There is a whole genre of smuggling that is literally just buying a bunch of watches or couple of high-end laptops or something and then throwing them in your suitcase and doing exactly this.

If you’re doing it with single items for personal use is it fine? Probably so, as long as you can avoid being extra stupid about it. Is it a good thing to get in the habit of? Oh mercy no.

Wait: My memory of the story was that Clinton loved to escort women around and constantly signed up for the duty, and everyone else on all sides of the equation had no particular strong feelings about it. Except for John Mulaney’s mom.

Don’t get me started on the cobblers

“It’s kind of getting communist when a feller can’t even put in a hard days’ work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least drink 1 or 2 beers.”

-People in the 1980s upset that they were trying to make it illegal to drive with a .15 BAC (which was the previous limit).

I know it’s only vaguely related, since they’re not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers’ funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn’t funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of “fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies” elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

Surely.

It is the difference between aspiration and victory

There are three types of pet owners:

• Those who respect their pets’ boundaries
• Those who squeeze their pets who are clearly hating it and fighting back
• Those who squeeze their pets who clearly hate it until the pets’ will is broken and they resign themselves that they’re going to get hugged sometimes and it’s okay

The first and third groupings I can get down with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE

Many of these bands are misplaced.

Gin Blossoms is sad. NIN is incredibly angry. Mazzy Star is a little bit horny. Deftones is pretty happy. Radiohead is at least a little horny.

I want to ask about how strongly Russia’s economy is doing, and how they are rising and NATO is falling apart and the EU is going to all crumble and freeze in the dark with no fossil fuels while Russia stands strong, and how that all ties in with this whole theory, but I have lost interest.

I wish you luck with your geopolitical theories. Y’all are weird.

Question: If Trump reverses the direction of US foreign policy, and starts openly seeking for Ukraine to be conquered and have its resources and land taken by Russia and the US, would it become support worthy because of its place on that list?

How about Canada? If he starts trying to conquer Canada (not that I think he would, I think it is pure posturing) would it then start needing Lemmygrad’s support?

Yeah. The whole thing of soliciting donations is backwards. I mean it’s fine, if someone wants to contribute then it’s fine, but it’s not accomplishing the goal.

• The people who receive the donations receive a tiny fraction of what they should
• The people who choose to contribute already have the right mentality (that they picked up from somewhere else)
• The people who don’t contribute are the ones who should be required to contribute, as a way to adjust their mentality

I think the modern internet with its everything-is-free mentality has created a lot of weird entitlement on behalf of the consumers of all that freely available stuff.

And, for some reason, the vitriol that’s created by the system is rarely aimed at someone who’s figured out how to sell their “free” users out to some eldritch corporate behemoth. It is almost always directed at somebody who’s trying to make a living by putting up a paywall, or at someone who’s providing something for free who isn’t doing as much as the users feel like they deserve.

I would assume that that’s low-effort shilling before I would assume it is stupidity.

Take a look over one of those huge toxic threads, and count up how many people are being assholes, and how many people are just there to type their happy little comments.

In my experience, the number of assholes is in the low single digits. It’s actually not that bad. It’s just that anyone who’s an asshole tends to amp up other people into a big spat, and also that they stick out (and attract more attention and replies) than the normal people. But there really aren’t that many of them. They’re just noisy.

Also, it helps to stay away from lemmy.world. For whatever reason, the shouty bad-opinion people tend to congregate there. I recommend Beehaw.

I’m not trying to be overly self-promotional, but rss.ponder.cat + piefed.social’s “feeds” could probably do this very well. I actually really like the combination of having aggregated RSS feeds I can control, along with other people voting on them so particularly interesting stuff from them get surfaced more than other stuff.

It’s called the social contract.

If you’re still in the teenager mindset, where you get to do whatever you want and it’s an atrocity if someone does anything to you, then of course you will feel upset about coming in, picking a fight with everyone in the thread, and them having a little chuckle and heaving you out the door and then getting back to what they were doing before you came in.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for someone who wants to talk in a community where they feel like they are not able to. What you did is not that.

It’s funny how all of y’all are rooting for this war to continue. You know it’s going to continue to be shit for Europe, right? I hope the war mongers get to actively participate since they love it so much.

Hard for anyone to see that any other way than hostile and as deliberately misunderstanding the situation.

Generally speaking, whenever you are telling somebody what they think, instead of reading what they think and then responding to it, you’re in the wrong. No one here wants the war to continue.

!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

It happens sometimes. More often on some communities and instances than others. It is for the most part recognized as wrong, when it happens. Sort of a “necessary” evil aspect of moderation that Lemmy inherited from Reddit, when they adopted Reddit’s moderation model which enables the creation of little fiefdoms under the exclusive control of one person or a handful of people.

Post up there if it happens to you, and you can get sympathy, feedback, and pointers to other communities that don’t do that sort of thing.

Edit: Oh lol. I didn’t look at the posts. You’re within your rights to say whatever point of view you want to say. If it is blatant propaganda and accompanied by personal abuse at people who disagree with you, you’re going to get moderated for it. If you really believe in these things, find some kind of “debate” community if you want, and I’m happy to spend at least a small amount of time addressing them with you.

I think it just feels more comfortable and “professional” also. I’ve talked with people for whom the jank associated with decentralized services is a total deal-breaker. They started a Mastodon account, but they picked the wrong instance and it got defederated because it had Nazis, they got annoyed and moved to a different instance, and then a few months later the admin for that instance evaporated without warning and rather than find a third one they turned their back on the whole endeavor as a hopeless kids-lemonade-stand waste of time.