I mean, it sort of does, particularly as far as retirement is concerned. I know some MAGA diehards that are, to a significant degree, judging by the metric of their 401k/Roth retirement savings accounts, and the value of those accounts are necessarily going to be tightly linked with the overall performance of the stock market by virtue of the fact that they are investment account.

Now, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the US stock market has been largely decoupled from reality since at least 2008. Consequently, the current state of the stock market no longer functions as any kind of meaningful metric for economic health. It is, in my view, just a system for speculation which exists to transfer wealth out of the pockets of the people attempting to beat the market and into the pockets of the people who already have enough money or influence to make the market. Even decoupled from reality as it is, however, I find it a dubious prospect that the line can ever keep going up indefinitely - they never do, and especially not when so many other (arguably more concrete) economic indicators are pointing the other way.

Looking at you, load-bearing (and suspiciously bubble-shaped) AI hype, looking at you.

Should such a crash happen, I’ll be very excited to hear what rationalization they pivot into this time. Who knows, maybe Trump will get control of the fed like he wants and then we can throw hyperinflation (and likely a subsequent de-dollarisation) into the mix to really take the already roaring garbage fire up a notch. I’m certain that this fascist will be just as cautious and responsible with the money cannon as his dictator peers have historically been.

There’s something comically absurd to me about censoring “fuck” on a post that jokes about pedophilia lmao. Feels like the priorities might be slightly out of order.

Yeah that was about my experience from switching as well 😭. It’s absolutely worth it, but god damn if there aren’t moments where I want to rip my hair out troubleshooting some issue that’s just plug and play on windows.

I’m certain that you could fix this issue by switching to Linux.

When they go low, start hitting below the belt until they cry foul.

I don’t really know what I put there that qualifies as purity testing? If it’s the final paragraph, I should say that it was intended to be unserious; I just wanted an excuse to continue the ‘fetter’ bit.

As stated, I think the situation is very unlikely, to the point that it’s not worth seriously considering unless we have a demonstrable, compelling reason to believe that a flip is presently happening. My point was rather to say that Fetterman’s flip was less unexpected than it would initially seem given what information existed at the time, and if he’d gotten the kind of attention Mamdani did when he was running, it likely wouldn’t have been as surprising as it ended up being. Conversely, however, even after the intense scrutiny Mamdani has received from both the media and people on the left and right, it would be a genuine surprise to me if he was being anything other than truthful about his beliefs and intentions, and so the two aren’t really directly comparable. It is speculation, yes, but it’s not as if it’s entirely baseless, and it leads into the conclusion of ‘all we can do is wait and see. There’s not a reason to be worried at this time, but there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful.’

Plus (and to your point), even if Mamdani turned out to be less progressive or less effective than I’d hoped, so long as he’s this side of sane about the current fascist takeover, then I’d say we should count him as an ally, regardless of anything else mentioned.

I mean, Fetterman had some questionable views even before the point that most acknowledged that he’d flipped, he simply got less coverage than Mamdani and had the benefit of running against Dr. Oz so a lot of it was missed/overlooked. I think it’s significantly less likely that Mamdani flips because, to my understanding, he’s been very consistent in his views for quite a while now, even from the time before he was in office.

That said, if Mamdani flipped I could see it doing significant damage to the left on the basis of perception alone, so it could be that I’m just praying the left won’t be… fettered, by another pretender giving progressive policy a wrongfully bad name.

I’m somewhat similar, but I find that I have a tendency to remember interactions and conversations better than anything else regardless of emotionality, likely because of my chosen strategy when it comes to adapting new behaviors for social situations. I have a practice of, after any given interaction, doing a ‘post match review’ of sorts, assessing what was said, how I reacted/responded, how that was reacted/responded to by the other parties, etc. Once I’ve done that, I can then adapt new social behaviors for future use. It’s a weird sort of VOD review type thing which, frankly, sounds somewhat sociopathic when I put it in those terms 😭.

I definitely remember interactions like this post mentions better than your standard conversation, but I don’t think it’s as a consequence of the emotions themselves (at least, most of the time; breakup conversations definitely stick because of the emotions). Rather, I think it’s more that if an interaction is emotionally charged in the first place, I’ll generally review that more times or more in depth for ways to better handle the situation, regardless of if I’m trying to provide comfort or hit back at someone being a prick. Repetition makes something stick in my memory, and emotional situations simply get more screen time and re-runs.

That’s just me, though. Neurodivergence takes a plethora of forms, and none of my IRL friends with autism use this framework, so who knows lmao. It also carries some environmental hazards in that, if you aren’t able to stop yourself from spiraling, you can fall down a hole of fixating on social mistakes, so it’s certainly not ideal.

