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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • It’s not illegal to sell bibles. I’m sure there are loads of churches that will fill their pews with them, but they’re not sending money to the campaign, they’re sending it to Trump. Why would he make this harder for himself, he can just take the money and put it in his pocket, there’s no reason to get the campaign involved.


  • For real. Trump is an idiot, a grifter, and a piece of shit, but this isn’t even sidestepping campaign donation law.

    He’s not a political candidate getting funds from churches, he’s a parasite capitalist selling bibles to his fans, and he’s a political candidate – 2 separate things. The bible money isn’t going to his campaign, it’s just going to his pocket.

    This take assumes that he’s selling bibles, funneling the money from their sales to his campaign, then funneling it back out to pay for his disgorgements. This take thinks he’s intentionally making is harder for himself, just to make it illegal.

    He’s just a guy selling shit.


  • We don’t do it for the purpose of increasing responsibility. I mean , I didn’t, maybe other people do. I just really wanted a couple little mini monsters following me around.

    When I was like 30, I was out hiking and I saw some guy with three little kids, the kids were hopping from rock to rock, and the littlest one ran up past the siblings to hold the dad’s hand. It was super cute. My parents were kinda uninterested and afk, so I haven’t seen a lot of examples of dads just having fun with their kids.

    That little family was inspiring, in the sense that it opened my mind to a new way of thinking, but also in the sense of taking in breath, it felt like I had been holding my breath and finally stopped. I realized I didn’t necessarily have to be like them, I could use their bad/mediocre parenting as a “what not to do” list, and still do some of the things that they did that were good. I could go hiking with my kids, I could teach them how to build a campsite out of nothing, or how to build a server, or how to put your thumb on the end of a house so it sprays really far.

    Sure it’s more responsibility but it’s also really fun.

    And, tbh, all the nice things in life are even nicer if you can share it with people. That goes double for kids, because they don’t know how shitty the world is. You just gotta make sure they understand and appreciate the fun stuff and don’t get spoiled.




  • I’m not sure it was ever accurate for people who weren’t already conservative.

    It makes a lot more sense that, as you get older, you stop growing and learning, so as society progresses, your formerly progressive views become commonplace and eventually anachronistic.

    (That’s 100% what happened to my mother, who was a hippie, literally flowers in her hair, and now “just doesn’t really get the whole trans thing”)

    And, if a person was progressive, but had some secret conservative or regressive values, those values come into sharper relief when their other views become commonplace – and, as you get older, you’re less interested in hiding your flaws and/or shameful values, so they come out more.

    (That’s what happened with my dad, he was in folk music groups in the 70s and then became a doctor and didn’t like the idea of poor people getting some of his money (even though it was those same programs that kept his mother afloat after his father didn’t come back from Korea).)



  • Oh I pirate the shit out of everything – and partly it’s a boycott, but I think mostly it’s the convenience. “Owning” things and enjoying them on my terms (no Internet? No problem) is just better than subscriptions.

    And I block ads, 100% for sure. I would literally give up most of the Internet rather than subject myself to ads – I’m “on the spectrum” and I have a very hard time with overstimulation and distraction, so ads substantially interrupt my ability to read (which I already have trouble with).

    Like – I love lemmy and everything, but I’m here because Reddit disabled the ad-free app I used to use. I was a daily reddit user for like 13 years. if I could still use Relay, my ethical resolve against their anti-user practices, and my personal commitment to foss, probably wouldn’t have held up.

    My feeling is, if I behave in a way that’s conducive with good mental health and life satisfaction, and what I do is also a political statement, then the universe is in harmony.

    It’s really just the "voting with your wallet’ perspective I mean to illuminate and undercut – it’s a very tempting idea, but I would rather we (as a resistance movement) remain sane and comfortable than ascetic and underengaged.


  • Voting with your wallet is literally plutocracy – those with more dollars get more votes.

    Not only is our theoretically bad, but it’s practically bad: the impact of a boycott is negligible, but the impact on the people doing the boycott is huge: not having access to the conveniences everyone else has puts us at a significant disadvantage compared to our peers.

