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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • This is probably unachievable in Western countries, since they expect the metro systems to make a profit, which makes no sense whatsoever.

    It’s the difference between making profit

    • Widening gulf between price and cost, then pocketing the difference

    And value

    • Widening the gulf between cost and utility, then increasing the overall value of the economic system

    Businesses are absolutely profiting off Chinese HSR. They just aren’t the rail network operators. They’re the operator’s clients.

    Incidentally, America does have comparable systems. We just do it for cars and planes, not trains




  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comGoogle Communism
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    3 days ago

    But in smaller, more local races

    They still routinely get blown out 80/20 on a good year because they have no media presence and nobody with a chance at winning wants to run under their brand.

    If you can win as a Green, you’d just run as a Democrat in the same way that Libertarians who want to win just run as Republicans.

    Just like the DSA does.

    The D in DSA stands for Democrats.

    They’re a caucus, not a party. And when they do win, they’ll often struggle to keep their elected officials loyal to the platform.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comGoogle Communism
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    4 days ago

    I’ve heard this argument before.

    I’ve already heard the argument that national campaigns are how you gain national media publicity. So it’s the most cost effective way to raise the Green Party profile.

    However you want to slice it, the current political system is very deliberately designed to keep people like Jill Stein quarantined and silenced. Insisting she’s the problem seems to miss the forest of disinformation and corporate propaganda for a very small pro-environmentalist tree.


  • Authoritarian governments do not like the anonymity the internet affords it’s citizens.

    The internet has never properly afforded anonymity. Advertisers are constantly trying to tag and track people inside and between websites, apps, and platforms. What we’re seeing isn’t a new iteration of the surveillance state, but a weaponization of existing tracking tools.

    won’t someone think of the children?

    I mean, this cuts both ways. Because there is really, legitimately, and seriously a crisis of predation by commercial vendors and individual exploiters alike that’s laser-targeted to the most vulnerable end-users of the internet. That’s not exclusively children. Plenty of these scammers and creepers target the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the gullible. And the fact that our federal and state institutions seem cavalier to the degree of fraud and malicious practices on the internet, when they claim to be so obsessed with protecting us from migrants, terrorists, evil drug dealers, and domestic radicals really speaks to their uselessness relative to their stated purpose.

    But on the other hand, yeah. All of this paranoia around kids using the internet does seem to be a backdoor to harass minority groups and dissidents. I might be more concerned about this except - per the above - they’ve clearly demonstrated vanishingly little technical savvy or procedural competency to date.

    Seems like we’re going to continue to get the same Big Punishments For Minor Infractions fear-inducing policing we’ve come to expect from the War on Drugs/Crime/Terrorism of the last sixty years.












  • Get the fuck off Twitter, get the fuck off Reddit, get the fuck off Facebook.

    I mean, way ahead of you. But we’re just jerking each other off if we think saying this downthread of a Lemmy post is changing anyone’s mind. This is the most Preaching To The Choir ass post you can make outside of an actual church.

    We weren’t ready for the internet and it’s time to turn it off.

    eye-roll

    Listen, if you want to walk around downtown with a big sandwich board that says “Log The Fuck Off And Touch Grass”, I’ll cheer for you when I see you. But there’s a reason people flock to an easily accessible portal for social engagement. And its naive to keep shouting “Log the fuck off!” from within the medium you can’t seem to quit yourself.