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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • Because Bluesky claims that they want to develop their relay tech into a standard like HTTPS or something, and then hand it off to a nonprofit to maintain so that it’s usable by everyone. The tech has the possibility to be decentralized/federated baked into it, but whether or not it will be anything other than a pipe dream/marketing hype has yet to really be seen.

    They present themselves as basically a Lemmy.world equivalent to those who care about decentralization, which is not a significant portion of their user base. For most people it’s just a buzzword, I believe.



  • I shop with credit cards that give me 2-5% back on purchases. I pay off my balance every month and have never paid one penny in interest or penalties in over a decade. My credit cards therefore pay ~$1,500/year tax free.

    I don’t really have anything to add as this is pretty much all spot on to how the wealthy live, but on this one I’d like to point out that you’re not actually making money - you’re just taking back part of the money that you already paid. That money isn’t paid by the credit card companies, they’d never be dumb enough to leave money on the table like that. They pay it through increased transaction fees for the businesses, who eat the extra cost through higher prices. There are states that do something similar with their recycling programs. They give you 5 cents per bottle you recycle at the center, but you paid a 5 cent bottle deposit when you bought them at the store. You’re not making any money, or even making back some of what you paid the store. You’re just getting your deposit back.

    Maybe you somehow reduce your taxes by cycling that money through a cash back program? I’m not well versed on finances, so I won’t even try to theorize on that, but it certainly isn’t free money or something.


  • Part of that has to do with how our economy is built around credit cards and debt itself. They don’t want you to fully pay off your credit card debt, and will reduce the amount you can borrow if you do. And if you try to opt out of the debt system entirely, it hurts you as well because you have no credit score from the credit card companies and no history of paying off you debt on time, which hurts your chances to get things like loans and mortgages. I hate debt, and ran into this issue the first time I went to buy a car because I had always used debit cards to buy stuff. Despite the cards being Visa cards that just got paid off immediately by charging my bank account instead of being paid off over time, I didn’t have any debt history as a result and had to have somebody cosign my car loan to vouch for me that I’d actually pay the loan.





  • There’s another comment further up about a statistic showing that people who pirate content are more likely to spend more money on content as well compared to people who don’t pirate content. It seems that there’s a correlation between people who pirate things and people who care about the ethical treatment of creators. Stuff like people who pirate music from Spotify and then spend money to buy the music from the band on Bandcamp.

    In that context, I have an even harder time caring about people pirating from the megacorps when they’re supporting creators at the same time. That’s closing in on Robin Hood style activities at that point.


  • Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.

    The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.

    But no war like the culture war, I guess.






  • Because Bluesky is centralised.

    You say that like that isn’t exactly what the majority of people want. When I first left Reddit, I was trying to explain Lemmy and federated services to some friends and one of them immediately replied with “why would you want that?” And this was from a guy who owned and operated his own TeamSpeak server just for his friends to use.

    The average person wants a service that’s easy to use first and foremost, and that is always going to be easier to do with a big centralized one owned and operated by a large company. They just want to be able to make an account and connect with friends and content. They don’t care about things like privacy until it actively harms them.



  • Do you have a general practitioner that you see for an annual physical or anything? Ask them about it. I had a weird skin condition thing happening in one specific spot on my body that I asked my doctor about, and he pulled up a big medical directory on the computer and cross-referenced symptoms and stuff through it. Eventually, we were both like, “It’s not cancer or anything, but damned if I know exactly what it is.” And he asked me if I wanted a referral to a specialist to get it checked out. These kinds of things are exactly what they’re here for. They can probably recommend things like what to eat and things to avoid for prostate health, and even order tests to get it checked out if you and they feel it’s necessary.