😄

Whenever I see Gulf of America mentioned, in my head it sounds like “This is America” in the Childish Gambino song.

Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.

Oh HELLLLL no. I hope my 2012 Subaru will last until I’m either dead or too old to drive. I don’t even want to have these damn screens for the usual shit you have to do on them. I want to be able to do everything with physical controls, no eavesdropping, and no dependence on a fucking app or touchscreen to operate anything in my car! I will drive my car while wearing mittens! shakes fist

They’ve been talking about this for years, wake me up when they actually do it. Or don’t, whatever.

I also think DEI is awful: Don Jr, Eric, and Ivanka, yuck! The worst of his spawn.

Stupid meme. Many other countries also classify tomatoes in with vegetables for various commerce regulation and taxation purposes. That case was just capitalists trying to get out of paying tariffs by nitpicking the definition of a tomato

I hate these things where people twist reality just so they can make a cute “Americans are so dumb” meme. If you want to bash the US, there are plenty of relevant topics to choose from for criticism. Better yet, read a book once in a while instead of just scrolling the internet and grabbing random shit that’s gone viral.

And BTW, what’s a fruit or vegetable is not some objective Sacred Truth that science “discovered”, it’s that science came up with a system of categorizing plants that people deemed to be useful for the study of Botany, just as legislators came up with a slightly different classification useful for taxation, and regular people also classify them in a way that’s useful for cooking purposes. This is not a situation where Science! is an almighty God. It’s just ways of sorting things. “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

I copied and pasted the message and it was the same article. If you don’t want to believe that, I really don’t care.

Thanks for posting the text. I went to it again and this time instead of saying it was for paid subscribers only, it said I could view the article if I would sign up for a free account. I suppose they randomly pick one or the other approach, or maybe they try to get you to pay for a sub first, then try to get you to go for a free signup to at least get your email address.

No it wasn’t free, I got that message and couldn’t read it.

If it’s free, why does it say “This post is for paid members only”?

posteo.de

Exactly. Every time I see someone post that “akshully, chronological order is also an algorithm” (which I see a lot), it makes me think of the old “what you are calling Linux is akshully GNU/Linux” thing. Please people, let that go.

Because you know perfectly well that when we talk about “algorithms” we’re specifically referring to corporate social media manipulative algorithms designed to increase engagement, NOT a simple sort of posts by date or number of upvotes. mkay?

Yep. Which means TikTok gave Thumper a load of dough and TikTok will be allowed to continue operating here. Zuck is probably not happy since he’d also given him a load of dough to get rid of TikTok.

pops corn

You don’t have to promote yourself or be fake at all. If you reply to people and they like things you say, they or others who read it may follow you. Often if you follow someone they’ll follow you back–but that most likely depends on you having put some info about yourself in your profile so they can get an idea of who they would be following, and even more likely if you’ve interacted with them before.

Since there’s no algorithm, hashtags are big on Mastodon. By subscribing to some you’ll find people to follow and interact with. Also, a common way for people to find and follow you is to write an introduction post and pin it–include the ‘introduction’ hashtag plus hashtags of your interests. That way when people search for hashtags they’re interested in, they’ll find your intro post and may follow you. And whenever you post about something you want to have more reach, put a relevant hashtag or two at the end of it.

As someone who had never used corporate social media like FB and Twitter (for my own reasons), when I found out about Mastodon back in 2017-18, I decided to join it because of its philosophy and it not being a corporate-owned walled garden. It has its flaws of course. But since I didn’t have any preconceptions, I mostly liked Mastodon as it was and didn’t find it confusing at all. That’s probably because I read up on Mastodon first to decide whether I’d want to try it, so I knew what to expect.

So I can understand how people who had been using Twitter and had their expectations shaped by it would assume that Mastodon was just a Twitter clone, not having learned anything about it beforehand. That’s why they were confused and disappointed to find that it was its own thing with its own philosophy, and had existing communities aligned with that philosophy.

Some (not all) of those who saw the differences as flaws, complained that Mastodon was crap for not having certain Twitter features, and some (not all) existing communities didn’t take kindly to demands that Mastodon abandon its philosophy and transform itself into a Twitter clone, so there were conflicts as well, and those new people didn’t stick around.

OTOH, many other new people found that they liked the different philosophy and those people did stick around, so Mastodon has grown. But IMO since most people like the Twitter-style algorithms and “broadcast/consume” culture (as opposed to Mastodon’s more personal interaction culture), Mastodon will always be a much smaller thing. But its existence is an important and good thing, like the quiet room away from the riotous street party, where you can hear each other speak.

I’ve been able to reproduce some, like the “how to carry <insert anything here> across a river” one where it always turns it into the fox, goose and grain puzzle.

But generally on anything that’s gone viral, by the time you try to reproduce it someone has already gone in and hard-coded a fix to prevent it from giving the same stupid answer going forward.

“But all the other lemmings are there! I can’t leave or I’ll be left at the top of the cliff by myself!” 🙄 Guess what, there’s more of us up here who aren’t jumping than you realize.

Sorry to be harsh, but that’s how I feel about it when people say they have no choice but to enrich these social media oligarchs by participating in their exploitation machines. By contributing their “content” to be collected, sold, used for training their generative AIs, by viewing their ads, and by making themselves targets to be manipulated by propaganda of all kinds.

They already exploit us enough in ways we can’t control, without us willingly participating in their schemes.

I think “how we got here” is more because of the massive and powerful opposition to health care reform by the Powers That Be, not because of regular people being grateful that we made a small amount of progress in spite of them.

These limp dick positions just provides political cover for poor policy

If you want to criticize me for my position on the issue, my position is that we should have universal healthcare at least on a par with the other developed countries.

My post was me griping about how pretty much impossible it has been to do anything about health care in this country for decades, and even the little we’ve gained is still under threat of being taken away. It took decades to get even the protections of the ACA passed (not allowing them to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions being IMO the most important one, which IS an improvement that has saved a lot of suffering and my life, among others, followed by expansion of Medicaid, which has also saved lives).

So yes, I did say things were even worse before the ACA and they were. That’s a fact, whether you want to admit it or not. If they repeal the ACA, it will cause more suffering and death. That’s a fact.

If you want to see how it was before the ACA, watch Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko”. You’ll understand how the ACA is an improvement, regardless of its flaws and failure to be The Ideal One True Universal Healthcare we wish for.

Trying to get something, anything, passed to improve the HC situation took decades of fights. Read the history of it. Did you know Nixon tried to get universal coverage done back in the late '70’s, but Ted Kennedy decided to make the perfect be the enemy of the good and led the effort against it, killing it (before he died he said that was his biggest regret). He and the unions calculated that if they killed it they could deny Nixon a win (sound familiar?) and get single-payer next time there was a Dem president, which of course they couldn’t. Clinton tried to do it, HRC led the effort and they were inundated with massive opposition. It got nowhere, not even close.

Next up, Obama. However imperfect it is, it was a significant accomplishment to get the ACA done. It was hoped it could continue to be improved and worked on going forward. Instead it’s been a constant battle just to keep it from being repealed.