I’m gonna guess that you put a decent amount of time into figuring out a good set of smart home products and maybe even put some effort into looking up which products play well together and what configurations are ideal.

And that’s great if you enjoy shopping for, setting up and maintaining all those toys. But we all know there is too much shitty tech out there to think that it’s a good idea to grab a bunch of smart home stuff at Best Buy one afternoon and just plug it all in and call it good.

I think the thing is, folks in tech are less likely to be cool with, for example, exposing their door locks on the internet without doing a decent amount of due diligence. You have to want it enough to put in the work to make sure you have something that you can feel is secure, smooth operating and meets your personal privacy expectations. It kinda has to be a minor hobby. Which is cool if you happen to enjoy it or get enough joy from the result to make it worthwhile.

For me, I have enough hobbies and pastimes. I’ll put in the effort when the payoff is high, like for a home media server. But there’s no way in hell I’m signing up for future chores and headaches just so I can control my window curtains from my phone.

It’s wild because these supposed geniuses have clearly not thought about who the fuck is going to buy all the shit produced by prison labor when EVERYONE IS PRISON LABOR! They’re addicted to making money and will happily squeeze all the money out of everyone till we’re all dead. It’s like if you have a cow and take all the milk and leave nothing for the calves; someday you’ll be left with nothing.

Yeah, although W is like a million times more charming than Vance. And I say this as someone who HATES W.

Also, he barely got in the 1st time (you could argue that he didn’t actually win) and then 911 happened in his 1st term, so at that point, we were cooked. I would still argue that even a 911 type event wouldn’t be enough to get Vance elected cuz he’s just so deeply unlikeable.

You’re 100% correct. And getting removal via the 25th is the longest longshot ever. But it’s kinda wild that we all could die in WWIII while Vance waits for the halfway point, so he’s eligible to be elected twice, even though he’s so uncharismatic he’s never getting elected once.

It will be like the before times when memes were passed by photocopiers

I thought Epstein introduced them?

There is no annual fee. I only use it at places where there is no surcharge for using a credit card. And this is only worthwhile if you pay it off every month so you aren’t paying interest.

You’re right that there is no free money and it is a cut of the merchant fees. It’s kinda fucked because places that charge the same for cash and credit have to charge more to cover the merchant fees and then people with good credit and good credit cards get a kickback while everyone else pays the inflated prices or even worse, get hit with ripoff fees and interest.

I try to use cash or debit at small local businesses so they aren’t getting slammed with fees, but places like that are usually pretty quick to add surcharges for credit cards.

Side note, in the US the CC companies used to be able to refuse to do business with anyone who charged a different price for cash vs credit. Since losing the ability to take payments via Visa or Master Card would be super detrimental to most businesses, only the most under the radar mom and pop shops added CC surcharges. There was a recent court case where this was basically struck down so now we’re seeing CC surcharges getting added on at all kinds of places. We seem to be in a weird transition but I think this will eventually get us away from this situation where poor people end up subsidizing the credit card rewards for rich people.

IDK if it’s available in Canada but you might want to check out the Fidelity rewards card. It shoves 2% into your Fidelity investment account each quarter. No fees, no fuss, no faffing around with points and tiers and other bullshit.

I’m a gen Xer in the US. I and most of my peer group have our own places. The ones with good careers and stable relationships generally have houses in more desirable areas, but even folks with more blue collar or less fancy jobs have a place further out in the suburbs or have a small condo. The only younger people I know who own are either in a situation where they both make serious money (like doctors or do well tech), come from money or occasionally just make it happen with just serious hustle and grit (and even then, I’m amazed they can do it).

In theory, if we all stopped working and spending, it would stop within days. The system is set up to make that extremely difficult, risky and painful, but in theory we could get change through overwhelming collective action.

To be clear, I’m not trying to “put this on the working poor”. I 100% get why most people aren’t in a position to act. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. This is not a safe place to risk your job, doing so is often risking your life (or your kids lives).

The GOP, the political donor class and their supporters are absolutely awful and deserve the blame. However, we can’t pretend that we are 100% helpless to stop them. When we think about Nazi Germany, do we think “well, the average German didn’t really have control over the situation?”

