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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The problem is most people don’t live in 15 minute cities and it’s impossible to turn the suburbs into 15 minute cities as most things are just physically too far apart.

    If you live in a gigantic McMansion neighborhood that takes 5 minutes to get out of by car and then your job is an additional 20 miles away there is no bus or train solution - you’ll have to have a car.

    Funny you should mention living in your car. I used to have a 40 mi commute from my suburban town, each way, to work. I lived slightly north of Baltimore and commuted to just outside of DC. I would spend an hour minimum each way driving. When traffic was bad easy 2 hours. I did this for 4 years and it was soul destroying, but it was an extremely lucrative job.

    Then I found a job in my little suburb that pays about the same amount of money and it’s close enough I can ride my bike to, which I do sometimes when it’s not hot, by car it’s only about 5 minutes. The extra time I’ve gotten back has been amazing and looking back I would have taken 20% pay cut to not have to do that horrible commute.

    That is not a solution for everyone as there aren’t enough jobs in the suburbs to support the population. They’re called bedroom communities for a reason.

    I’m really not pro or anti car. I just think you have to be realistic. The realistic part is the suburbs are just too spaced out and too far from jobs to have a functioning mass transit system.



  • The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.

    Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.

    Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.

    Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.









  • I don’t want to “study” or empathize with magats.

    I want to belittle and (electorally) destroy them into irrelevance.

    I grew up in a magat household. They’re magats because they’re fucking morons. I solved the mystery for you - no additional study is required.

    I got in a debate once with my mom about the age of the Earth (of course she’s a young Earth creationist). I brought up the speed of light - we see things that are farther than 6000 light years, so the Earth has to be more than 6000 years old. Her rebuttal: “What if the sky is like an Etch-a-Sketch that God is holding up for us to see?” How do you reason with someone that believes something like that? Do you really think I if brought up stellar parallax or spectroscopy or stellar evolution that would change her mind?

    My grandma, I bought her an iPad 10 years ago so she could get on Facebook and watch YouTube and stuff. Big mistake! Now I have to hear stuff about how Hillary Clinton has been arrested and convicted by a military tribunal and is wearing an ankle bracelet and will be put in prison after the 2018 election. Adrenochrome. Comet Ping Pong. Democrats want to chop off elementary school age boys penises. Bamboo ballets. Mike Lindell. Ballots dumps. Obama controls everything. Porn in schools. Democrats are trying to make us eat bugs.

    Prior to the iPad I had probably heard her mention politics like less than a handful of times in my entire life.

    She wouldn’t get the COVID vaccine… Even though she’s 83 obese, arthritic, congestive heart failure, diabetic, and has had two previous heart attacks. Then she got COVID and almost died, was in the hospital for more than month, now on oxygen at home… STILL WON’T GET VACCINATED.

    These are not people that reason or think about anything. The only way to get them on our side would be a propaganda network to compete with Sinclair, Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Hannity, Neck, Levin, Shapiro, PragerU, Crowder, Savage, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Project Veritas, The Blaze, WND, Candace, Jordan Peterson, The Washington Times, etc… And then pump that down their YouTube and Facebook feeds. Unfortunately I don’t know any left wing billionaires that want to create competing institutions to these things.

    Not to mention the right wing message of simple solutions, zero thinking, and your prejudices are actually a good thing is hard to compete with.



  • Here are the subs I used to go to…

    • Askgaybros - Doesn’t exist on the fediverse
    • Gaybros - exists but barely gets one post per day
    • Politics - I’m banned because of my username, but plenty of subscribers. Interestingly I can’t figure out how to contact a moderator to get unbanned. The information page doesn’t list who the moderators are. I had a similarly “offensive” name on Reddit for a decade and never got banned from r/politics
    • askreddit - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
    • Android - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
    • Linux - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
    • Economics - maybe a post or two a day

    When I go back to Reddit, on desktop, all of those are operating as they normally do, with no perceptible change on the amount of posts.


  • There’s two problems…

    1. There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)

    2. Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn’t matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don’t give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.


  • We can’t incentivize people to change their behavior because no one is going to deliberately lower their quality of life.

    What politician is going to win on a platform of…

    Let’s make air travel so expensive that normal people can no longer regularly fly!

    Vote for me I’m going to double your electricity bill!

    You know that big SUV you love that is entirely impractical but you just like it because of how big it is… If you vote for me I’ll make gas $7 a gallon so that you can’t afford to have a giant SUV anymore.

    You know how you like to eat your Taco Bell nachos in your car with a plastic spork… If you vote for me I’ll replace the plastic spork with a cornstarch spork that starts to melt when you use it.

    The only thing that is going to save us is technology. Like air travel being fueled by biofuels, electricity costs kept somewhat normal by building new nuclear generation, giant SUVs being powered by batteries charged by nuclear/renewable energy, actually recycling the plastic spork.




  • Google+ didn’t work because they didn’t push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.

    Yes - I’m being serious they didn’t push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn’t inadvertently leak your info.

    If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we’d still have Google+ today.

    Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we’d still have Google Talk. I don’t recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don’t have to use.