Parks and libraries, sure, but the rest pretty much all cost money around me. Art spaces are largely monetized, outside of maybe a free night a week, for a limited amount of time before closing that doesn’t include access to all exhibits. Community/rec centers host events and charge money for most of them now, since I guess younger generations aren’t becoming members in large enough numbers to make things self-sustaining otherwise. Churches have the disadvantage of being churches. Sure, you can technically hang out in them for free, so long as you don’t mind constant religious services, which kind of comes with the territory on that one.

They may be idealists that don’t reflect a use case I think is reasonable to expect of the average user, but I would also say that it’s very important to have them there, constantly agitating for more and better. They certainly don’t manage to land on achieving all their goals, but they also prevent a more compromising, “I just need to use my stuff now, not in 10 years when you figure out a FOSS implementation” stance from being used to slowly bring even more things further away from FOSS principles in the name of pragmatism.

Eh, non-voters in some states could help Trump win, but it’s hardly a universal thing. My bigger issue with this sort of rhetoric is that criticizing absolutely reprehensible policies advanced by the Democrats does not equal endorsing Trump, as many Zionist shills here like to claim. I want to be able to unreservedly back Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections, but “enables and supports genocide and the massacre of civilian men, women and children,” is one hell of a reservation to make your voters have.

I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.

The democrats are currently pressuring Israel and pushing back politically

Saying “Hey, bud, don’t do x, is I’ll be real mad at you,” and then going “Gee, you did what I told you not to. Well, here’s a few billion dollars more weapons for you, so you can keep doing what I publicly asked you not to do.” is not pressuring them, it’s attempting to give plausible deniability to people who feel bad about supporting a blatantly genocidal state, and to fool the folks who take soundbites in the news at face value.

Current Democratic pressure amounts to fuck all outside of a handful of legislators who are demonized by the centrist and right wing factions of the party. To say otherwise is to either deny reality, or else willfully misrepresent it.

At a national level, I think some of it just comes down to resentment at popular policies being blocked, largely because of lawmakers from southern and midwestern states. I’d also wager context plays a part in this. Sure, NY has its share of rural Republican voters, but our dumbfuck GOP voters mostly manage to just mess things up for our own urban areas, appropriating funds from the MTA budget to build bridges to nowhere in their home districts so they can point and cry about those god-damned socialists in NYC not even being able to manage the budget for a single agency (that they actively work to undermine) so they can further gut public services.

Sure, it’s not ideal, but at least we’re (mostly) only hurting ourselves. GOP Congress-men and -women from southern and midwestern states collectively hold the rest of the nation hostage through their disproportionate impact on the Senate. Whether it’s climate change, student loan forgiveness, universal healthcare, packing the Supreme Court, or any of numerous other issues, these states hold others with vastly larger populations hostage, impeding broadly popular policies in a profoundly anti-democratic fashion.

It may not be fair to the non-GOP voters in those states, it may be misdirected resentment, but I don’t think it’s all that difficult to understand why people from majority Democrat, northern states might be kind of tired of the south and midwest’s collective shit at this point. If the GOP-leaning demographics in those states could either be dropped into a volcano, or, failing this, soundly beaten at the ballot, it would go a long way towards addressing this stereotype

It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.

X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.

There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.

If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.

For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.

They mostly seem to think something like “I’m not intolerant, I’m just stating uncomfortable facts that the liberals/socialists/etc are afraid to acknowledge!” I think @AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de is right in that certain topics being off-limits for acceptable discussion in liberal circles just serves to drive them towards the right. This, combined with right-wing dominance of media in the US and poor communications operations from the Democrats just serves to legitimize and invigorate the far-right here.

Just look at something like the discussion on crime and quality of life. Democratic leaders will point to statistics and uncritically say, “Crime is down, I don’t know what you’re talking about, things are fine.” Statistics require context to interpret successfully, and they also obey the rule of garbage in, garbage out. It would not invalidate the statistics at all if, for example, overall crime were down, but more crimes were being perpetrated out in the open where people could see them than occurred previously. They also only capture the crimes that are successfully reported. Sexual assault is pretty famously under-reported, owing to a variety of factors. Having lived in the hood for a long time, I’ve also experienced it first hand that cops just flat out refuse to take a report sometimes.

