Climate change is the single overriding issue for me. We are beyond out of time to avert damaging levels of warming, and even Biden's climate policies -- by far the most sweeping in the history of the country -- are barely adequate to begin steering us away from the absolute worst. If Trump gets in, and eviscerates federal climate policy, and stacks the EPA with oil lobbyists (again), and fills federal courts with science-denying assholes, and sabotages state and local efforts to decarbonize, and destroys all chance of global cooperation on this issue, and (most importantly) dismantles democracy so that it is effectively impossible to vote for a progressive ever again absent a second civil war, then we will be consigning the entire planet to "nightmare hellscape" levels of climate change with no viable pathway out. A second Trump term would add four billion tons of carbon emissions over the next six years. It would "negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years". And that analysis doesn't account for increased emissions from Trump policies, just a reversal of what Biden has accomplished. Allowing Trump to win again would not just be national, but global suicide.
To avoid charges of bias, how about direct quotes from their own manifesto:
Environmentalism “is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.
Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.
Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s `radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening”
Eliminate the heat-and-eat loophole. States can artificially boost a household’s food stamp benefit by using the heat-and-eat loophole. The amount of food stamps a household receives is based on its “countable” income (income minus certain deductions). Households that receive benefits from the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) are eligible for a larger utility deduction. In order to make households eligible for the higher deduction, and thus for greater food stamp benefits, states have distributed LIHEAP checks for amounts as small as $1 to food stamp recipients.
the USDA should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes. Currently, students can get meals from schools even if they are not in summer school, which has, in effect, turned school meals into a federal catering program. Restore programs to their original intent and reject efforts to create universal free school meals.
Eliminate the Head Start program. Head Start, originally established and funded to support low-income families, is fraught with scandal and abuse.
So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.
Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We're all better together. I really hope you reconsider.
Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate -- seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It's a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that's honestly pretty fair.
I fear this is going to be a turning point for the party to turn fully against Ukraine. McConnell apparently argued forcefully in favor of keeping the funding intact, but got overruled by most of the caucus, including Thune (one of the top candidates to replace him). And this is the Senate Republicans we're talking about, the House caucus is even more openly antagonistic.
Keeping Democratic control of the White House and Congress next year could be key to Ukraine defeating Russia.
Convenient (for them) that they start this only after destroying all the coins people earned over years of using the site. I had over 80k coins and 18 years of premium from various awarded posts (all OC) that they just threw away for nothing.
If they respected my contributions, I might be excited about this, but now I plan on contributing absolutely nothing of value ever again.
I'm all for shitting on Xitter, but this is a pretty bad article. It's written like somebody put it through Google Translate a few times, and doesn't cite any sources for any of its claims. Closest I could find was this Business Insider story on a report by Apptopia, which only says that its downloads in various app stores declined 30%, not its overall userbase.
It's something I started noticing shortly before the API stuff. Bot accounts using ChatGPT to respond to random posts and comments. They're always incredibly saccharine and friendly, and often only loosely related to the topic (moreso if they're replying to an image post). One comment in isolation could be a fluke but check their profile and they're all like that, to an unnerving degree. I imagine they get sold off to spammers once they get enough karma. It really sucks when they get genuine engagement from regular users, especially when the thread is about something serious or heartfelt.
"WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, DON'T MAKE LEMONADE. MAKE LIFE TAKE THE LEMONS BACK! GET MAD! I DON'T WANT YOUR DAMN LEMONS! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?! DEMAND TO SEE LIFE'S MANAGER! MAKE LIFE RUE THE DAY IT THOUGHT IT COULD GIVE CAVE JOHNSON LEMONS! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! I'M THE MAN WHO'S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! WITH THE LEMONS! I'M GONNA GET MY ENGINEERS TO INVENT A COMBUSTIBLE LEMON THAT BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!"
When you share something cool, link back to the original creator or where you found it from.