    And finally, it’s not just practically bad, it’s actually contraindicated. The executives of a corporation are legally required to maximize immediate returns to their investors. It’s literally illegal for a CEO to move a company in the direction of civic responsibility over profit. And it’s not just “profit” – it has to be increasing profit. Line has to go up; they can’t just keep it flat, even if “flat” is hugely profitable. To withdraw our financial support will just cause them to squeeze harder on everyone else.

    (There’s an argument that there might be more profit in social responsibility, but unless you have numbers to back that up, and it demonstrates immediate returns in addition to long term benefits, then it’s just a guess, and a guess is never going to be more convincing to shareholders than facts.)

    The only way to change this is with regulation, and a cultural shift away from “line goes up” mentality. And you can’t effect political change when you’re spend 3x as long making dinner because you’re boycotting processed food.

    Suggesting that we just give up all the conveniences that our labor, our creativity, and our cultural contributions have enabled, for the sake of convincing a CEO to be nicer is just ineffectual.




  • One of the things that I thought of to help with this problem is, like, what if we figured out how much it costs to meet like all the basics in life - a house (not a rental!), food, soda, internet, heat/hot water - all that stuff. Then add some more, so that people could do nice stuff and enjoy their lives, save for retirement, go on vacations, etc.

    Then - now here’s the crazy part - we make a law requiring that everyone in the country needs to be paid at least that much money. It would be like a “Floor Wage,” or, like, a “Minimum Salary.”

    If the increase in the cost of doing business didn’t eliminate billionaires altogether, I bet people would at least stop giving a shit about billionaires and their gold piles because the rest of us aren’t living in debt while they build yachts for their yachts.


  • Before Obama, I could still remain quiet when people said “voting for anyone is implicit approval,” or whatever - and for the most part, they’re right - voting is a pretty low level of change.

    I voted for Obama because even if he is a bit of a tool, he’s black, and now a huge group of minority kids saw someone who looks like them in the white house. I voted for him not because of the “HOPE” on his signs but literally to give black kids hope. (And yeah, for the most part, it’s false hope, just like it is for white kids, welcome to the club.) He was a positive symbol and, if it’s a symbol who is also a centrist Democrat, that’s better then a centrist Democrat that isn’t a positive symbol. And a shit ton better than Mitt Romney or whoever the other guy was.

    And then Trump happened, and any respect for the “don’t vote” viewpoint drained out. If you still think both parties are the same at this point, you might want to start asking yourself what else is going on with you - because “not great” is not identical to “fucking terrible”…

    Biden isn’t doing what I want him to do - health care, income inequality, corruption in Congress, etc - but the infrastructure bill isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing, we need it. We need a lot more, but 1 > 0.



  • I mean, if this is a package manager challenge then a distro is just a package manager

    And in a lot of ways, it kind of is - now that most distros are using systemd and most distros have all the same stuff in the repos, a distro - in the sense of how different they feel to use - is basically just swapping package managers.

    (Distro maintainers, don’t misunderstand! You folks do way more than just zip up a package manager! Your work is crazy hard and we appreciate you!)

    So if a distro is more than just the package manager, what would that mean:

    1. Default desktop env; obv a big one for Fedora since RH drives both Fedora and Gnome;
    2. Community; another big one for Fedora since it has one and it’s a pretty great one
    3. …? Idk this isn’t like an essay I had planned, I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head ;)

    Point one, yes, OP has betrayed the spirit of Fedora because Gnome isn’t featured in the screenshot - but if we didn’t know better, there’s not actually much in the screenshot that can’t be done in Gnome

    Point 2: any time you’re using a smaller-community WM or DE, yes, you’re going to have to reach beyond the distro’s community - but for a lot of stuff, you’re still in the Fedora community;

    Point 2.5 - and, when posting screens to unixporn communities, the F is what matters; it’s representation, it’s demonstrating what’s possible, it’s showing that Fedora is a viable choice for new ricers that aren’t aware that you can rice any distro; and - maybe most important - it’s cool - OP is literally improving fedora’s reputation by posting something awesome that uses it

    This isn’t a comment to argue, it’s meant as a discussion - what would make it more fedora-ish and less of a package manager challenge?