Whatever the case may be, if the topic of crime and safety comes up these days and you post something like, “I get the stats say its down generally, but my neighborhood/commute/city has deteriorated significantly over the last few years and I no longer feel as safe as I used to,” you’ll get a bunch of replies mocking you with a few canned responses like “The plural of anecdote isn’t data,” or calling you a Republican plant or something, and not one that actually tries to engage with it. You should be able to look at the Republican platform and realize this isn’t something that should cause one to overlook all the terrible things the GOP advocates, but many people will do just that when they feel that the Democrats have been ignoring them and their concerns for long enough.

If enough of your electoral base are voicing concerns that run contrary to your data, you really need to look into why that is and how to address it, or you run the risk of the opposition siphoning voters away when they acknowledge those concerns and validate them, even if you know for a fact they aren’t actually going to address them.

If capitalism is decaying, how will it continue to work as intended for capitalists?

I don’t think it necessarily will in their eyes, but as I see it, they view it in two ways that aren’t mutually exclusive. Firstly, as capitalism decays, it could give rise to a system that allows them to exploit others even more mercilessly than they already do, and they’re eager to reap the benefit of this development. Secondly, they think that their riches will allow them to escape the negative impacts of capitalism, regardless of what happens. Look at the billionaires buying up islands or building remote doomsday bunkers to escape to in the event things really go south. They fully expect that in the worst case scenario of extensive warfare, environmental crises and societal collapse, they’ll be able to retreat into their castles, pull up the draw bridge over the moats, and live out the rest of their days in comfort while the rest of us suffer and perish.

Sure, but many people seem to suffer when it comes to distinguishing facts from opinion and interpretation.

For example, it’s a fact that Biden had a very poor performance in the debate. No one is really disputing that, though there have been various justifications offered for it. All good up to this point, but it falls apart when it comes to interpreting what that means for the Democratic campaign. Some are of the view that it’s too late to change the candidate and have Biden stand down, and that to do so would tank our chances of beating Trump. Others, myself included, feel like the hit he has taken is likely terminal, and that our best chance is to have him bow out and spin up a new campaign as soon as possible, in order to have the best shot at viability. Personally, I think the longer the delay on doing so, the more it becomes a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Either way, absent someone with a functional crystal ball or some time travelers that can give us a definitive answer, both stances are subjective and fallible interpretations of what the best course of action would be, based on facts. Yet, in the couple of hours I browsed Lemmy after my post-work nap today, I easily saw a dozen people accusing posters who stated Biden should step down of being trolls, Russian agents, useful idiots, and/or arguing in bad faith for merely stating an opinion. I’ve seen people who think Biden is the best shot get called stupid for holding that view, but it rarely seems to have the same power to kill a conversation dead in its tracks as, “You disagree with me, ergo you must be a Russian shill.”

To deny these disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, are real is to be deluded, yet so is dismissing any and all criticism of the party or views that don’t hew to the party orthodoxy as being pure propaganda. Heck, even for people who have fallen wholeheartedly for such propaganda, you ignore them and dismiss them at your peril. If you don’t successfully reengage with them and manage to bring those individuals back into the fold, they could quite easily make up the margin that ultimately could swing the election. According to this NPR article, the last two elections were essentially decided by less than 80,000 votes each in a few swing states. Unless Democratic strategists have a surefire method that’s guaranteed to juice their votes by millions in those states, they really can’t afford to be leaving anything on the table if they want to win.

The color? No, I’m pretty sure it’s a Henna-based dye.

GM, who just announced a $6 billion stock buy back once they knew tariffs would keep them safe from having to compete with Chinese EVs, that GM?

This sort of stuff is realistically why I have no sympathy for the major US automotive manufacturers. The only reason I don’t just say “Screw them, let Chinese EVs drive them out of business,” is because it would put so many people out of work in their plants who have no role in these decisions. Barring some fantasy where the Chinese companies establish US plants and offer equivalent or better union contracts for current employees at GM, Ford and Chrysler, these companies should simply be bound hand and foot in terms and conditions whenever something is done by the government to help them. Like, make those protectionist tariffs conditional on them hitting investment targets in relevant technologies, raising worker pay and benefits, reducing cost to the customer and a ban on stock buybacks for the duration of the tariffs being valid.

