Too true. I would give my right hand to live in Europe rather than the US.

When I worked in healthcare there were days where I clocked in at 7am and was forced to keep working until 11pm without any lunch or dinner break. Worker rights in the US are almost completely non-existent and the way some workers get treated is hellish

at some point people will have to start owning their consumption patterns.

Next time you are buying groceries, don’t buy anything that has any plastic in the packaging and then get back to us on how avoiding plastic is merely a matter of choice.

Nearly all clothing is full of plastic these days as well. Plastic from china is just as bad for the environment as plastic from any other country.

These days, profits growing slower than anticipated (but still growing) is framed as losing money.

Didn’t workers make that exact argument when their good manufacturing jobs were being sent to poorer nations? Seems hypocritical that the government allows globalism to hurt the working class as long as it benefits the rich, but suddenly globalism is bad when it hurts the profit margins of our billionaires.

True, but if you are a politician and you pay a ghost writer then political groups can bulk purchase your book as a way of laundering bribe money

Maybe, but I am boycotting all capitalist entities the best I can. If I need something I try to buy used or from worker co-ops or to check it out from a library or pirate it.

The global medical community had to beg the US to ban lead from consumer products like paint and gasoline for close to 80 years and our politicians kept taking bribes from lobbyists to ignore medical science… But did we learn from that and ban lobbying? Nope, lobbyists are now bribing politicians to ignore the plastic epidemic and global warming

Replace guillotine with imprison and lets include all the lobbyists, Super PAC members, super delegates, and politicians who accept money from foreign fascist states (like Russia and Israel)

Oh, sorry. Your joke went right over my head.

Eh, Dave Ramsey has some good advice but he also has some really terrible ideas so I strongly recommend going with someone else.

Clark Howard, the Money guy, and Jill Schlesinge are all many times better than Dave Ramsey.

I can relate to that, but fart sounds are also seen as childish and immature by lots of people so the site will never be a serious Twitter alternative unless they pick a bird name

Not the same. Twitter and tweets were uniquely brilliant in a way that “toot” will never be. Farts are unpleasant. Bird sounds are very pleasant. Also, Every hear the phrase “a little bird told me”? Or notice how in very old disney movies (which are based on old German fairytales), that the birds talk (tweet) to the heroines as benevolent messengers? Twitter was honestly the perfect name for the company. Mastodon is a terrible name, but better than X

Mastodon is also just a terrible name for a Twitter alternative where nearly everyone thinks of the format as being tweets (a sound a bird makes). If they had to pick a animal name, then they should have picked a two syllable bird name like Magpie, Pigeon, Bluejay, Robin, Raven, or even a 3 syllable bird like StellarJay, Cockatoo, etc.

Also kinda shitty of those companies to charge educational instutions

It really is, but what can do? Capitalism exploits everything for profit.

That is sort of like complaining that people think of the US when they hear “school shooting”: The US has something like 20% of the world’s prison population and we likely use complete solidarity confinement more than any every other (developed) country combined together… So the term is rightfully US centric because, like school shootings, solidary confinement is far more of an issue in America.

"The European Court of Human Rights distinguishes between complete sensory isolation, total social isolation and relative social isolation[30] and notes that "complete sensory isolation, coupled with total social isolation can destroy the personality and constitutes a form of inhuman treatment which cannot be justified by the requirements of security or any other reason. " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement

If the European courts find it important to distinguish between types of solidary confinement them I feel like posters should as well. Otherwise you can’t blame people for defaulting to the most commonly used type of solidarity confinement.

And the US has far more prisoners than Europeans do and we use solidary confinement far more often.

Climate change is threatening to potentially be an extinction level event and yet Americans keep buying bigger and bigger tank sized vehicles… If we can’t even be bothered to save ourselves by addressing climate change now then I think there is virtually zero chance that we will ever colonize space or other planets.

If capitalists valued the public good instead of profit min-maxing then they wouldn’t be capitalists. They’d be some kind of socialist, probably market socialist (co-ops owned by workers or the public.)

Since you are arguing from a perspective of what benefits society, I can only assume you must be a socialist. One of the foundational principals of capitalism is that capitalists have every moral and legal right to extract as much value from society as they can and the market will regulate itself. As long as we have a capitalist system this will always be the default position of the general public and our politicians.

Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,

Walmart has 10.5k locations. 163B divided by 10.5K is about $15.6M per location.

Jesus, in what world is $15M profits per store location considered a “slim margin”?

I think this will be potentially be a good thing (at first) as you won’t have people wasting their life away just endlessly walking around the store updating the price of every individual item for 40 hours a week.

Things will get messy when they start price gouging based on current inventory, weather, holidays or emergency situations.

Things will get deeply dystopian if they start scanning customers as they enter and change the price based on their skin color, gender, clothing, or estimated net worth.

I think this is more of a capitalism problem then a societal one. Capitalism creates extreme wealth disparity and since wealth buys political representation that creates a situation where our politicians serve the rich and not the people. Some people call this Late-stage-capitalism or terminal-stage-capitalism

If John Oliver’s segment on Amazon was correct, then Amazon is much worse than Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t force their employees to pee in bottles and work them ragged until they had severe burnout or became physically disabled.

Is it even possible to get a job without internet access these days?

Disagree with your second point. Punitive measures are better served as a temporary stopgap. So a better approach would be: the government should either nationalize twitter or force twitter to be open to federalization (like lemmy) and then build their own publically owned instance.

Musk himself keeps calling it Twitter. He did it multiple times in his interview with Trump.

I lowkey love that Musk refuses to change it back because it highlights the fact that the richest man in the world is a huge idiot and that capitalism is not a meritocracy.

If you don’t under the dangers of sending SWE jobs for critical digital infrastructure to foreign countries then you should read up on what happened with CrowdStrike.

Also, ignoring the fact that capitalism is destroying the planet, capitalism is failing the working class and our country in many ways. Everytime talented workers are laid off to inflate quarterly profits it does enormous harm to workers and the loss of expertise destroys future wealth.

Interesting, I’d guess that you are better than average at tuning traffic noises out then. I am probably worse than average myself as traffic would constantly wake me up when I lived downtown.

UK sirens aren’t half as obnoxious as US sirens. US sirens are higher pitched and loud enough to given pedestrians hearing damage

US sirens are too high pitched. European sirens have a lower pitch which allows the sound to travel further which allows them to decrease the volume.

You have never been to a car centric city? Cars are loud af. Noise pollution from cars is so bad that studies have been able to link living next to higher traffic roads with poorer health outcomes

Yeah, any decent podcast app that has a 10s / 15s time skip is the only reliable way to deal with ads. Just skip ahead a few times until the ad is over.

If there were a reliable way to auto-skip ads then ads would lose all their value which could shut down some of our favorite podcasts. It sucks that ads are a necessary evil for podcasting, but there is no clean way around that unless we dismantled capitalism and switched to some hybrid of market socialism and public funding

The US only makes up 4% of the global population and if we keep allowing capitalism to ship our software engineering jobs to India then India is going to very quickly surpass us. And when that happens the US will quickly become more and more irrelevant.

I only took 1 Reverse Engineering class in my CompSci program, so I could be wrong… but I am pretty sure it is both extremely tedious and also extremely difficult to crack Denuvo

Shoutout to Slay the Princess. It was honestly one of the best games I have played in years and it was created by a husband / wife duo so it is as indie as it comes.