Canada (from US.) I like where I live, I just don't like the government.

There's a fairly strong case that stopping Bush might stop 9/11

When Harris first came on the scene I thought to myself that the election became a battle between Reagan nostalgia and Obama nostalgia. And I cannot blame any American for feeling Obama nostalgia because I feel Obama nostalgia, but reliance on nostalgia blinds us to new ideas and current issues.

Nothing will be done until the politicians can no longer ignore end FPTP movements.

I'll be the first person to explain how the math on third party candidates doesn't work out, but I'm really not into this "blocking them from the ballot" thing. Whether it's the Dems with Cornell West and the Green Party or the Republicans with the Libertarians and RFK Jr.

State level systems. Some Canadian provinces had universal healthcare before Canada had it nationwide.

I mean, that already is used to significantly lower at-the-pump gas prices from what they actually are, and raising gas prices is an easy way to lose an election in America, so that probably won't change. Notice that in many other countries gas prices are way higher than in the US.

I know there's no laws that allow the people of the USA to prosecute companies for business models that destroy the fabric of society, and I even fear that kind of law could be abused to prosecute abortion clinics and LGBT rights orgs...but dating apps make me wish there was.

Andrew Tate...PUAs...Red Pillers...it all only makes sense in a world where dating apps are the primary way we meet people.

The notion that books are "of the past" has done harm to many.

I feel like a lot of internet people (not even just socialists) go from seeing copyright as at best a compromise that allows the arts to have value under capitalism to treating it like a holy doctrine when the subject of LLMs comes up.

Like, people who will say "piracy is always okay" will also say "ban AI, period" (and misrepresent organizations that want regulations on it's use as wanting a full ban.)

Like, growing up with an internet full of technically illegal content (or grey area at best) like fangames and YouTube Poops made me a lifelong copyright skeptic. It's outright confusing to me when people take copyright as seriously as this.

If we all adopted NJB's mindset we'd just have our grandkids asking why WE didn't do something.

For the most part, we win cities and towns, not countries (and especially not big countries like USA, Canada, and Mexico) and certainly not continents. It's way easier to hear about national news than local news, and even moreso local news that isn't from your city. Urbanist communities often portray stagnancy, but that's often not the case, for better and worse. Houston still sucks but it's better than it used to be. Philadelphia is still one of the better US cities for being carless but for a variety of reasons (shitty Democratic mayoral nomination that proves we need to end first past the post, crime related decline in public transit ridership) it is likely to get worse (and to be clear, Houston and Philadelphia are both relatively low-income cities. They do not have the money to make the big transformation Paris did, and that's in spite of Philly literally being designed to be like Paris) Neither of these facts should have the response of "give up."

GIMP is way too complicated for what MS Paint gets used for, I'd easily argue it's harder to use than Photoshop.

Paint Dot Net is a happy medium but that's also Windows only IIRC

I can't say I definitely won't go back...I like Lemmy's community better than Reddit's but I'm not sure it'll ever be as popular or as reliable as a source of info as Reddit. I think the Fediverse runs into similar problems to Linux, where it's definitely superior in most ways to the nonfree competition, but that superiority goes hand in hand with inaccessibility to non-nerds. I like Tumblr's community less than Reddit (and Lemmy, Reddit, and Tumblr are the only three social media sites I even find the community tolerable, though I don't have Mastodon because I don't have anyone I want to follow there) and Tumblr has never been useful for searching info.

But let me tell you, Spez's conduct and praise of Elon Musk is what has me considering not going back. It's just...he tried to act on the pulse of the userbase and failed spectacularly. Also hearing that Reddit is a noticably higher percentage assholes after the protests started.