Yeah, I think a lot of comedy works because there’s an ‘aha’ moment where the person hearing the joke makes a novel connection and it finally clicks into place. That’s why explaining a joke immediately renders it unfunny. Imo, the final line feels like it sabotages the joke to some degree because it makes the joke too clear, but I’m honestly just operating on vibes here.

I honestly think this joke would be funnier without the final line

Fr. I died when I saw the title because it reads like a conspiracy theory class roster lmao

Yes, but if the minimum wage increases, everyone who makes above minimum wage has a better argument to get a raise as well. Employers have to make pay competitive, and a raised minimum wage sets a new floor that wages have to be based around.

Edit: Also, that ignores the fact that there are people who make above minimum wage but below whatever it might be raised to who would also be affected by a minimum wage increase. If the wage was raised to $15, for example, then anyone who currently makes between $7.26 to $14.99 an hour would receive a raise, despite not being represented in the data set you reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States

Very confused why this is getting downvoted so heavily. Sewer socialism is a pre-existing term and is not a negative descriptor. This opinion piece in particular is pointing out that Mamdani is seemingly aiming to be another in a long lineage of successful socialist mayors who made it their mission to focus on the day-to-day infrastructure of a city, even the dirty kind like sewers, as a way to measurably improve the lives of their constituents.

My assumption is that people are downvoting this without actually reading the article, as generally .world seems to heavily favor Mamdani, unless I’m missing something?

Better yet, this religion could easily hate Trump, Vance, and the assorted boils on the ass of life who make up this administration based solely on the teachings of Christ.

If Christ was alive now he would fucking hate these so called Christians for what they are, and they would hate him back for being a brown socialist.

I give decent odds that we’ll be past the ‘lost ballots’ stage and into ‘edited ballots’ territory tbh

Um. Ackshually 👆🤓 the Mormons are KJV only loyalists, so their Bible does indeed predate the USA.

The Book of Mormon, however, does not (unless you’re Mormon, in which case you believe it was translated from the golden plates, engraved ~400AD and based on earlier plates which Mormon (the person) and his son Moroni found and compiled). Think of it more as an addition to, rather than replacement of, biblical canon.

I will now remind the teacher that they did, indeed, forget to collect the homework. I have an appointment with a locker, after all.

The idea that there are no resources we know of in space which are not more easily accessed on earth is just outright untrue, or at least is only true in a narrow sense. My example here would be Helium-3, the ideal fuel for fusion (a difficult choice due to high fusion temperatures, but it has the advantage of not kicking off neutron radiation in the process the way something like Deuterium-Tritium fusion would). Earth contains ~10-50,000 tonnes of feasibly accessible Helium-3, and if we were to move over to fusion power at a large scale at our current rate of power consumption, we would consume that amount of fuel in a matter of years, likely less than a decade. By contrast, the moon contains orders of magnitude more Helium-3 in its regolith, somewhere in the ballpark of 600,000-1,000,000 tonnes, a sufficient quantity to last over a century in the same usage conditions as outlined for Earth. Additionally, both of these sources pale in comparison to the amount available in Sol’s gas giants.

The caveat here is, of course, that it’s unlikely we would switch to fusion entirely in the first place, and that accessing that helium-3 at scale is not easy, no matter where it comes from (though doing so at scale is likely easier on the Moon than it is on Earth). It also ignores ideas like degrowth, energy efficiency improvements, dealing with the drawbacks of alternative fusion fuels, etc. I think, however, that it remains illustrative of the larger point: there are compelling reasons to go to space, even from a raw materials perspective alone.

I categorically disagree with the premise that ‘the drive to explore’ is from Star Trek, and to state that authoritatively and leave it at that is, in my opinion, incredibly reductive. We’ve been exploring, as mentioned, since before we were even Homo sapiens, and I think at this point we can relatively confidently call it part of human nature. Human prehistory and (relatively) modern history has several examples of those who effectively blindly threw themselves out into the ocean, in some cases likely on rafts at most, and discovered new places to live as a result. For example:

Homo Erectus made it all the way to the island of Java and then proceeded to cross the Lombok Strait, crossing the Wallace Line and spreading to the island of Flores ~1.2 million years ago, at which point they stayed there, adapted, and became Homo Floresiensis. This crossing likely wasn’t blind, as Mount Rinjani would be visible, but this a distance of ~35km of deep ocean strait water. Treacherous conditions to brave on the promise of a peak in the distance; nonetheless they did it, and likely only with simple rafts. Along those same lines, the migration of Homo Sapiens from Sunda to Sahul ~65,000 years ago is similarly noteworthy, as some of the relevant crossings required would have been, in all likelihood, blind. (Take this with a grain of salt, though. I had a hard time finding an accurate measure of the distance between various island crossings at this period of history. Under perfectly ideal conditions it is possible each step was visible from the last.)

