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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • The current senator minority leader is Chuck Schumer. He’s incapable of being an effective opposition leader. The dude is addicted to the status quo, terrified of rocking the boat, completely disconnected with the American people, and overall stuck in the mindset of a 20th century politician.

    There is a lot of frustration with him among democratic voters, but he’s maintained his power among the donors and other senators.

    A huge part of his argument is that there’s nobody else that can replace him. At the moment, he’s not wrong. His rivals in the Senate are either cut from the same cloth as him, or are in their own way content with the status quo. I know people on Lemmy love Bernie, but the man was elected to the Senate the same year Pokemon Diamond and Pearl hit the shelves and is no closer to the revolution he promised.

    While this filibuster doesn’t accomplish anything itself, it’s part of a larger effort Booker is making to raise his national profile and position himself so he can replace Schumer. In that context, it’s an important and smart strategic move.

    Ironically this filibuster was probably less physically and emotionally exhausting than trying to teach all of his Senate colleagues how to effectively use TikTok.




  • Hyundai and Kia always has something out of the ordinary happen. My model was an ICE with two major flaws: one meant that the engine was liable to catastrophically fail and catch on fire at around 90k miles, and the other made it so stealing them was literally child’s play. Kids were making TikToks on how to steal them…

    Hyundais just aren’t good cars. They cut corners to the max, and when shit goes south just try to gaslight everyone involved. I’m highly skeptical that their EVs are high quality, because their ICE models were shitboxes.





  • One thing to note is that there are a lot of bad American beers in small and mid-sized cities. Basically what happened is that in the 2010s it became trendy to go to a brewery with a food truck and just hang out. As a result a ton of “breweries” opened that were more or less selling the experience, with a handful of low effort trendy selections to serve as a hook.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t good beers though. America is the land of people who do their own thing, often regardless of social norms and established conventions. There’s a lot of great beers across a broad range of categories, it just takes a bit of digging.

    As a sidenote a lot of these D tier breweries are closing and/or rebranding. Changing consumer sentiment means merely being a craft brewery is no longer a hook, while rising real estate costs make the entire endeavor more expensive. The breweries in shitty locations tend to close. The ones in good locations tend to massively reduce their own output, while offering a variety of local alcohol and expanded food options.








  • I agree. Ironically he also went on a bit of a rant about how the traditional media outlets whittle down interviews to the most salacious bits, and that’s part of the reason the American public is slowly losing trust in them.

    While the reason for him saying this is to discredit his previous perception as robotic, he’s also not wrong. All the articles I read “highlighting” the interview hyper focused on a few lines, and in doing so left and incomplete or dishonest impression.


  • So I watched the entire three hour interview.

    Technically speaking, Zuckerberg emphasizes the need for balance. He on multiple times either emphasizes that both men and women should feel comfortable in corporate environments, and explicitly says something like “there has to be a balance” on at least two occasions.

    The issue is that other parts of the interview don’t really match that idea of balance. Zuckerberg and Rogan spent like a third of the entire interview talking about bro culture stuff. I’m not even talking about “bro culture in the context of corporate America”. Rogan spends like a full ten minutes lecturing Zuckerberg on the proper way to bow hunt.

    Overall I think the media is focusing outrage bait while ignoring the serious implications of the interview. Zuckerberg is clearly lobbying the Trump administration to prevent meta and other US tech companies from being subject to EU regulatory security. It has serious implications both as a consumer and in terms of geopolitics.



  • Hate to break it to you but reddit isn’t dead.

    I still go on reddit. In a lot of ways it’s a lot worse than it used to be. It’s way more corporate. Huge portions of the site seem sanitized, often in obvious and eyeroll inducing ways. There’s also a lot less content in general. The content that does exist is lower effort, and way more repetitive.

    However in some ways it’s genuinely better. The discourse is a lot less toxic than it used to be. A lot of genuine cruelty wrapped in virtue signaling that defined the site from 2018 to 2022 is either gone or greatly diminished. It’s also slightly less of an echo chamber.

    I think what happened is that after the mobile apocalypse, a lot of the power users left the platform. While these people contributed a lot to the site, they were also extremely toxic people with an even more warped worldview.

    The mods are a reflection of this. They are more corporate, which leads to a lot of censorship like this. However it also means that scrolling is quite a bit more pleasant.

    Overall I spend more time on Reddit than Lemmy. There’s very little content here once you filter out all the outrage bait.


  • So there are actually levels to antivaxxers. The granola nuts that think putting anything into your body is a sin are actually the extreme minority or antivaxxers these days.

    The average antivaxxer is someone who has extremely little faith in both big pharma and the government as a whole. They usually come from a community that has been screwed over by both. In the US, this translates to older first generation immigrants, the African American community, and low income white people in areas that were hit hard by the opoid crisis.

    A lot of these people are cool with the traditional flu vaccine, because it’s been around forever. The covid vaccines on the other hand were met with skepticism, on account of it being “untested”. In their eyes FDA testing and positive media coverage don’t mean anything, because in their eyes both groups have lied to their faces in the past.

    A lot of the antivaxxer discourse during covid frustrated me. While there were people who were legitimately just idiots, there were a lot of communities who had fears rooted in genuine trauma and frustration. Calling them a bunch of idiotic death cultists and then celebrating on social media when one of them died just resulted in those communities distrusting the system further.