[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 130 points 4 months ago

I don't have any medical debt at the moment, and I think there are probably some better long-term things we could spend our extremely valuable and limited political capital on, so naturally I strongly support this because I'm not a fucking inhuman monster.

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[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 122 points 5 months ago

I think the British royal family is a scourge on the earth, responsible for untold amounts of suffering. The UK, British Isles, British people, and world would be a better place without it. I truly hate everything the Windsors stand for, along with their ancestors going back hundreds of years.

But I hate cancer more.

I think it's possible to have complex feelings about this. Nobody deserves cancer. A lot of the kings of England deserve to have had their heads cut off, but none of them deserved cancer, and certainly not this lady who just lucked and schemed and Machiavellied herself into a life of incomparable privilege inside one of the most powerful dynasties still in existence--the same thing anyone would have done given the chance.

Fuck the royal family. But fuck cancer more. I hope she comes out of it alright, because her husband needs to break the British monarchy, and it would be nicer for him if he had his wife with him when he did.

[American here, if it wasn't obvious.]

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 146 points 5 months ago

The Democrats need to immediately trumpet this thing from the rooftops. The GOP wants to take away Social Security and Medicare. 170 of them put their names on this budget, if NBC is to be believed.

The Republicans want you to never be able to retire, and they want you to never have the healthcare that your parents and grandparents had or that they themselves enjoy. They want you to be poor and stay poor, and they want the same for your children.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 186 points 6 months ago

Way to communicate contempt for your customers. If you're in the business of selling decorative replicas of cartoon swords, you need to be in on the kayfabe. Nobody is expecting to take one of these to a real swordfight. What they are expecting, however, is to have a cool prop to show their friends, and it's not unreasonable to expect the cool prop to feel like it's not trying to fly across the yard if you swing it around.

If you don't want people to touch the merchandise, the second sign is all you need.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 116 points 6 months ago

This last round was the line for me. Canceled the whole Hulu/D+ mess and haven't looked back. My Jolly Roger is a little tattered these days, but I still know how to fly it.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 143 points 7 months ago

My money says this guy can't even close his closet door anymore for all the skeletons.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 164 points 7 months ago

This is the best parody I could come up with:

Vivek Ramaswamy is suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and has informed his team to go fuck themselves because he got his, an official tells CNN. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the former candidate was spotted in the parking lot of the News Corp. Building offering free handies for any executive who would give him an interview for a cushy political consulting gig.

This story is breaking, but who really gives a shit if it's updated? Ramaswamy was an also-ran when he started, and now he's a has-been. Other possible hyphenated verb compounds include Trump-slurper and woman-hater.

The original article contains 28 words, this summary contains more (and is entirely useless). Saved an arbitrarily large negative percent. I’m not a bot and I’m not open source! I'm just an asshole who hates what these Republican pricks are doing to democracy, and this comment is a parody. Salt grains advised.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 142 points 10 months ago

Yeah no shit. They feel that way because it is that way. You don't need polls for this information. It's economics. "Perceived" or not, it is actually, literally harder for millenials and younger adults to achieve the same level of financial stability as their parents, full stop. That's not a matter of feeling or perception. That's the declining real value of money. Inflation, greedflation, economic contraction at key life milestones, wealth inequality, lower indicators for health, and on and on. Across every metric I can think of off the top of my head, millenials and the next generations perform worse than previous generations due to circumstances entirely beyond their control (and largely the result of the prior generations, including dead hand control and policies directly adversarial to young adults' accumulation of wealth). For many young adults, the best financial windfall they'll ever experience will be when their more affluent parents die, and no active measure they can take on their own behalfs will meaningfully change it.

The ruling class should be terrified of them.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 134 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Very optimistic of you.

Joking aside, apathy isn't the problem. That is, the issue isn't that people don't care. Ordinary people care a great deal. The problem is that the cost of the action that would be sufficient to change things is too high personally for those ordinary people to take.

People just don't want to be gunned down by riot police or go to prison for assassinating oil executives. The solution to this problem isn't paper straws and recycling (and it never has been). Further, abandoning cars isn't feasible for stroad-bound Americans. Abandoning beef is, but your family switching to chicken and fish won't even twitch the needle.

Point is, the kind of change that's needed is societal--the kind of revolutionary change that's paid for in streets full of blood. In the "Well if enough people just ..." argument, the enough people is hundreds of millions. We have to become a fossil fuel eschewing society. Whole industries have to collapse.

The companies responsible for climate change can be counted on one person's fingers and toes, and they're names any adult can guess in a few tries.

We're not storming their doors because we don't want to be recipients of the state violence these companies will muster to stop us.

Flooding cities might change our minds, but probably only for the people who actually live there. The sad truth is the rest of us will sooner consign Miami to the depths than orphan our children for their grandchildren's sakes.

Things will change when we starve, but probably not a moment sooner.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 142 points 10 months ago

I know we're all cynics here, but good for him. Even if this is entirely a publicity stunt, the guy is still taking a huge risk that someone might offer to take him up on it. That's a lot of nerve, and that's a lot of faith, either in God or in the way Hamas values hostages.

Either way, to repeat the notion elsewhere in the thread: any of us offering? Maybe it's a low risk--but it ain't zero. It's easy to dismiss these kinds of gestures from the same armchairs from which we solve geopolitics and warfare, but a public figure going on record for selflessness is something to be celebrated, even if the only noble trait is willingness to roll the dice on human nature in the hope of sharing an altruistic sentiment.

"Hurt me instead of her" is something we wish more people of faith would say everywhere.

[-] xhieron@lemmy.world 249 points 1 year ago

This is very upsetting to me--more as a point of principle than in fact--but I appreciate that it doesn't bother younger generations at all. I just had a small argument with my 11 year old about how not-a-big-deal-who-cares this is, and it basically ended with us agreeing to disagree since it'll be his problem and his kids' problem.

And the problem is normalizing the notion that an OS doesn't need to include a non-subscription word processor. The entire point of this move is to shift the OS Overton Window in favor of consumers accepting and expecting that features like word processors, spreadsheets, etc., should be installed separately and paid for on a subscription basis despite previous iterations of the same software being feature complete on install and purchased at a set, non-recurring fee.

WordPad hasn't been anybody's first choice for a word processor in years, but it was included with Windows and did the bare minimum for unsophisticated users. Now we're entering an era in which those users will as a matter of course buy off-the-shelf computers that come pre-installed without WordPad, but rather with a trial of Office Fuck-You-Pay-Me Edition. Those users may well discover that after their first six months with their new computer (that has made Microsoft more money selling their data than they paid for it), they suddenly get a pop-up informing them that their trial is up and MS wants $99.99 to release the documents they're holding hostage.

It's a step backwards for consumers in general, so even for the sophisticated of us who are least likely to be personally affected by this change, there's definitely cause for alarm.

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xhieron

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