Another example is the fact that humans settled the remote islands of Oceania. Polynesia is particularly noteworthy here for its remoteness, and we managed that ~3000 years ago. This would have involved anywhere from hundreds to thousands of kilometers of open ocean, navigated with no promise of land, much less any indication that there even might be land. For that matter, given the massive nature of the ocean and the tiny size of these islands, how many people ventured off into the ocean, never to return, before we finally hit on success? I would imagine the number is quite high, and from a raw survival perspective, it seems an incomprehensible journey to embark on, but we did it anyways, and I would argue that is indicative of our drive to explore. Why else would you embark on such a trip except to see what may lie hidden, just beyond the horizon? We’re a naturally curious bunch, it’s one of our primary strengths as a species, and I feel that this is just an extension of that inborn curiosity.

Circling back to Star Trek, though, trust me, I’m well aware of the cognitive dissonance of Americans as it relates to expansionism and manifest destiny. Indeed, I did a long-winded breakdown (I’m prone to bloviating tangents, can you tell?) a few weeks ago in a different comment of the way that the American genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas is presented as a foregone conclusion; inevitable by fate and absolved by destiny. It’s an insidious idea, and one which infects a problematically large pool of our media; I won’t argue with you on that.

I also don’t know if it’s fully accurate to describe the society (at least of earth, not necessarily the whole Federation to my, admittedly limited, understanding of the lore) of Star Trek as communist, though it’s probably not inaccurate either. I think it would be more accurate to say that Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity society, and so the lack of certain economic pressures have led to an economic configuration that is hard to translate into modern terms, though I’ll admit that’s splitting hairs. I think it’s probably close enough, and I think it’s very fair to say that they are absolutely socialist. Funny enough (and to your point) I think the meme of “fully automated luxury gay space communism” is actually a pretty good descriptor of the economic configuration of Star Trek. Regardless, I think a lot of Americans miss that fact simply because words like “Socialism” and “Communism” have connotations and associations in America which are fundamentally inaccurate. Most Americans have, frankly, never moved past the red scare in their understanding of socialism more broadly, likely as a consequence of propaganda, so it’s not surprising that they missed the memo here.

I disagree that life requires a narrow set of conditions to continue. What I believe is the case is that life requires specific conditions to begin, but once it exists, it is incredibly resilient. There are extremophiles which could reasonably survive in the vacuum of space, and from a more anthropocentric perspective, humans have proven ourselves to be remarkably resilient in the face of climatic tests. Sure, the most inhospitable of earth conditions is a paradise in comparison to something like Mars as it exists now, but we adapted to those when the height of technology was a flint knapped hand-axe. It’s safe to say that the technological aspect of humanity has come a long way, and our ability to survive in and adapt to the conditions of bodies other than earth improves steadily day by day as the wheel of technology turns ever-faster (to say nothing of outright space habitats, which we could absolutely reasonably build with our current understanding of physics). I don’t mean this as a glorification of human industry; rather, I mean to say that ingenuity, adaptability, and tenacity are fundamental characteristics of our species - it’s why we’re here today.

I will also note that there’s no guarantee that there aren’t habitable worlds in other solar systems, and no reason to assume that they couldn’t be found. Even within our solar system, there are planets which, with sufficient effort, could feasibly be colonized near to our current tech level (looking at you, Venus. I know Mars gets all the attention but you’re my one true love).

And, indeed, I wonder if you’ve proven the fundamental point yourself with your observation on organization and long term planning. After all, is it perhaps possible that the very reason we have never demonstrated that level of resource management in our modern, industrial world is itself capitalism? Such a duplicative, wasteful structure is fundamentally inefficient, and more to the point, is fundamentally at odds with the communalist nature of humanity. We are a species which, historically, shares, and just the mere fact that we have convinced ourselves that selfishness is in our nature does not make it true. Additionally, centuries of planning becomes a lot more reasonable when humans reach the point of living for centuries, which is a prospect that I think a lot of people ignore the (relatively speaking) imminent nature of.

All that is to say: we are a species of firsts, and typically when we are met with a survival challenge on a physiological level, we conquer that with technology. Clothing, fire, tools, and planning allowed us to conquer the arctic despite a body plan which is adapted for equatorial living, why should we assume we won’t also eventually rise to this technical challenge in the long term? I have no idea what that intermediary period will look like (except that it will likely be, at minimum, equally unpleasant for us as it is at present), but if history shows us anything it’s that we eventually pull through. Humanity tried to migrate out of Africa several times before it stuck, populations died out, and we find fossil remains which have genomes entirely unrelated to anyone not from Africa, but the notable thing is that we kept on trying anyways.

We’re just stubborn like that.