Everyone after high school should work mandatory 1 year of retail…Would curb a lot of this holier than thou narcissism bullshit really quick and have people treating each other with more respect.
I’ve been saying the same thing since I worked retail many years ago. Would either save the world or destroy it, and I’m not sure which would be better.
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.
The King James version was also written to specifically reword the Bible to include as many references to a monarchy as possible in the hopes of propagandizing the population during a time when kings were losing their heads at an alarming rate in Europe.
“If God truly does exist, he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.”
Thomas Jefferson
50% of the Founding Fathers were agnostic or atheist. My question is: why does she hate America?
I don’t disagree that this isn’t the right community for this, but it is at least more useful to know because this is the head of US immigration, and so people outside the US should be aware of the caliber of people that we’ve put in power over people visiting our country. Like the tourist who got deported upon entering the country on vacation because he had a meme image of a bald Vance.
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.
I had a FedEx driver the other day tell me that they separate packages into multiple deliveries sometimes even though they’re all being dropped off all at once for the same reason. Cook the metrics so it looks like they’re making more deliveries in a certain timeframe.
They never said that everybody has a right to drive. The reality is that, at least in the US and similarly planned countries, cars are priced like a luxury and treated like a necessity by the powers that be. Anything that isn’t driving a car is an afterthought.
The trick is to get an entire neighborhood in on it. That way you can schedule shouting matches in the front yards of the houses neighboring the open houses as well.
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.
Try Etsy. There’s a whole community about making these things, and I bet they’re on Etsy.
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.
As others have said, talk to your doctor, but I’m pretty sure that doctors use ultrasonic vibrations to break up that sort of stuff, so I think you’re gonna need something stronger than a vibrator if you’re worried about it.
They also said at one point that these guys were “corrupting the youth with their long hair.”
What I meant by generational line wasn’t genetics, but location and culture. Many European countries wouldn’t make the top 10 list for the biggest states in the US. If you look at a map of the US, Maine is about the same size as Portugal. The distance from Rome to Brussels, for example, is about 100 miles less than Boston to Altanta. So if you live in southern France, and your parents moved there from northern France, that’s like moving from one end of a state to the other. An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance). Americans have such a different sense of scale when it comes to distance. And then you add in the amount of immigration that the US has (or at least had historically), and you get very diverse groups that, while they are American, may be first-generation Americans whose grandparents still live across the world in different countries. I myself am 100% American, but like 50% French and 45% Portugese due to my grandparents being immigrants on both sides.
The culture here is weird as well, because it’s both homogeneous and not at the same time, and I think that massive scale of distance plays a part in that. Because you could listen to somebody from Boston, NYC, London, and somebody with a southern drawl, and you’d swear that they’re all from different countries despite everybody speaking English because of the difference in dialect/accent. Oddly enough, I took French in school from a Belgian immigrant, so if I still spoke it, I’d have a bit of a Belgian accent (enough that people picked up on it in Montreal and Paris when I was a kid, at least), and I’d say the difference between Boston English and New York English is about the same as Belgian French to Parisian French, while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French. The distance from Brussels to Paris is less than from Boston to NYC. And the same goes for culture. We all eat Mac and Cheese, but Cajun food is specific to a “small” area of the southern US because the spices and ingredients simply don’t grow in other parts of the US. And then you add in stuff like immigrant owned restaurants, and it gets even more varied. And as you go across the country, you can see stuff like massive architectural differences in the way houses are built. New England houses largely look like houses from the UK (with the occasional Slavic style house popping up here and there in my experience), while the south and the west have very different styles. And the reason that New England wouldn’t look out of place in Europe is because the culture there is very much influenced by those European roots. When people immigrated here, they brought their culture with them, and many settled into little enclaves of fellow immigrants from their country. Everybody speaks English, but you know when you’re in an Italian neighborhood in NYC or an Irish neighborhood in Boston. Many places are starting to put both Spanish and English on things like road signs (especially in the south near Mexico), but I’ve seen cities where roads are marked in both English and Chinese due to the large amount of Chinese immigrants to those cities.
The US is such a weird situation as a country that I don’t think there’s anything you can compare it to. It’s like that 10 year period in Japanese history where they went from feudal fiefdoms to a countrywide rail network, electricity, and an army armed with gatling guns supplied by the US. There’s no real frame of reference to draw parallels to.
On the one hand, as a country of immigrants, there are tons of places where communities settled and brought their culture with them and so have a strong feeling of connection to their ancestry despite their culture today being completely different. The French Quarter of New Orleans comes to mind. On the other hand, we also kinda traded tradition for consumerism. We lack a real sense of history and culture of our own, making it easy to connect more with our hereditary culture than our country’s.
You can also add to this the ease modern technology has brought in communicating with people across the globe. Americans are probably more likely than just about any other country to have distant family connections in other countries that they are in contact with. If you’re French, you probably come from a generational line of French people who lived not far from you (relatively speaking). By comparison, as a kid, me and my parents went on vacation once to spend a week with some distant relatives of ours in Scotland because we have connections to a specific family castle there.
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.