When your job is to shovel out garbage, because that is specifically required from you and not shoveling out garbage is causing you trouble, then you are more than reasonable to let the machine take care of it for you.

Much worse? I don’t think we are at the point to tell yet. The problem is also that the US has always acted in the way of a Fascist empire to the outside, which many US-Americans chose to be ignorant about. The US has murdered millions of people in Vietnam and surrounding countries, at least a million in Iraq and hundreds of thousands if not up to a million or two in South America since the 1950s. The US has fully supported the genocide and ethnic cleansing against millions of Palestinians under a “Democratic” president and people kept justifying to support him by arguing that a slow genocide is acceptable.

So the US started from a point that was worse than 1920 Germany, but only time will tell if the end point will be as bad as 1945 Germany.

You overestimate how high political activity relates to overall awareness. It is always a minority of people that lead the activities and the change. Even revolutions don’t happen through majorities. They happen through active minorities, when the majority becomes indecisive about sticking with the old or new system.

Seriously. Trump is not some random disease that came out of nowhere. He is a symptom of a system that is fundamentally and severely ill and whose past power holders and power brokers have been reinforcing the system to become like this.

Even if you get rid of Trump now. Unless the system is fundamentally changed, which included removing all current elites from power and permanently barring them from it, another guy like Trump or maybe even worse will come to power.

Why could Trump sweep back in for a second presidency after four years of DNC rule? Because the DNC was ultimately happy with where Trump lead the country and they were happy to continue many of his policies, rather than giving Fascism the boot.

the fact that there is .xls and .xlsx, .doc, .docx … proves otherwise.

Yes they can still load and handle the old formats, but evidently the standards did change. As they are pushing for Office365 this will become an even more regular scenario as they want to force everyone to use the latest software, which then is only available in the subscription model.

On the flip side, you can also have threads where people hold different conversations, but it becomes impossible to read, because you don’t get the reply-tree structure like we have here.

Then again with reply trees you cannot easily see, which tree has the latest answer and if things are generally active or not.

Different formats for different focuses.

Yeah it can. But then they have only my passwords. If they steal a database from a large identity provider, they have millions if not hundreds of millions of passwords. For monetarily motivated crime, my password manager is not a realistic target.

Yeah, also if the one login gets compromised, oh boy…

Anecdote time. My first e-mail account got hacked. I still had my Steam account attached to it. Now i have a VAC Ban in CS2 because some chinese kid used it for hacking ingame.

Well, do you see where society is at now?

It seems like it has been subject to many long term negative effects over the past decade or so.

I had a discussion the other day, where people were not happy with lemmy instances not handing data over to google. They argument was that we should do everything so lemmy can be found more easily, as the only goal is to “win” against reddit.

Unfortunately in that discussion people were not interested in using Lemmy and the Fediverse at large to create a positive vision of the internet. They just wanted to stick it to one corporation they don’t like. I don’t like reddit either, but i think we should thrive for a Fediverse that upholds decentralization, open source and non commercialization of social interactions. All the large Internet corporations want to create the opposite and have been quite successful so far.

Well, 200 years ago Slavery for all was just normal in the US. Now it is only “normal” for people incarcerated, often on trumped up charges.

Things won’t change by staying inactive.

Assuming someone to develop a sufficient consciousness of their time starting with age 10 that would mean anything before 2010.

In all practical matter, people who are 25 now, cannot have any practical recollection of the US invasion of Iraq and are only having broad ideas of the 2007 financial crisis.

That is indeed scary.

[–]VerthiasGoldwater Conservative 21 points 1 day ago

Guys I just want a balanced budget and less federal government corruption.

This is gold medal satire.

Rovers as opposed to humans. Humans need food, a pressurized, temperated air environment, a discharge for their excrements, a higher level of safety and return mechanisms, much stronger radiation protection…

So a big event without any practical relevance because there is more cheaper, reliable and safer alternatives available?

North Koreans don’t think this. Everybody knows its bullshit. The point is not for people to believe in the bullshit, the point is normalizing the government to get away with obvious bullshit. And this pattern is not exclusive to North Korea at all.

The “limping on” has been the past 40 years already. Ever since Neoliberalism became the dominant economic ideology and fully embraced by both mayor parties.

Capitalism declines into Fascism. The current administration is not the root cause of the US problems. It is a symptom that is accelerating the decline into Fascism. But the ground work was laid many years ago and defended ever since. We see a similar trend in many other countries that adopted the US Neoliberalism to various extends.

There is only so much mentoring can do though. You can have the best math prof. You still need to put in the exercise to solve your differential equations to get good at it.

My impression is that people will be eager to tell in the comments that a news source is bad or biased, or that the specific article is misinformation.

At the end of the day, if you just trust some rank value that someone tossed in, w.o. knowing who is behind it exactly and how they reached that conclusion, it can be an easy source for disinformation.

Also some news outlets are providing reliable coverage on some issues, while being biased on others. Often they just repeat texts from Reuters, AP or other agencies. So any single value rating can warn you that the same message is “biased” in one case and in another case it cheers it on as “reliable”.

In other words: You can keep jumping out of the window in different ways, trying to find a way for humans to fly w.o. mechanical help, or you can just accept taking the stairs.

Seriously, my first thought was looking forward to the ADL explaining why smiling Hitler denying the Holocaust is not antisemitic since it isnt against Israel or something.