• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Here in Boston we’ve got migrants sleeping in the airport, the state transportation building, and now the state owned gym and pool complex across the street from my house. The governor is draining a $600 million rainy day fund plus asking for another $250 million to help manage the inflow of migrants. Meanwhile our housing crisis is only getting worse, and we’ve literally got no place to send these desperate people. I’m pretty far left, but this doesn’t feel manageable to me.



  • Guy I worked with retired from the Navy as a captain and got whatever very generous pay came with that. Then used his veterans preference to get a job in my agency, did that for 20+ years, retired as a gs 14 so he gets that annuity plus his TSP savings plus social security in a few years. He’s still barely 60, so he is working as a consultant. I’m guessing he’s pulling down $200k with all the various incomes and maybe working 20 hours a week, and he’s got the Healthcare and other benefits for life. People trash talk the military and government but if you work the system right it can be worthwhile. Hell, I wish I’d joined just so I could get USAA.




  • Serious answer, as someone who’s been through years of therapy.

    Pretty much everyone rich and powerful experienced intense trauma early in life. And one of the horrible ways our early childhood trauma plays itself out is by causi us to recreate it on younger generations. You don’t just wake up one day as a child molester. That shit was visited upon you in some fashion when you were a child.

    Our entire culture is based on generational trauma (strongly suggest you read the Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate).

    People who seek power and fame are almost all incredibly damaged from a very young age. Not necessarily an excuse, but if you want to stop the cycle you have to be able to step back far enough to see it.



  • I work in government. Biden has an excellent idea of what he’s up against. And he saw how Obama and Clinton talked a good game but got out maneuvered by the right. He’s an incredibly effective president, vastly better than I thought he’d be. He’s managed to get so much done even with the right going full fascist against him, and he’s done it without complaint or drama.

    I am honestly baffled when I hear liberals complain about him. He’s gotten more progressive goals across the finish line than any president since FDR, and he’s not even 3 years in. Is he 100% perfect? No. But he’s very very good. I’ll take very very good over outright fascism any day of the week.



  • Seriously. Our house is 175 years old and hadn’t had much work done to it since the last major renovation in the 1920s. People ask me if I renovated it myself. I laugh and explain that no, a crew of full time professional carpenters, roofers, masons, demo experts, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, and painters spent over a year on it. I just don’t think anyone has any concept of how much work is involved in real renovation.

    Fortunately interest rates stated low enough that I could keep borrowing more and more and more money to pay all those people. But now I’m trapped and can never sell.


  • yacht_boy@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Depends on how you define that. Literally none of the communities I was part of on reddit have a functioning equivalent here.

    Boston? Dozens of posts a day on reddit, maybe one a week here.

    Burning man? I don’t even know if there have been a dozen posts in the community here.

    Geology? Don’t think I’ve seen a single post.

    Communities for specific bands (I’m a jamband fan) exist here but have no are almost no content.

    And so on.

    I’m the kind of user who comments often but doesn’t post much. With no one here posting, there’s nothing for me to interact with.

    If you want echo chamber liberal political memes, obscure open source software discussions, or endless hentai, then lemmy is great. But it has no pull for people who want to participate in niche communities like mine. Hopefully it’ll happen, especially as reddit gets shittier and shittier, but even for people like me who desperately want to leave reddit and are willing to take a chance on a new platform, this is a tough sell.

    It’s going to take a few more digg type events to really get lemmy to pick up enough users to make the conversations in the small niche communities hit critical mass. Until then, lots of people will give it a try, then bounce.