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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • There are many many layers, conservative media and social groups and psychological barriers, that act like an immune system, all in place to prevent information like this from actually being seen or acknowledged.

    No information typically makes it past the first barrier, conservative media, which simultaneously floods the information channels with anti-left messaging. If it does, their social groups are there to discount it or kill it. If the information makes it past that, their brains are trained to resolve the cognitive dissonance to reject or disbelieve it.

    And that is why we’re really screwed. There’re things like this all the time that should be killing Trump’s candidacy. The system in place to prevent that is disturbingly effective.


  • The overall average median lifetime earnings of $1,850,000 for men and $1,100,200 for women. Let’s just take the average and say an average American earns $1,475,100 in their lifetime.

    The important thing to remember is, in an unequal system where workers have most of the value of their work taken by a single person who the system disproportionately favors, that value is translatable to literal life. They are directly, inexorably going to die having had that value simply transferred to the other person or people who collect that value. Or put succinctly, they are giving up life, and the “owner” of the business is gaining the value of their life.

    Another note is that even though most valuations are stock, stock valuations do not exist in a vacuum. The stock market is the realizable increase in productivity value that we all collectively have caused.

    So based on that principle, just for fun, let’s convert these fortunes to human lives, to better understand just how much (economically-valued) life force these people have taken from people:

    Elon Musk: $262,000,000,000 = 176,259 American lives.

    Jeff Bezos: $208,000,000,000 = 141,007 American lives.

    Mark Zuckerberg: $203,000,000,000 = 137,617 American lives.



  • This is really unprovable, but my theory is that this is also another result of late-stage capitalistic exhaustion. While young people still want to be ethical and moral and safe, there’s a lot of moment-to-moment existential rebellion with so many layers of rules, norms and expectations.

    It’s similar to the rise of “treat” habits - if there’s no realistic possibility of the American dream and house and white picket fence and kids for an average worker’s salary, you have a moment of probably irresponsible spending that feels life affirming, to shake off the feeling of being in a Matrix pod that’s sucking out your life force in the most efficient manner possible.

    Hence, no condom! Or something.









  • The funny thing is this will do absolutely nothing to prevent a sitewide protest. There are so many ways for mods to effectively destroy a subreddit or redirect it while remaining public.

    In fact, and this is the important blindness that Reddit continues to have, the mods usually need to work hard daily just to keep a sub usable. Reddit is so dismissive of that effort and so brazenly presumes upon their volunteer labor that they seem to think subs just continue on sheer momentum, if only they could stop mods from sabotaging them.

    Mod posts every day pointing to a new community at Lemmy or elsewhere, stopping using bot removal tools, stopping troll culling, marking NSFW, etc will do the job.





  • It makes sense once you consider Paramount is in limbo until a merger with Skydance, run by David Ellison, the son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison.

    David Ellison may be more liberal and has apparently donated to democratic candidates more often than republicans. But you can imagine the direction coming down from high-up CBS positions to not engage in anything that may look partisan.

    it’s just a shame that the right has convinced anyone that “verifiable reality” is partisan.