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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 6th, 2024

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  • Old appliances broke, but they were made to be easy to fix so our grandparents could just swap out the broken parts. I helped my dad replace the compressor on an older fridge as a kid and the heating elements on my grandma’s toaster. I remember my dad taking me to some locally owned mom and pop hardware store where we could buy replacement parts for old appliances off the shelf. My parents still have the toaster, but that store closed down and new stuff isn’t made to be fixable anymore (most likely due to planned obsolescence thanks to late-stage-capitalism).

    On a tangent, when you think about it, throwing an entire toaster away because one heating coil burned out or throwing awag an entire fridge just because the compressor gave out is not rational. But if you tell people we should have the freedom to buy repairable appliances then they look at you like you are crazy. To me, it is the other way around. Sustainability isn’t political or a luxury, it is an inevitabe, unstoppable force of equilibrium.


  • He has potential, for sure, but putting the blame on one person was a massive whiff, especially when his own sources had spelled out the real problem multiple times:

    "When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.”

    On February 6th 2019, Gomes said that he believed that search was “getting too close to the money,” and ended his email by saying that he was “concerned that growth is all that Google was thinking about.”

    “Growth is all that Google was thinking about”. Companies prioritize quality and customer value when they are worker owned or trying to corner a market, but once they have a monopoly that goes out the window. Profit driven monopolies always end up cutting corners and abusing their customers. That is why anti-trust laws are so important and why it is so frustrating that we allow companies to bribe our politicians into eroding our anti-trust protections







  • Many of us are involved in politics outside of voting. I write my congresscritters regularly, usually on matters of foreign affairs, for all the good it does. I donate when I can.

    I hate to be a bad news bear, but calling and writing congress does effectively nothing. When it comes to actual policy (and not empty lip service), politicians only serve donors and lobbyists.

    If we want real change then we will need to replace our broken and corrupt two party system with a modern multiparty democracy






  • Real leftists would advocate for socialism.

    True, but there are there differing approaches to socialism: MLs want authoritarian socialism (government runs everything), while Democratic Socialists usually want a hybrid of market socialism (co-ops) and government run socialism for needs that free market co-ops cannot address. And then there are libertarian socialists who want only worker owned co-ops and syndicates. Finally, we have SocDems that want indirect socialism where strong regulations and labor protections try to achieve socialist goals through capitalism.