Are we sure it’s not mostly still bots on Twitter? I deleted my account back then and have not been back.

At least, not willingly back, since some people still hyperlink to Twitter directly rather than just sharing screenshots of whatever the content was. So you click the text hyperlink thinking it’s to a web article, only for it to bring you to some random string of tweets visibly displayed in the least logical order.

I would like to believe that those in power would take other preventative measures before a situation like in Argentina happened here in the US. Maybe in five years, assuming the US gets a bit more logical, then that option would be completely out of the question.

Large spending cuts don’t seem realistic in the US, too many different states have competing interests for a majority of them to agree to drastically cut spending without alternatives, imo.

Immigration brings more people in to the economy to pay towards the national debt; more jobs need to be created to accommodate a bigger population. The debt is out of control once it’s at the point when there are physically not enough people in the country working and paying taxes to pay off the interest on that debt. I’ll add that it’d also potentially have to be a point where even if you had high corporate taxes it’s still an insurmountable sum of interest accruing.

Immigration in this context isn’t to drive down low skill labor but to have more jobs in the economy overall to pay towards the deficit.

I agree, losing manufacturing was a harsh blow to US culture and has hurt people in the US more in the long run.

I’m not as read on Argentina’s financial situation to comment specifics, but the US wouldn’t necessarily have to heavily devalue the currency to the point of hyperinflation. The US could still do hyperinflation, but it’d hurt trade even more as well as investor confidence; plus it’d probably piss off a lot of the people living in the US when suddenly their fixed income gets them less goods and services.

Cutting all spending is definitely tied with hyper inflation as one of the worst options, imo. Especially since you’re paying into a failed system and literally seeing no personal or societal benefit from your tax dollars.

Imo, it’s hard to say if not being able to cover debts would lead to high unemployment on its own. As it stands we’re not currently covering all our debts, but still promising to pay them back.

If it was announced now that there’s no projected way for us to cover the growing interest of US debt, when so many companies are already cutting jobs to bolster short term profits/projections, then there would be high unemployment.

Realistically, the government would have to find ways to make up the money it’s burning though if it doesn’t want the blowback from stopping spending. Growing industry through incentivizing more workers to come to the US and increasing domestic manufacturing is one of the ways the US could grow its economy. Doing something like that though would require shifting political framing to start seeing the benefits of bringing in more laborers to the US.

If the US was truly in a jam we’d start devaluing our currency more to pay towards the deficit. That’s not a good idea at all, but if we’re not raising taxes on corporations to pay towards the deficit then there really aren’t that many other options.

The US would have a hard time actually defaulting on its loans, imo. If the population growth stagnated enough that not being able to cover the interest became a concern, then the US could make it easier for people to work in the country to help grow the economy instead.

The easiest and most logical route is taxing corporations more, not even necessarily needing to cut current spending. It’s definitely a hurdle like you mention due to the media environment.

Words alone aren’t really what I’m alluding to here, more so authoritarian labels. One case which caused a decent amount of friction on BlueSky was that someone was allowed on the platform that was making harassment style content about other BlueSky users, but they shared the content off of the platform.

If it was built like Lemmy, then instances could pressure each other to be more selective for who they allow on the platform.

Often mean words aren’t the core problem, but toxic individuals or people/bots with ulterior motives on a platform. Not everyone should have the privilege of being part of a community if they can’t be decent.

From what I gather, the admins could be stepping in more like they do on Lemmy for hateful behaviors/users. If BlueSky were more federated like Lemmy, I think they would have been defederated by now for not taking direct action.

The block lists themselves work great imo and should be used universally on the Fediverse, but people do have understandable gripes with admins there for not stepping in more and are instead differing moderation to the user level tools in place.

I feel that content, consistency, and having a dialogue between users is the lifeblood of these platforms.

I’m not on Lemmy, BlueSky, or the Fediverse because of Linux, open source, or anti-social behaviors. But I find some of the other parts to be interesting so I’ve stuck around. I think the first two things are interesting, but not a primary concern or need for me to at this point in time.

I mean I use Windows cause the specific games I play are only playable on Windows. I think a lot of people are in the camp of only switching when it’s not a big hindrance.

BlueSky is something I’d use more, but it’s a pretty big time investment to get started as a new user. First you need to find peers with similar interests to even get started or convince some of your friends to hop to the platform with you.

Just commenting or posting without trying to connect with others first is just not the most fun experience. It often feels like you’re speaking into the void with no assurance you’ll even get a reaction or response back. Contrast that with smaller Fediverse instances like Wafrn where engagement is much higher, albeit with a higher technical knowledge niche audience like Lemmy, which could easily be a barrier to entry.

What smaller instances do right, is that they give people more ways to express themselves, the barrier to interaction feels much lower, and I know my voice isn’t just lost in the void since I can go to the ‘active’ feed and see my post sequentially there next to other people’s posts. Sometimes it can feel a bit awkward for me if I post something light hearted and the person that posts just before/after you shares something more serious. I still mostly prefer this shared feed though that will include my friends posts as well as new posts.

Some things I wish they did a bit differently was the reply system, since if I’m scrolling through recent posts it’ll show me the same post and their reply threads back to back in reverse order. So it’s not just bumping the post to the top of the feed, which I don’t mind, but the same post may appear multiple times back to back for each back and forth reply rather than being a single continuing thread.

This thread isn’t being very helpful one way or the other, because we’re all talking about different snippets of information about driving.

