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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Congress members and senators still showed up to work, and the decisions they took still mattered, even if some of the Republicans were constantly violating precedents and norms. The judicial system still kept churning and mostly following the laws and precedents, even if Trump appointed a lot of unqualified partisan judges.

    From an outside perspective this is a good demonstration that while your system is somewhat flawed, it’s still resilient. By flawed I mean mainly the two party system and stuff like judges being appointed by politicians. However if your system didn’t have some builtin failsafes, it would have been much more vulnerable to influence from unwanted sources.

    Even if most trump voters wanted to turn the US into a proper aristocracy, (some right wingers actually do*), the process would have been much more complicated in comparison to countries that have become dictatorships in the past decades.

    *I’m referring to a somewhat new trend, where influential people are claiming that the US is suffering from a dumb population, and that experts should be given more power.



  • I like his approach of stating that these are big claims, but cannot be really evaluated in any meaningful way, as there is no useful public data to look at.

    In my opinion this is the main crux of the whole topic. One party (the US government) has a boatload of various quality sensor data that could be studied, but it’s classified. As a result nobody can believe anyone’s statements as they aren’t supported by anything.








  • Is this really a year old post? It was a good read regardless.

    To comment on the topic, this is going to happen more and more, especially as proprietary stuff becomes more and more complex. With implants it’s obviously more serious, but this also applies to anything from cars to game consoles.

    I’m no stranger to scrounging junkyards for car parts or ebay to replace components from an old console. However that cannot go on forever, as parts get more rare. This is somewhat remedied with eg. nintendo consoles, where some reproduction parts are available (cartridges, screens etc.). With more niche and increasingly complex products this option is often not available.




  • Because what can I do?

    I try to focus on being happy and living my own life. These things are civilization level issues, and last 50 years have shown the civilization’s fundamental incapability to face the issue, let alone attempt to solve it at any meaningful scale.

    IMO there is nothing wrong with attempting to minimize one’s own carbon footprint, but the futile attempt to push for more significant changes will just lead to disappointment



  • Couldn’t it be argued that it’s a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?

    For example reddit and youtube are completely different in terms of the nature of the platform. Could attempting to monetize an average reddit user to the level of those using youtube might be a mistake? Keep in mind that reddit has much lower overhead for keeping the service running.

    The mental image I’m going after is a country that exports mainly wheat arguing that its’ exports should be valued the same as a country that produces complex electronics. The products are at a different realm of complexity. Commodities should be valued for what they are and not be confused with higly refined products.