically ghost towns here for a lot of them.

There are also some more specific community leanings. You’re gonna see a LOT of Star Trek and Linux related stuff.

But overall, I’m happy enough with it knowing it’s a non-privatized space to talk.

“Spends more on groceries than on other categories” so they’re poor. You can just say that. It turns out your money needs to go to keeping you alive before it goes to other things, and if you don’t have much money left after that, you can’t exactly spend more than you spent on food on other things.

Imagine being a consultant and get paid to write completely pointless things like that.

Ok, sorry about that. I’m more than happy to update it if you want to give me some constructive feedback on what was confusing about it. Note though that this was the 3rd part in the series, and maybe you didn’t go back and read the previous 2 parts? They start here

NP. I’m not really great at giving writing advice, so can’t really help there. Something about it just didn’t click when I read it. The extra context you linked did help a bit.

As far as the issue: After reading it I think it does just seem to be a matter of terminology mixed with problems that arise with when you need to write math expressions inline in text. If you can write things out on paper or use a markdown language, it’s really easy to see how a fractional expression is structured.

8

2(1+3)

is a lot easier to read than 8/2(1+3) even if they technically are meant to be evaluated the same. There’s no room for confusion.

And as for distributive law vs multiplication, maybe this is just taking for granted a thing that I learned a long time ago, but to me they’re just the same thing in practice. When I see a(x+1) I know that in order to multiply these I need to distribute. And if we fill in the algebraic symbols for numbers, you don’t even need to distribute to get the answer since you can just evaluate the parentheses then use the result to multiply by the outside.

Conversely, if I was factoring something, I would need to do division.

ax + a

a

= x+1, thus: a(x+1)

I think we’re basically talking about the same thing, I’m just being a bit lose with the terminology.

And while we’re at it, the best way to make sure there’s no misunderstanding is to just use parenthesis for EVERYTHING! I’m mostly kidding, this can rapidly get unreadable once you nest more than a few parens, although for these toy expressions, it would have the desired effect.

(8)/(2(1+3)) is obviously different than (8/2)(1+3)

Something about the way this thread was written was kind of confusing, so I don’t really get what their point was. Is it just that the terminology is wrong? Or am I missing something?

Like, whatever you call it, a x b, a*b, ab, and a(b) are all acceptable notations to describe the operation “multiply a and b.” Some are nicer to use than others depending on the situation.

Did anything meaningful come from those leaks? People can try to do stuff to powerful people to reveal their misdeeds, but they’ve written the laws and are barely bound by the reach of nations in the first place. Few receive consequences for their crimes.

As for existential threats like nuclear weapons, that’s it’s own can of worms. So yeah, I guess in that respect they’re not really in control. But short of nuclear annihilation or the eventual collapse of the human-suitable environment, they seem pretty untouchable.

EDIT: Actually, we even have a great example of the ways they can fly above some world spamming catastrophes: COVID 19 happened. Many died, many more lost their livelihoods, homes, etc. Meanwhile many of the rich got to take private transportation to private places so they could wait out the pandemic in safety while their companies’ profits increased and they used that increased wealth to buy up even more capital.

I’d seriously doubt any claims that there’s some cabal that deliberately caused it, but they sure do have the means to escape the worst of disasters and even exploit them for profit.

This is more language/writing style than math. The math is consistent, what’s inconsistent is there are different ways to express math, some of which, quite frankly, are just worse at communicating the mathematical expression clearly than others.

Personally, since doing college math classes, I don’t think I’d ever willingly write an expression like that exactly because it causes confusion. Not the biggest issue for a simple problem, much bigger issue if you’re solving something bigger and need combine a lot of expressions. Just use parentheses and implicit multiplication and division. It’s a lot clearer and easier to work with.

Where do they get the money from?

I think for memes and news I’m pretty much set with lemmy. For a lot of more niche topics like specific gaming communities, I do kind of feel left out. For now though I’m willing to bite the bullet. I stand by why I left Reddit. It’s nothing special technologically to warrant putting up with the shitty business practices. Eventually people will migrate elsewhere once the squeeze is tight enough, whether it’s to lemmy or not. For one of the games I play there’s already more activity on their forum than the subreddit for it. Not so much for others.

Biden, and any US president, is pro-military industrial complex. Anything that lets them sell more weapons and increase US hegemony is what their ideology is.

Oppressive systems passively inflict violence on the oppressed. Artificial lack of access to basic necessities like food, shelter, healthcare hurts or even kills people. Getting over policed gets people hurt or killed.

The absence of war isn’t the same thing as the absence of conflict. The conflict is built into the structure of a hierarchical society. It’s just only felt by some. A war brings the conflict to the surface to make those who the system supports feel the pain of those who it does not.

The government could give in and create a more just society for everyone and the conflict would be resolved. The oppressed giving in only benefits those in power. They go back to passively experiencing systemic violence.

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Submitting to an oppressive government is not peace.

One of these “sides” could unilaterally peacefully end the conflict. For the other side choosing “peace” just means submitting to living under an occupying force as eternal second class citizens. insert mlk quote here.

In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.

In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.