The law, in certain states, is to go the speed of traffic if you’re in the left lane. In other states, it’s to keep the left lane clear unless to pass.

The rules of the road in general is to follow signage and drive at the speed which feels safe based on the conditions of the road.

In some places, the conditions of the road can be good enough that it’s not a major concern to go even five miles over. In other places, driving the speed limit could actually be dangerous since that’s too fast depending on the time of day, the season, or due to wear on the road itself.

What makes something useful to you? Does it need to be something done or learned purely for the sake of profits? Does it need to be cold and unfeeling data for it to matter?

I think the leadership is less socially conservative compared to the past, but they represent some very conservative bases so they more or less are having to crawl progress forward or they risk a schism.

The previous pope, Pope Francis, stacked the Vatican with more progressive leaning cardinals. I believe Pope Leo will be following in Pope Francis’ footsteps in terms of appointments.

Both likes and dislikes, imo. Bad actors and their bots can make it appear as though their stance is a widely held belief, they can dog pile dissidents, they often attack a straw-person for a point you never made to pull others against you and derail the conversation, etc.

With user level tools at your disposal, such as on BlueSky, you can at least coordinate a response to flag potential bad actors and even have the options to mute/block them by default. If your account were to be hacked and publishing disruptive content which was not something you would post, then your account could end up on these mute/block lists and you’d need to communicate the issue with the individuals that maintain these mute/block lists.

I feel that half the problem is pushy people and the other half is those same people getting FOMO.

A normal person isn’t going to care, but people that see legitimately everything as ‘their prerogative to anything they want’ are the types that are going to have anger, coursing in their veins, the second they get a whiff of something ‘exclusive’ that they are not privy to.

When you tax these big companies, they may try to move to another state, but if it’s coming at a federal level it’s not something a company can get away from without exiting the market as a whole. Which, would be a foolish choice for any company to make if they want to retain the money they made in that economy. They can’t exactly cash out if they are in the stock market for instance. Furthermore, any company that would like to leave would leave behind a hole in the market for a competitor to fill.

If companies flee to Canada for instance but are not already in the Canadian market, then they are having to compete against existing companies in that market. They may falsely assume that the consumers there will have the same buying preferences that they have in the US. This was the case for Starbucks for instance when they were trying to enter the Italian coffee market a while back and failed as a result of them not trying to understand local demands.

There’s a bit of a misunderstanding of how money works in macro economics. A competent government doesn’t run out of money, effectively, since they have power over the money supply. Now, you can’t really just print more money in the long run and expect everything to work out, but if your money is backed by assets then ‘you’, the government, can spend it to fuel the economy.

Money spent = The economy keeps spinning

Money not spent = Great Depression

Money being spent is such a good thing for the economy, that it is the entire reason most country’s economies want a little bit of inflation ~1-2%. When the economy is put in a state where it is propped up by big corporations, those corporations not spending money actually slows down the economy and in some ways actually lowers their potential to earn more money down the line.

Money not getting spent means there is less money to go around to upskill the workforce, there’s less projects getting started, and less jobs means less money getting created by work.

It’s feasible by taxing corporations more, that’s the important part.

You don’t necessarily need to compete with China if your panels are made with more ethical and sustainable business practices. In theory you make a deal with your allies to buy yours because you went the extra mile to do it right. You’d want other goods in such a deal though if you want to take the pressure off of China because they are able to produce theirs via less sustainable practices.

On the grand scale, we’re pretty late in terms of manufacturing to compete with China unless we did something more drastic like convincing a lot of people to live and work in the US. We could be a bit protectionist about our fledgling industries if we want to scale manufacturing more, but that will bring some trading trade-offs with any countries that we don’t have a trade deal with.

Our economy is mostly service oriented because we did all this offshore manufacturing decades ago, but now workers have less access to manufacturing jobs although there is still room in the market for our manufacturing sector to grow.

Nuclear power, solar/wind/hydro/thermal? power, public transit projects, forest management and other ecological projects that can all create jobs.

Which battery project in particular are you saying is a failure? Can you provide a source for what makes it a failure?

I’ve heard recently that solar panels have been having breakthroughs that extend their useable-life.

I’m sure ramping up and subsidizing local production of solar panels could make it more eco-friendly. However, I’m personally interested in nuclear power, specifically getting thorium reactor projects going.

Greenists would open up newer green industries and create new infrastructure projects. With all the help being thrown around the might not even be people going hungry or ending up on the streets.

I feel people should instead say they’re neat/organizational freaks. The idea actually comes across accurately that way rather than making people actually believe you have a neurological condition.

Hey now, those “market forces” are actually the work of the wonderful ‘Invisible Hand’! Which is of course the work of God and is definitely not being manipulated by all those billionaires behind the curtain over there…

When education is purposefully defunded and left to rot for decades now, is it really that surprising things are the way they are? When voters are more educated, they tend to vote Democrat.

If a country wants to prevent this, then it needs protections that can’t go away for education. Furthermore, media companies need to be held to higher standards of reporting, and at this point I feel that influencers should fall under that bucket as well.

Personally, I don’t hate the idea of tying the ability to vote behind getting any Associates Degree. With the caveat that the college would need to be free and accessible to anyone that wishes to go, with a room and food expenses covered to accommodate people. I feel this is a fairer way to get Aristotle’s idea of restricting voting to the educated.

Severance be like: