Another point here, Amazon has really thin profit margins on their core business (not counting AWS, etc. Just the online shopping). If it weren’t absolutely gargantuan, it would fail. It’s only profitable because of the logistical efficiency it has achieved, exploitation (of workers, cheap goods from China, etc.), and absolutely massive economies of scale. Similar to Walmart.
Recommended reading: People’s Republic of Walmart. All for nationalizing - would be better for everyone.
Oh, totally. Just like to bring up that our grandparents/great grandparents were getting nasty even before widespread use of birth control, etc. Young folks today are having a lot less sex, or so I’ve heard, largely due to difficulties finding partners, stress, etc.
And yet they had more premarital sex than millenials/gen z
Edit: can’t find the source where I had heard that. Maybe not true. This study shows the rates are lower than for millennials, but close. https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/hemez-nonmarital-sex-by-age-25-boomers-millennials-fp-17-11.html
Grab em by the vespussi
You can either use AI to just vomit dubious information at you or you can use it as a tool to do stuff. The more specific the task, the better LLMs work. When I use LLMs for highly specific coding tasks that I couldn’t do otherwise (I’m not a [good] coder), it does not make me worse at critical thinking.
I actually understand programming much better because of LLMs. I have to debug their code, do research so I know how to prompt it best to get what I want, do research into programming and software design principles, etc.
All is dependent on what instances your home instance is federated with. Federation/defederation by your home instance determines what you see in All.
Szmer.info is federated with lemmy.world, so you would be able to see politics@lemmy.world, which has US politics. Unless you’ve filtered things out of your feed, but that’s different.
Whoa that’s really odd. You might submit an issue on github, if you want: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Huh. Comments shouldn’t be affected, as I understand it, just posts from defederated instances won’t show up. For instance, .ml is defederated from any and all porn instances - so porn doesn’t show up in my feed. I wonder if it could be a delay in the comments showing up, not actually an absence of those comments?
Either way, plenty of good instances to join that are less defederated than .ml
The particular instance doesn’t matter too much as long as it hasn’t defederated from other instances you care about & vice versa - since you can still see, post, & interact with content from other instances. I made accounts on .ml and .dbzer0.
The peer pressure (and stupid broken updates from MS) finally got me to install linux about 8mos into using lemmy. It’s pretty great, though - wish I’d done it sooner.
Just adding to this a bit for context. Demi isn’t a sexual orientation like gay, straight, bi, etc. But it is a label for how people experience attraction within their sexual orientation. So OP you definitely are in the minority, but you are certainly not weird. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demisexuality
It’s exhausting. And trying to convince someone like that of anything is basically impossible. I have had painstaking, well-reasoned and well-sourced political discussions with many people like that. Funny thing is, I can almost always get the to agree to progressive or socialist policy goals. But, there are all these ideological land mines and, if you trip one, then they fall back into their defensive web of miscellaneous falsehoods and conspiracies.
Validation of their feelings and a return to a mythologized past. Try having a reasoned political discussion with someone like this:
Well back in my day things were just better. America was the best and we didn’t have to apologize for that. And the blacks and mexicans and what not didn’t complain so damn much because folks were wired different back then and there wasn’t nothin to complain about. Chuck Berry. You know Chuck Berry? Greatest rock and roller of all time and he was colored. Didn’t nobody have anything to say about it, he was just damned good at guitar. Now the kids - black kids - listen to all sorts of damnable noise and them from the cities in gangs shooting each other up and corrupting good white kids in the small towns and suburbs getting them into drugs. We’ll be lucky if we dont end up like another Chicago. And they whine and complain about racism, but we had a black president and look how that turned out. Granted he was a muslim and not even a citizen, but try tellin them that. I mean hell look at what Hillary did to all them folks at Benghazi - just let them muslims kill all of em, probably wouldn’t have been politically correct to fight back. Dumb broad even wrote it all down - the emails. Had her dead to rights - she should’ve hanged but thats what you get when you have all those corrupt democrat senators in charge of the kangaroo court. And those democrat cities just keep letting illegals stay because they know they’ll vote democrat - they don’t care how many of them are raping and murdering women and kids long as they get their votes. Not even just the mexicans anymore, you got those communist gangs from venezuela taking over whole apartment complexes and the defunded police can’t do anything about it. You know something was wrong with that Biden election - not just illegals voting but I saw on Fox that they were sending out whole reams of mail-in ballots to blacks and college kids and what have you. And then they take all the conservative ballots and conveniently lose boxes of them. Maybe Elon’s going to fix it now since he knows all about those voting machines. Liberals voting for dead people too, but that’s been on the news since Bush - I don’t know why nobody does anything about that. Now you know what’s really racist is planned parenthood - nobody hates babies, especially black babies, as much as planned parenthood. They kill more black babies than anything and the demonrats just keep convincing folks that its OK. Makes me sick that we kill hundreds of thousands of babies every year and i dont care what color they are. You know another thing? We knew which bathroom to use - we figured out a genius method. I’ll tell you: drop your drawers and look down. Then you’ll know. And you’ll know if you should be on a mens or womens track team and if you should wear dresses. It’s probably because all the kids have autism from the vaccines these days - now I guess they’re mutants because of that COVID mRNA vaccine too - but not me. No sir. I’ll stick with the DNA god gave me. That’s probably why all the boys think they’re girls now. Or cats and try to piss in litterboxes at school. People knew who and what they were once. They knew their place, worked hard, and didn’t complain. Now if we can just get Trump in for a few more terms then he’ll set everything straight and get rid of all those regulations so I can afford eggs again.
