I love that paranoia and xenophobia. As if a corrupt domestic company is somehow magically better than a corrupt international company.

It’s been quite obvious over the past few years that yes there’s potentially some risk of foreign countries trying to install spy code, but actually that doesn’t seem to happen very often, and what’s much more damaging to our society are large corporations that use their power to screw over the general public, and most of these large corporations are domestic.

Even if everything you wrote is true, none of it applies to the United States because we have the electoral college. Sorry, but it’s not Europe, and we have our own weird system.

Why would they waste time trying to explain? The problem lies with your understanding, not their actions.

But look, I’ve voted third party a lot, and I could tell you what other activities I do to make the world a better place. If I did, would you stop saying this kind of thing in the future? Do you promise?

Just like you, right? Just like all of us who are posting instead of campaigning.

Prison? …No. You’re just wrong. That’s bad no matter what.

For people who are worried about what their family members would think, probably they’re not donating or signing up for newsletters, so their postal mail is not going to give you much information.

The cops are not good at protecting you, wherever they are, but sometimes they’re good at protecting themselves.

I agree that going to the cops probably wouldn’t keep OP safe. But it would give the cops a starting point if a dead body turned up. They would know exactly where to start looking, and they probably would do so. But couldn’t lead to more harm than it is likely to prevent? Yes, possibly. It’s hard to make that determination without knowing more details about the city.

Sometimes you just don’t talk about politics, to avoid fighting with in-laws. That has always been true, and it will always be true.

But I hope you don’t “go back to normal”, because hundreds of millions of Americans acting “normal” had the power to prevent this kind of scenario from occurring in the first place. Of course there’s a ton of corruption, and shady corporations and billionaires (all of them) are major culprits in the badness, but also we the people have a lot of power to fix problems if we can get ourselves organized and motivated. So let’s do that.

I’ve had two Lodge fry pans for twenty years. Zero issues. $20 each.

Your feelings are of course valid, that’s how you feel, and it’s a perfectly normal thing. On the one hand technology keeps changing, but on the other hand people are trying to drum up money by selling promises of new technology as if it were snake oil.

All of the talk you hear about AI, it’s 95% nonsense. Of course we can see some new cool toys, and we should be happy that we have new cool toys, but it’s not like something totally magical has happened in the last 2 years, and it’s not like something totally magical is going to happen in the next two years.

With all that in mind, you just got to take a break from the news, whenever you feel like it, and try to be open-minded about what the future will bring. A couple of decades from now is certainly going to be different from a couple of decades ago, and although that can be scary at times, remember that the same thing was true for our parents and their parents and their parents.

They’re telling you it’s morning.

The shape of my body.

Many years ago I got to the bar early, before my friends, and while waiting I applied for a job using their Wi-Fi. And I got the job. The job looked good on paper but my new boss f***** me by wage theft and pocketing pension contributions. It was fun, but it would have been more fun if I had been paid according to the law.

I disagree about the value of commenting and posting. If I don’t have anything to actively contribute, and I know it, I’m doing you a favor by STFU. Entertainment and disengagement have nothing to do with it.

If I’m using this platform as a news aggregator, that’s 100% passive and legitimate and respectable.

In your edit where you say that many people take this too seriously, that’s you taking it too seriously. Stop being so sensitive. Don’t have a hissy fit. We’re all just playing around, right?

It’s the way you opened your post. You felt that perhaps Lemmy is largely communist, and some of us just don’t see that trend at all. That means either you’re ignoring many users, or you haven’t spent a reasonable amount of time browsing, which in turn makes it a waste of time for us to answer your question.

That being said, I can only speak to my motivation. Presumably some other people downvoted for similar reasons.

My cats treat me like a big cat. That’s why they brush up against my leg, for example. Or wake me up at 6AM on Sundays.

I’m not the master. But they don’t want to disrupt the harmony, and I’m the biggest, so they usually avoid doing things that irritate me, if I’m there to see it happening.

A wolverine. A kamoshika.

Capitalists hate capitalism. Competition is so irritating, because someone might undercut you. (And other people would cheat to win, just like you would, so you can’t ever relax.)

Tell that to Amazon. If you can build a monopoly, you win in the medium run.