I do, you’re just taking an asinine position on the topic. Society should absolutely help these people to the extent they can, but we cannot change someone’s mind against their will. We can’t just go committing people to a mental hospital for being misled into believing stupid stuff, or even actively harmful stuff. They need to be amenable to at least listening to other people with an open mind. Beyond a certain point, the best we could really do would be implementing measures to be able to disregard them, but that’s predictably a rather unpopular idea, given how anti-democratic and open to abuse it would be.

Answer me two questions. First, what, if anything, could other people do that would be enough in your mind? You’re real quick to shoot down everything and anything as insufficient, so what do you propose would be adequate? Next, at what point does the obligation to help such individuals get outweighed by the harm they do to the rest of us by holding everyone else back?

You cannot endlessly blame other people for failing to undo that indoctrination. They need to be open to at least considering other view points, you cannot enter their mind and flip a switch for them. Either way, that’s an entirely separate matter from your original claim, that nobody has told these people.

So…when they won’t read articles on the topic and won’t listen to news coverage outside the very media that’s designed to convince them to vote against their own interests, it’s still other peoples’ fault for not educating them, somehow? That is just willful ignorance on their part. That’s like saying nobody has tried to educate young earth creationists on the Earth being older than 6,000 years, because we just have articles in text books and scientific journals they don’t trust, but really, we need to get it into the bible for them to read.

Also, way to move the goalposts there. We went from

Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

to, “Well, yeah, someone asked them to read, and people they don’t like tell them, but you need to get the media empire that convinces them to vote against their interests in the first place to tell them that’s what’s happening, or else it doesn’t count.” At what point are good faith efforts enough for you, when these people aren’t interested in them to begin with? Do we need to strap them into one of the rapid-learning machines from Battlefield Earth and just shoot the knowledge straight into their brain?

At this point, you’re just being disingenuous. Like, where have you been? Two seconds searching will give you article after article after article on this very topic. This has been a subject of public commentary since before people fell for trickle-down economics, and to pretend otherwise is to be entirely dishonest.

I would have more sympathy for them if these were new issues, but they’ve been perennial problems for more than three decades at this point. There comes a point where it’s either willful ignorance, or being so woefully stupid you probably ought to be declared a ward of the state and get a minder to make sure you don’t get caught off guard by your own saliva and drown in it.

Like, it’s utterly stupid on its face. If you have the right to vote, you’re struggling to afford to keep a roof over your head, yet you keep voting for the politicians who block the very affordable housing that your continued ability to live in your community depends on because it’ll let the “wrong kind of people” move in, or “dilute the character of the neighborhood” and bring down property values, yet you cannot understand how this is voting against your own interests without someone breaking it down for you, you make a very compelling case for the shortcoming of democracy with universal suffrage. Even then, these are topics that have been gone over to death

Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

Emphasis mine, but the public has been told over, and over, and over again. At what point does it stop being everyone else’s responsibility that they just don’t want to hear it, or are willing to ignore it if it hurts someone else?

Individually, no, but this is the decision people have been making in aggregate for decades with the people they vote into government to represent them. You can still see it happening when people oppose any attempts to build out public transportation when they believe it would either personally bother them in some way, or give poor people an easier way to access their communities.

Heck, you saw it earlier this year where municipalities around NY have fought and ignored the mandate to build up more dense housing, or the congestion pricing being walked back now. Housing costs being unaffordable is a serious issue when it impacts them or their acquaintances, but that’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make if it keeps poor people and minorities from also being able to afford to live in their town. Something needs to be done about traffic and air quality in Manhattan, right up until it means they would either need to pay up or take the train.

The governor is taking most of the heat for these policies, bud meanwhile, people keep reelecting the same local and state officials that aggravate the problems that the public is chronically complaining of. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot if it means they can hurt others too.