That is roughly paraphrased from my parents, grandparents, other family, some senile guy at the grocery store who wouldn’t stop telling the cashier about Chuck Berry, etc. They don’t have rational political goals, usually. These folks are genuinely operating on an entirely separate set of facts and assumptions to us. Their brains are co-opted by decades of counterfactual propagandized conspiracy theories, which are too numerous and ingrained to easily disabuse them of. They are faced with an increasingly complex world and are constantly told versions of events that are terrifying or disgusting to them and spoonfed the solution: fascism, piece by piece, until you get MAGA.
Oh of course I agree. That’s just what the nestle asshole said.
That’s good. Boycotts can be effective!
Nestle has an extremely safe, risk-averse marketing strategy. In part due to their various scandals, they try really hard to be family friendly and boring.
That said, they are not worse than other food and beverage conglomerates.
child labor: mars & others were also implicated. These companies were most likely unaware of the child labor being used to harvest cocoa. The way it works is there are wholesalers in Africa who buy cocoa from processing facilities who buy fresh cocoa pods from local farms. These wholesalers advertised themselves as being child-labor-free. The farms they buy from were using child labor. This is a problem with capitalism exploiting people in the global south, causing perverse incentives, and with companies having limited insight into the full depth of their supply chains.
water is not a human right: The nestle water exec said the quiet part out loud. But, no beverage company believes water is a human right - they just aren’t stupid enough to say that on camera. If they did think it was a human right, they’d be working to ensure universal access to clean water rather than bottling it and shipping it around the world while limiting water access at their extraction points and polluting the water near their factories. Look at what coca cola is doing in mexico - rampant water pollution such that in factory towns Coke is the only safe drink for folks because the water is contaminated. Nestle is bad, but no worse than coca cola.
infant formula scandal: this occurred in the 1970s and was obviously awful. Every major multinational food and beverage conglomerate has stories like this if you look hard enough - this just happens to be a fucked up series of events that got some major media play.
People online scapegoat Nestle, but continue to buy electronics and clothing made with child labor, tree nuts/soda/and other products known to be harmful to watersheds, and many other products from companies which harm people in the global south. This isn’t meant to defend nestle, but to remind everyone that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Nestle is not anywhere close to an uniquely evil company. Not even in its own industry.
Things won’t get to that point, most likely. Things can get really bad and still recover. If it’s an apocalyptic scenario, better invest in a stock of bullets and a bunker.
Finance-wise, have an emergency fund and well-diversified portfolio. This is not financial advice, and I’m not a professional, but this is what I’d do with retirement funds and personal stock accounts:
Emergency fund: if you already have this handled, then look at your investments. If you dont have an emergency fund, do everything you can to save up at least 3-6months of living expenses - ideally in a high-yield savings account to protect your money from inflation.
US stocks: Don’t be over-exposed to US stocks, especially riskier ones. Historically, bonds and foreign stocks have been recommended to balance your portfolio, but many people have ignored that in recent years due to the dominance of US large-cap stocks, especially the tech sector. Ensure you’re diversified in accordance with your risk tolerance/retirement time-horizon.
Non-US Stocks: It would be good to have a non-US ETF or index fund with developing and emerging markets. It may not perform as well, but can potentially hedge against US market volatility. The counterpoint here is that US stocks are globally interconnected enough that getting non-US stocks would overexpose you to that part of the market. Caveat emptor, do research.
Bonds: bond ETFs/funds, I-bonds (inflation protected securities, you can buy $10k per year), and automated bond ladders can give you steady returns. Remember buying bonds directly is fairly illiquid - your money will be stuck in the bond for the duration of the bond’s term.
Cash: Inflation isn’t crazy right now. Probably wouldn’t be bad to have more cash than normal sitting in high-yield accounts (earning around 4% APY right now) since the market is likely to dip. Maybe consider liquidating some investments that are riskier than you’d like. I wouldn’t really advocate trying to time the market, but also it doesn’t seem like a bad time to be a little heavier on cash imo.
Check out Boglehead 3 fund portfolios and their variations. Imo it is time to be safe and boring. If you have a long time until retirement, don’t panic - ride it out and consider rebalancing your portfolio to the standard, oft-recommended asset mixes. If your retirement timeline is short, make sure that you aren’t over-exposed to risky investments like stocks.
“BEANIS” heh heh heh