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

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  • A danish news organization will have articles about what Danes think of tariffs. The same with a Canadian news organization, a German one, etc. Yet for some reason almost all of what American sources talk about is what citizens of other countries think.

    I think the fact that American establishment publications put out more articles about what citizens of other countries think of tariffs than what Americans think of tariffs is part of the reason why Trump won.

    The upper 10 percent of liberal America seems to think of themselves as citizens of the world, and seems to spend more time caring about anything other than Americans outside their hyper-specific socioeconomic niche.

    The end result of this mentality is that Trump was able to make huge inroads with groups that were historically democrat’s bread and butter in 2024. Even if he was lying through his teeth, he and his team made real efforts to appeal to issues that were important for demographics.

    I’m willing to bet you could find people from Hawaii to Mississippi altering their spending habits in fear of Trump’s tarrifs. Maybe the press should spend more time reporting on them.

    Obviously, neither Trump nor MAGA is the answer. However there needs to be a way to talk with how out of touch so much of our establishment is without sounding like a Trump supporter.



  • I feel like they need to break this down by age a lot more than they do.

    In today’s day and age, it’s perfectly normal for a parent to offer significant financial support to their 20 year old child. While adulthood technically begins at 18, society is structured in a way that encourages some form of education/training through the rest of our teens and early twenties. A lot of this time adults in that situation will be setting themselves up for success, but not in a position where they currently have meaningful income. Parents helping out enables them to lay the groundwork for being independent later on in life.

    On the flipside a 30 year old receiving relying on their parents is a wtf moment 9/10.

    Another consideration is independent adults moving in with their parents for the purpose of acting as a caregiver. While that’s a problem for society, it’s a completely different problem than adults needing parental contributions to survive.











  • 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.



  • I mean Trump’s economic policies are a philosophical rejection of trickle down economics. He campaigned on a platform of leveraging trade protectionism and immigration reform to produce higher blue collar salaries. He’s doing so in a way that is giving both Wall Street and economic experts conniptions, because they’ll end up biggest losers. Trump has even explicitly called out NAFTA and one of the reasons he won 2016 was his rejection of the TPP.

    That is honestly the kind of policy I’d be opening to supporting in a vacuum. A lot of it is oddly similar to Bernie’s economic plans circa 2014. The problem is Trump is an openly corrupt billionaire, friends with other slightly less openly corrupt billionaires, may/may not be a Russian asset, and probably is in the early stages of dementia. There’s absolutely no way he delivers.


  • Honestly I have a lot of sympathy for these people.

    It’s one thing to invest in some moonshot crypto. It’s another to invest in something claiming to be FDIC insured. There’s also not a good way of verifying that information to the extent the victims would have needed to know something was amiss.

    It seems like the FDIC was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t really know or give a shit that someone was leveraging them to mislead consumers. Instead of actually fixing the problem, they just washed their hands of it.

    You can call Trump the devil all you want, but the system was broken long before he came on the scene.