Yes, and no. Yes the GOP is pushing for all of this madness and obstructing any efforts to reign it in. But as much as it pains me to admit, most people in the US bear some culpability. In theory, if everyone old enough and well enough to do so unsupervised, traveled to their state capital or major city and basically flooded the streets with protesters, effectively halting all traffic and commerce, and refused to move until Trump was gone and the war was stopped, this shit would probably stop. Similarly, if everyone refused to work or spend any money, aside from the absolute bare minimum, this shit would stop. Of course there are a million reasons why this won’t happen. It weighs heavily on me that I’m still paying taxes and generally behaving despite the clear need for drastic action.

The problem is that it isn’t just ancient history. There is a lot of fucked up shit happening today that is directly related to shit that’s been going on during our lifetimes. And that shit is all directly related to shit that has been happening over the last 100, 200, 300 years.

When I was a child in a large modern “liberal” city in the US, adults would get up in the morning to throw bricks at school buses of children because they didn’t want black children attending their neighborhood schools. This wasn’t in some tiny southern backwater where everyone was some convenient stereotype and this wasn’t 100 years ago. My parents lived through segregation. The last known child of enslaved black Americans died 4 years ago. There are people alive today whose grandparents were slaves.

People here like to pretend that “Lincoln freed the slaves and then it was all better and everyone needs to move on”. The fact of the matter is that the US is not very old, it’s been super fucked up since day one (really, since before day one), we have made a lot of progress but that progress is very recent and no where close to sufficient. No one is saying to punish random white people. But we should absolutely call bullshit when gaslighters try to tell us that there is no systemic racism in the US and knowing our recent history can help inform those conversations.

Also, if I “diminished…American white supremacist attitude” that’s a good thing, right? They should be diminished.

They are trying to say that you are ignoring the serious issues that the US has with white supremacy. Your comment obviously isn’t taking away any power from the fucking Nazis running the US government, and no one is claiming otherwise. In this context “diminishing” means “disregarding, downplaying, ignoring”. They are saying that you are pretending that it is not a real and serious issue.

For example, in the US, our president regularly says wildly racist things. His supporters then diminish the incidents, saying that the President isn’t racist and we’re just overreacting.

I’m not American, so I’ll just ignore the first sentence. The 2nd sentence is on another lavel, as I haven’t attacked black people, native people, or their ancestors or my feelings.

Yeah, so the original post is clearly about the US and may require some US specific context to understand. What you’re doing is equivalent to me going into a thread in “Ich el” and complaining that a German language joke about German society (that I don’t actually understand) is flawed for not including Brazil. Or going to a “Black Lives Matter “ protest with an “All Lives Matter “ sign.

Everyone is welcome in the conversation but when multiple people are telling you that you don’t understand what’s going on and are being offensive, take the hint and try listening more and talking less for a bit. We all know that there has been slavery in many different systems in many different countries. This post was not about that. Everyone isn’t knowledgeable enough to make insightful posts about that (myself included).

I happen to know enough about the US to assert: the US currently has some deeply fucked up racial issues including actual racists running our government. The original post is pointing out that we should not be surprised since this has been a deliberate policy since the founding of the country all the way through my parents teenage years. After over 400 years of white supremacist policy, we’ve had about 50 years of trying to not have actively, aggressively racist laws and now there are dickbags on major news networks claiming that “whITe mEn aRe tHe ReAl vIcTiMs”.

Is that a dress with a built in cowlneck/hoodie? If so, mind sharing where you got it? Does it have pockets?

But individuals do have power to make Twitter less important. Well, maybe not Twitter, just because it’s 95% bots, but social media companies are usually only valuable if they have users. There are people who depend on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram for their business but 99% of users absolutely do not need to use those services. The analogy with recycling and climate fall flat because it takes many orders of magnitude more effort to avoid most/all plastics/packaging/fossil fuels than it does to just avoid IG/FB/X. The biggest barriers to getting rid of these shit companies is 1) too many people don’t realize how awful they are 2) too many people just don’t give a shit and 3) too many people are addicted to the dopamine hits from these trash sites.

Seriously, just don’t use them. When you’re presented with something that tries to force you to use them, say “sorry, I don’t use Meta products, do you have another way for me to get [the pop-up dates, the invite, etc]”

It’s rainy here today and my dogs aren’t happy about the whole walk situation. It’s nice to have a reminder to try and enjoy it.

There is a world of room between “good” and “ran a child sex trafficking ring”. Clinton may be a POS for many reasons and he may have visited Epstine island and maybe even raped children (we don’t know at this point but anyone in the flight logs is sus). That is all absolutely terrible but it’s still very different than kidnapping 10’s or hundreds of children to rape and pimp. And the files seem to indicate that Trump was actively involved in this scheme for decades.