I didn’t think for even a moment that it would be that simple, thank you so much!

Sorry, what? Are you saying that this comment about the holocaust makes the Nazis look… better?

Have they actually got something in the pipeline.

Tough fucking luck. If healthcare is private in the US, it’s none of their business, the state doesn’t get a say.

Who’s trying to trick you into eating a sugar substitute?

Plus the reporting on it.

At a certain point, people start saying things like “X is supposed to be bad now, but give it 5 years and it’ll probably be healthy again!” or “they say you’re not supposed to do Y anymore…”.

Because, of course, most people get their information from news sources who are always trying to find the next superfood or poison that we’ve all been consuming for hundreds of years. And often, many of the things were taught when we’re younger are no longer considered correct, or at least fully correct, anymore.

So at a point people just get tired, ignore all of it, and just do whatever they were going to do anyway, because from their perspective, scientists can’t make their mind up anyway.

Not exclusively though. For many the fact that there a scary sounding chemical called MSG in their food is enough. Lots of people are obsessive about ‘additives’ and assume they are all bad.

I’ve started shooting myself with BBs, I’m working my way up to pellets, then. .22, probably going to stop before 50BMG, but before long, I will be unstoppable!

I’ve used this for distilling too, when people start talking about methanol. Even with the worst distiller in the world, you’d have to drink something crazy like 10L before it would kill you.

Obviously by that point you’d be dead with alcohol poisoning. But saying “you can safely drink 14 cans of coke a day before the carcinogenic effects of aspartame become an issue” is completely valid, and not the same as saying “drinking 14 cans of coke a day is a healthy way to live”.

They’re just not, though. Meta and Reddit are not the same. Reddit and my employer, where we make thing that people choose to buy, are not the same.

People can have preferences on different platforms and products, and they can have different amounts of confidence in different companies on how capable and trustworthy they are.

It’s the kind of meaningless vague posting that rightoids are rightly criticised for when they post shit about the people they consider to be the ‘problem’. It’s vaguely shaped like the way they see the world, but really this is about as substantial as the ‘immigrant benefit fraud’ posts your shitty uncle posts.

I don’t even know what this is referencing, or how this would work, but everyone is in here saying ‘Omg so true’ and believing that this is the reason that things are shitty.

Like, everyone’s quick to jump on bollocks conspiracy theories, and consider such things as flat-earthers to be significant in any way, but you’ll constantly see vague shit implying these enormous, unlikely conspiracies between multiple competing companies, the government, involving the collusion and silence of thousands of people, and they get up voted because people believe it’s the sort of thing that could happen.

What bothers me is that it ends up coming to ‘someone should do something about this!’, but exaggerating constantly makes extreme options look reasonable or even necessary.

Very few people can actually say what they’d want the new status-quo to look like though, outside of vague slogans or utopian ideas that those in power will somehow do things wisely, justly and selflessly, like they never have before. We can’t compare to any other attempt at communism, and even the most prosperous socialist state would be considered ‘neolib’. Because the thing is, it’s really not clear how communism is the silver bullet many think it is, but also, the vagueness and disparity about the end goal means that we can’t really look at our current situation, look at the proposed one, look at what it will take to get there, and make an informed decision on which is likely to actually make things better.

Examples? I would love some free billions!

*exist for the good of those in power. I really don’t see the value of concentrating power into a single point of failure.

German government procurement is horrendously inefficient, but it’s because of incredible levels of transparency to try to prevent corruption.

It means that even the most minute purchases come with lots of beurocracy attached.

You can look at it almost as its own kind of corruption, that syphons money into the beurocracy, but it does mean that things aren’t happing without people knowing, and that, for an extreme example, when you decide to invade another country isn’t the moment when you discover that you discover that most of your equipment had been sold for vodka money a decade ago!

You’re right, what excuses do the Russian invaders have for Ukraine? It sure blew up in their faces. And I hope it continues to until the invaders return to their miserable little circle of hell thry built for themselves.

Oi, I’m moderate af and am only techy to people who don’t know the difference between a laptop and… the larger one!

I do like a community that values a free, open and decentralised Internet, Reddit used to, but seems to have lost that.

Not always, but it is when you go public. I work a lot at small businesses, lots of them have shareholders who are mostly hands-off, or would prefer a more conservative approach to protect their investment.

People who invest in non-public businesses are usually in for the long haul, and come with much greater risk.

But when you go public, your business just comes a commodity, nothing but a vehicle for a fund manager to use to try and get a higher return for their clients so they get more business and commission.

In theory, it’s a really democratic system, but the reality is that we’ve lost track of what an investment is meant to be, and the number of private individuals actually holding shares in a company directly is very low, it’s mostly fund managers who literally just want to pump their numbers for a few years, because long term, they never really beat the market.