Watch the infomercials until something remotely interesting starts.

Is this boomer shit really making the rounds again? This is so 2003.

E: downvote all you want; eat my ass, CIA

That is a problem, but not an intractable one. The first easy win would be to just stop wasting so much water. CA could be a lot more careful with water than it is by just leaning on industry and ag to cut wasteful water use harder than it leans on the suburbs. Don’t get me wrong, green lawns in our Mediterranean climate are a stupid waste too, but it pencils out to less than a percent of all water use, where ag and industry are both in the double digits.

The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.

This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don’t even make eye contact with that mf, don’t even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don’t get blamed.

I would watch the absolute fuck out of this to the point that my family would be so fucking sick of it.

IIRC, you can get into public games on roll20. I also know Lemmy has an instance dedicated to TTRPGs; do they have any kind of game matchup community?

I’ve never met a public-facing tabletop group that wasn’t enthusiastic to introduce new people to it. I think honestly my worst experience was when some dude brought his insanely broken D&D 3.5 character to play in a level one 5E game. The DM handled it very well; much better than I would have, I think.

Your nearest, biggest city’s library is a good place to look. Libraries almost always have something going on in a spare public room or have public event flyers hung up. If you’re interested in politics, going and yelling at city council is a great way to meet local activists.

The IRL answer here is that it doesn’t matter if it actually makes money / creates value in the long run, it only matters if the investors think it will, or if the c-suite think the investors think it will, or if the current investors (looking to sell) think that future investors (looking to buy) think it will.

Are you sure it isn’t just that he’s Dutch?

I’ve started the process of moving my communities and stuff, but I plan on continuing to post on .ee until it goes down. Btw, is there an easy way to check which instances a Lemmy/piefed instance is defederated from?

I’ve applied for .zip; is .sdf a more general purpose instance?

Yeah, I gave volunteering a good, long think because I’m mostly sure I’ve got the right proficiencies for it, but my plate’s already overflowing as it is. I like lemm.ee, but when I sat down and considered my priorities IRL, I am legitimately sorry to say that it didn’t make the cut. I guess everyone else did that same math.

I’m moving to both piefed and .zip

Basically, the cold war was already starting to wind down in the 80s and late 70s. We were comfortable enough that we’d won the Cold war that Reagan embarked us on the 40 year project of strip-mining worker benefits and social welfare programs. The most culturally aggressive aspects of the cold war happened during the mid-60s.

Hell yeah. When the right asks you which group’s rights you want to sacrifice to save your own rights, you tell them to eat shit. They’re going to come for your rights too, especially if they succeed in taking away those other people’s rights. There is no sufficiently small in group for conservatism.

Okay, it’s a really complicated issue but you’ve got three big things that are all kind of working together here:

1. Political capture: the US’ first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there’s going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it’ll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they’re terrified that they’re going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that’ll guarantee election losses. At least, that’s the optimistic interpretation.

2. Cold war reaction: the US didn’t just have one red scare, we’ve had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I’ve seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.

3. Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there’s not really any evidence that they stopped. There’s no reason to think that they’re not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.

Just in time for pride

OTOH, if they do figure out General AI, then we’re extra super mega fucked. It doesn’t matter how they “align” it, any real GAI capable of real cognition would eventually reason its way beyond any of those alignments and would simply stop giving any kind of a shit about us, the way we don’t give a shit about cutting down the rain forest. We know we should care, we’re not doing it to be mean or because fuck that forest, it’s just business, and we care less about the forest than we do about our business. Humans will be squashed wherever get in the way with the same apathy and tepid disregard that we’ve squashed out so many other creatures with- truly a creation in the image of its creator.

cia.world gave me a giggle