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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I’d argue it doesn’t have to be that way.

    Lemmy is currently one of the few places online that can break free of media narratives because no corporation owns or runs it. It’s all volunteers. It could be made into a great place for open policy discussion, that serves the public interest.

    People are so used to the vitriol promoted by 24/7 corporate media that it will take a long time to change that, but you have to start somewhere. You have to chip away at their influence, otherwise things will only be worse in 20 years.



  • If you make less than $103,000 / year (family of 3) and pay more than 9.5% of your household gross income on healthcare premiums, you will likely save thousands by using your state’s healthcare marketplace. You are likely eligible because they fixed the family glitch, now the 9.5% applies to the cost for family rather than individual coverage as before.

    Although the subsidies will likely end after 2025 if dems don’t retain a majority in house/senate.

    It could easily save you thousands of dollars a year… Like I’m 100% of it… Ask me how I know, lol. Please look into it. I think you have to wait til open enrollment in December? or when your healthcare renews annually. You might be able to do it immediately due to “hardship”. I don’t know the specifics of your situation but I’m pretty sure you and a lot of other people here would save a lot of money. I would talk with a healthcare_gov or your state agency agent, they get paid by the gov’t to help you through it at no cost to you. You can also get a low HDHP and get your own HSA to essentially pay no taxes for medical expenditures. I hear fidelity is good, due to no fees.

    Speaking of which, is there an active financial advice community on Lemmy (like that old site that should not be named) like /c/financialplanning or something like that?




  • I agree that she should be more clear on demanding a ceasefire (although she did actually partly demand just that in March, at least for 6 weeks - and again during the debate), and that this war could probably be stopped if she made such demands. The current US administration is working to end the fighting, so not voting for the party that is actually working to end the war is at the detriment to the people of Gaza.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said two weeks ago that 90 percent of a ceasefire deal had been agreed upon.

    Washington has been working for months with mediators Qatar and Egypt to try and bring Israel and Hamas to a final agreement.

    Biden laid out a three-phase ceasefire proposal on May 31 saying that Israel had agreed to it.

    20 Sep 2024, Al Jazeera

    Now compare that to Trump:

    “From the start, Harris has worked to tie Israel’s hand behind its back, demanding an immediate ceasefire, always demanding ceasefire,” Trump said, adding it “would only give Hamas time to regroup and launch a new October 7 style attack.” Trump added: “I will give Israel the support that it needs to win but I do want them to win fast.”

    So he would basically allow a full scale genocide, no holds barred.

    That being said though, this is likely not going to end anytime soon due to the massive pager/radio attack on Hezbollah that’s likely going to make this whole quagmire even worse. And I 100% agree with you that the US/Kamala/Biden should put Israel in it’s place before this whole powder keg turns into WWIII, which is not outside the realm of possibilities to anyone who has studied history and the role multiple global conflicts played in the past to lead to world war.


  • It seems to me like we didn’t have this problem twenty years ago. If blinding LEDs are the problem, why not just not allow them anymore for headlights? It takes 5 seconds to pop in a new incandescent headlight on cars that have them, and well made ones can last 20+ years depending on the construction. Visibility is good and equivalent to some LEDs with higher end lamps, and it doesn’t create a superbly unnatural light that impairs the other drivers, pedestrians, or nature. It would also reduce light pollution.

    On very rare occasion, the progressive step forward, actually looks a lot like the road backwards. It would take a long time to implement, but anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do it right.

    Auto sensing technology is going to be more of a glaring headache in 20 years, when you have half of the cars with failing sensors and everyone getting blinded even worse. Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) are not a solution, it does not properly address the issues of glare, and it will likely only make the problem worse by further removing human interaction from headlight controls.














  • The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.

    Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)

    Profit = enshittification. It’s guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.

    An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone’s home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.

    Do any software devs (ok that’s like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn’t have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?

    The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can’t buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.


  • laverabe@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky continues to soar
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    21 days ago

    thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. I really like the idea of using a web browser, like firefox or a fork of it, as a basis point for a distributed social web.

    I don’t really understand how it would do that but it is a very interesting idea. I guess since firefox is open source anyone could create this ability. Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web? Lemmy is a good a place as any as it’s too unimportant and tiny right now ;)