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The Media Still Doesn’t Get Biden Voters
  • I don't have any evidence for this but purely speculation on my part: racism can explain a good amount of that. Biden has in the 90s voted for "tough on crime bills", he is the definition of political establishment, and is a white man from Wilmington. Obama definitely is not textbook underpriveleged but he doesn't have those points that biden does

  • 13-Year-Old Rape Victim Forced to Give Birth Due to Mississippi’s Abortion Ban
  • Its not idiotic, because democrats have had numerous opportunities to enshrine abortion and contraception into law, while controlling both the legislative and executive branch. Republicans are perfectly able to pass their abhorrent laws, but democrats seem to not be able to pass good legislation even when they control the government. Until Roe was overturned, this state of affairs was actually very beneficial to democratic politicians, because they could recycle abortion as a rallying point every single election.

  • Whatever stage of capitalism this is, I'm exhausted by it
  • However it is also openly obvious that reforms(at least in north america and europe) often result in backsliding. You also forget that while the revolutionary regimes often had issues with corruption and committing atrocities, they often were a million times better than the equally or moreso brutal regimes that came before them.

  • How do primarily overnight package focused carriers make any money on 2-day services?

    So this is a rather niche question so I hope it is still relevant to this group, but I was thinking. The big package transport companies(in the US this is UPS and FedEx) make most of their air cargo money on overnight packages, where the business model is pretty straightforward. Have packages fly between a small number of hubs each night so you can relatively economically cover large areas with overnight service, because each plane is as full as it can be. The better question is how the same air cargo operation can transport the same packages in two days while being so much cheaper that they can charge 1/3 the cost of overnight. I can come up with a few ways, such as driving the package to a further away airport so you can put it on only 1 flight, or trying to drive it to a big hub before flying it, but all of these business models seem questionable at best because they seem to apply to niche cases only. Does anyone with more knowledge of the subject know the answer?

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    Google’s Plan To DRM The Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
  • Hot take: the narrative that politicians do not understand technology due to their age is giving them too much credit. They have entire offices full of staffers whose entire job is to explain these things to them in ways they understand, as I am sure they have for some of the more important things. They just don't care because their purpose is to serve corporations, not the public.

  • Google’s Plan To DRM The Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
  • See this kind of shit is why I pirate, not because I can't afford to pay $10 a month. When the $10 for a lot of content becomes $10 per month per piece of media you like, and you can't watch it on your platform of choice, and you can't watch it on a flight without paying more or not at all, this makes the $5 per month I pay for a VPN sound like a far better service.

  • How i feel on Lemmy
  • Another interesting point is whether we attribute the successes and failures of a state on it's particular social, economic and political situation or it's ideology as the root cause of anything. Most people, when they agree with an ideology, will attribute the good things to the ideology and the bad things to specific circumstances, and the opposite with ideologies they do not agree with. The more nationalist Americans will tell you that Cuba is poor because it is communist, and that Bush invaded Iraq either because he was corrupt or because he was promoting freedom. However there's also the argument that Cuba is poor because it is sanctioned to hell by the US, and that Bush invaded Iraq because of American capitalist imperialism. Which one of these you agree with pretty much entirely depends on your ideological opinions rather than what actually happened, and as far as making a valid argument either one is at least a coherent point.

    The reality is that you have elements of both the fundamental ideology and the specific political circumstances in every social outcome you see. Which is an idea quite fatal to most of the rhetoric you see nowadays and part of why it's impossible to have any political discussion with people you have fundamental disagreements with.

  • Why are folks so anti-capitalist?
  • My stance on this starts with the things that a lot of people for the most part can admit are problems. Corporations with the power and wealth of small countries, concentration of money in the hands of a few, absurd costs of living, decreasing access to education, the environmental crisis, constant wars that destroy poorer countries, and in many countries poor healthcare outcomes. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

    Now why do these things happen? In my opinion the origin of these issues comes down to private ownership of vitally important organizations and infrastructure, and the resulting profit seeking regardless of the consequences. This also is how I would define capitalism, because capitalism is at its core only a way of organizing the economy.

