I’m of two minds. On one hand I agree, it’s gotta be dead simple. On the other hand I think the public is more capable than it seems. People figured out email and the mess that is Windows. The fediverse just feels like a lot because it’s new. Some better branding is in order though, like your example of not using the word “instance”.

I often think it would be better to obfuscate the federation aspect altogether. Most users don’t need to know or care that a post or user came from another instance. But I think that path will ultimately be more confusing than just having the small learning curve.

Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health

Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation

Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society’s health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don’t like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait

Going to London is about as far as many Americans get

And of course, the stereotypical European arrogance about being “well traveled” because they passed through a few countries on a day trip

I have some thoughts about travel as a way to acquire culture, perspective, and wisdom — or rather, the illusion of such. I might post about it sometime soon once I get my thoughts together, but basically at this point I’ve dialectically negated my old views of travel and decided that using travel as a means for enlightenment is a relic of colonial ideology. I don’t think one can learn much about other cultures without living among them for extended periods, years.

Frothingfash but he has beans falling out of his mouth

I love this website lmao

Making up shit out of whole cloth lol

To remember 9/11 you have to be at least in your late 20s or early 30s. Tells you something about these nerds that they think so badly of literally all young people.

I remember 9/11 very well, and anyone who lived in the last 25 years knows what it is like to live in the post-9/11 hysteria.

Moving to a different country actually reaffirmed my leftist positions. Turns out the more of society you see, the more left you are on average. It decimates all illusions. This is commonly known anyway, and represented in every electoral map for fucking ever

It’s ironic to accuse leftists of being unaware of other countries. When I was (more of) a lib I never learned that much about other countries. Now I’m reading a lot more books and watching a lot more non-English content from other points of view.

A channel I subscribe to just posted an explainer on spin, for anyone interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYeRS5a3HbE

It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.

are they adding extra ethanol or something?

Yes. 88 has up to 15% ethanol. You should check your manual before using it.

Ok, use Android then. Millions of people don’t care about those things because they have different priorities for their phone which Apple accounts for when they decide which features to roll out.

It’s in beta 1. Some apps look kinda bad if you’re trying to pick a horrid color. Hopefully they do something to improve contrast before release.

Every new Android version adds features that have been on iOS forever. Both OSes have different priorities.

Android will often add new features but they are poorly integrated or thought out. iOS tends to add features with a much higher level of refinement the first time around.

This is the other side of the iron curtain my friend

Estonia is something else. They canceled a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel project due to Chinese funding. Not sure if it was part of Belt and Road Initiative or just a private entrepreneur. But that would have been great, as right now it’s about €40 each way on a ferry.

In games you are petty-bourgeois and own your labor products.

“Hey, sorry to bother you, was just wondering if you were dead. Please call back at your earliest convenience.”

You should have GPS without any service at all. You might need data for the map to load, depends on the app. If you’re lucky and the app automatically cached it when you had signal, or you manually downloaded the offline map, then you could navigate home in airplane mode.

All of this is moot because I think I remember reading the rest of this story. The hiker wasn’t really lost, they simply went on a hike without telling anyone, and ignored calls during that time because they were trying to unplug.

First step is abolishing wage labor and private property. Transitional political forms take on some form of direct democracy, probably something similar to soviet councils.

Whataboutism is a meaningless brainworm which the user invokes in order to ignore their own cognitive dissonance and inconsistent standards. You cry “whataboutism” when @very_poggers_gay@hexbear.net was correct to point out your own double standard. “All of this sounds at odds with representative democracy” implies that you believe genuine democracy is something we currently stand to lose.

What you need to understand is that Marxists are not interested in imposing utopian futures on the world. “What do you have in its place?” is the wrong question. Better questions: What currently prevents genuine democracy? What are the material conditions which both produce and maintain it? Then you get to work on changing those material conditions and removing the real basis which produces the problems.

With modern technology I wonder how necessary representative style governments really are. Electronic voting already exists and works quite well, and is probably the most secure form of voting as long as it can be audited. Of course, at some point administration has to come down to individuals, but as long as those individuals are held accountable in some way then it seems that the actual democratic step (i.e. voting on policy) need not be mediated through representatives as is oft repeated to justify the status quo.

You might have been referring to this with republicanism, but there are different types of representation, too. Parliamentary democracies are not obligated to obey the wishes of their subjects, whereas soviet (council) democracies are a form of direct democracy, where representatives are merely delegates and are obligated to obey/communicate the wishes of their subjects. In my comment above I had in mind the parliamentary type, since that is the kind in which there is a buffer between citizens and political institutions which is used by the bourgeoisie to suppress changes which would undermine capital.