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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I think it’s the distinction of whether or not it is voluntary. Buying things is a choice, taxes aren’t (outside of voting for certain political candidates who promise to use taxes in different ways).

    A lot of people out there have short-sighted mindsets like “Why do I have to pay for schools when I don’t have any kids?” or “I have my own insurance, why do I have to pay into someone else’s public healthcare too?” People can’t be relied on to make the spending choices needed to support a healthy and stable society on their own, so taxes and public spending make it for them.

    To add on to that, not all taxes fund things for the public good. In the US at least, and other countries with large military spending, one must accept that a lot of tax money goes to fund the military industrial complex. Taxes are also used to line the pockets of corporations via bailouts and overpriced government contracts.

    Now I also believe there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, but taxes are nevertheless different from a voluntary exchange of currency for goods and services that one directly benefits from.









  • I’d be shocked if this wasn’t happening already.

    The mob could kidnap someone in broad daylight just with masks and bulletproof vests (even more convenient for them) and half the public would be convinced it must be the victim’s fault.

    Literally ICE has shown that the public will not intervene when masked, plainclothed thugs with no ID are just ambushing and grabbing people off the street, so anyone else could probably do it and get away with it, too.


  • Arguably, lemmy is going to be more private than reddit because your data are being queried, refined, quantified and categorised by reddit to be sold off to the highest bidder. If a different actor is just scraping activitypub they need to do all of that themselves.

    I don’t think there’s any “arguably” that Lemmy is more private, it’s a completely open platform. Sure Reddit is a closed platform that can sell data to whoever, but Fediverse data is freely accessible to anyone who just has a bit of technical know-how to set up an instance, after which they can query, refine, quantify, and categorize it all they want. If there’s profit to be made with that data, someone will do it. I am assuming that our info is already being collected by both private interests and governments.


  • There was a small window where Reddit could be used to find good answers to things, but that ship sailed long ago.

    As soon as the site started to become popular in the mid 2010’s, every “expert” was someone who maybe once took a related class in college, or think sharing their girlfriend’s uncle’s neighbor’s relevant story means they have the definitive answer.

    “Hello Reddit, does anyone else catch themselves acting differently between family and friends?”

    “As someone who once took a psychology class in college, your symptoms are 100% aligned with dissociative identity disorder, and you should seek help immediately.”






    1. Remove the backdoor no ball. It does not benefit the sport but puts a lot of stress on bowlers bodies, knees in particular. The most commonly injured body part for bowlers. They land with 6x the impact of their bodyweight on one knee 6 times an over, like 20 overs a day. No good.

    I can get behind any rule that exists to protect the players. Sports are inherently physical but they shouldn’t endanger the athletes.

    One of the reasons why I have a hard time getting behind boxing/certain martial arts as sports, it just feels like slightly more sanitized gladiatorial combat.



  • Admittedly I can’t see why it’s that surprising, the format is almost a carbon copy of Reddit.

    When I think of old forums, I think of the chronological-only format with no voting. There is a top post in a thread, and all replies that follow are a single chain of chronological posts. No nested threads of parent/child comments that help keep conversations more organized, and no upvoting/downvoting which affect the sort criteria.

    Not to mention older forums are usually directly admin-managed throughout, as in not just anyone is able to start a subforum/community on their own for a given interest within a site that they then moderate and can appoint their own co-moderators for. There’s a site admin or admins, and maybe a group of admin-appointed moderators who help manage the entire thing.


  • Lemmy is the only platform I participate on. I do occasionally check some niche subs on Reddit for hobbies and games I follow for news/suggestions/ideas/etc., but no idle browsing and no contributing, not even through votes.

    I also sometimes pop onto Reddit just to manually edit and delete more of my comment history, because the automated tools are apparently only capable of seeing the past year. Once I finally get through everything, I can delete my account, but it’s a slow process with years worth of content to remove going back to 2010.


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