    There are then multiple answers to how we should address them. Regulating companies and reforming capitalism without addressing the root issue are a common one, and in some cases somewhat effective. However, in most cases such movements(which I would call social democratic) have a tendency to quickly walk back their achievements. For example, Tory attacks on the NHS in the UK have contributed to its reduction in quality. Or the walking back that the Mitterand administration did in France. Or the deregulation of trucking in the United States which led to substantially lower wages. This is also a western-centric argument on my part, because social democracy also relies on ruthlessly exploiting poorer countries' workers but that's a whole separate can of worms.

    One could think of this backtracking as faults in the political system, which they perhaps are, but I think they are inherent to capitalism, because when you have such overwhelming power in megacorporations, they will inevitably eventually get their way as long as they exist. It's the equivalent of being surprised that you will eventually burn up if you try to stand on the sun despite your thermal shielding or other mitigations. Which isn't that absurd of a comparison because the sun's surface is only ~15 times hotter than a human if you measure from absolute zero.

    The next answer is to try to, through monopoly breaking or other means, to revert capitalism to a former state of less concentrated capital. This is a fool's errand and a reactionary stance in most cases, because monopolization is inherent to capitalism, especially now that companies' fixed costs are immense, but the marginal cost of each new unit(be it a package sent through a carrier or a complex electronic device) is nearly negligible in comparison, making a monopoly the inevitable outcome.

    And about at this point in my political development I found out about Marxism and it's overall proposal for an alternative to capitalism, and I found it the most compelling. The history of Marxism is also a whole separate can of worms so I won't go too far into it, but I agree with the Marxist class analysis that there are owners(most of which aren't even individuals anymore) and workers, and that workers' main political strength are their numbers. And a lot of capitalism reform proposals do actually rely on mass political organization of workers. Now what I say is, I think we can be more imaginative as to what that power can be used for. I don't think what comes next after capitalism will be perfect, but I think we can do much better.

  • The decentralized web is growing
  • I was actually thinking about what it would take to have a truly peer to peer video site. Have clients simultaneously consume, serve and transcode content. It would obviously be concentrated in the hands of big enthusiasts and small video companies, but presumably it would be similar to the fediverse where you can choose from many instances.

  • The hottest 14 days ever recorded are the last 2 weeks
  • But their countries are only poor because of the imperialism of rich countries for centuries. You're saying they should be grateful for rich economies helping them develop, when those rich economies are the reason they are poorer to begin with.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden to FDR, LBJ. Thanks for the free campaign ad!
  • I fail to see why you think helping corporations earning money will help individuals, especially with raising taxes on them. Corporations' interests are lower wages and higher prices, worker's interests are higher wages and lower prices. The only way to then increase wages is to force companies to do so, either through job disloyalty, strikes, regulations, or etc. Don't see how lower taxes will make them pay more.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden to FDR, LBJ. Thanks for the free campaign ad!
  • I mean the opinions of the voting public are nearly always more complex than either Republican or Democratic party dogma. The problem is that there is no substantial way of politically engaging besides voting. I would argue actually that generally the public is way more left wing than it is given credit for, but a lot of people have no accessible ways to transform these ideas into action. And for this I don't have an easy answer. Disclaimer, am a leftist so I would obviously think this, but I do still think that we would see more diverse political ideas if our political systems were made to be more open.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden to FDR, LBJ. Thanks for the free campaign ad!
  • I find the "raise taxes to pay for social programs" and "cut corporate taxes" to be somewhat contradictory. Reagan and Thatcher were textbook neoliberals if you need any examples, and they destroyed social programs and labor unions rather than supporting them.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden to FDR, LBJ. Thanks for the free campaign ad!
  • One thing I also wonder is, does it matter? Things have definitely improved for marginalized groups over time, but I can probably find texts from 2000 years ago that talk about discrimination over immutable traits being wrong. Discriminating as a head of state with presumably good access to information is equally wrong at any point in time.

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden to FDR, LBJ. Thanks for the free campaign ad!
  • If by "left" you mean democrats then they will not do this because it is not what their views are. They are ideologically as neoliberal as Reagan and Thatcher. This is part of why they don't do as good of a job opposing the far right as they could, because they only exist as long as their only opposition is unhinged far right politicians.

  • Stop he's already dead
  • Sunbird is somewhat suspicious to me because of the "we won't open source because it's less secure". Makes me wonder what godawful nightmare their app is if they don't want to let people look. Oh and if they're doing it as a business decision I don't want anything to do with them either as it's still vendor lock in.

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    Mayoman68 @lemmy.world
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