Patriotism doesnt automatically mean america.

My point is that your entire perspective is already warped. You have no way to get me and you to communicate and effectively work together. The very fact that you and I are disagreeing is the very point I’m trying to make.

Now an American who discusses things with me, that’s different. Because we can at least hold commonality between our country, and both of us would benefit from our country moving forward and progressing.

I know you skimp on your education system

Exactly. You hate us, look down upon us, etc. etc… That’s fine. I’ll work with the people who are willing to talk with me, work with me, and think about the betterment of our country. I honestly don’t need people like you in my life.

And if you want to talk to Americans about american problems I suggest a less international community dedicated to such musings, instead of self centeredly derailing a random, at best tangentially related comment section.

This is a discussion about Patriotism. IE: things we do for the love of our country. If we don’t share a country, there’s not much we can share being Patriotic about, now is there? And thus, the discussion goes sideways and there’s no hope of us ever possibly coordinating with each other.

Alas: such is life.

Again, why are you even talking about america?

Because this is a topic about Patriotism and who is actually going to help my country. And building a culture that encourages people to help my country.

but outside your bubble

I’m happy with “Americans” being my bubble. I honestly don’t need to care about others, and as you point out there’s plenty enough to worry about if we keep it to Americans alone.

SMBC-comics is obviously itself an American comic strip as well (A PH.D who lives in USA in any case), so you’re coming over here to talk about an American comic, talking about American issues that’s bringing up American political discussion and… like shitting on it? Okay, no one asked you to come over.

Now my question to you is: what are you doing in this topic? Are you seriously trying to discourage me from improving the country where I live? Or are you trying to say your country is better or something? I don’t even know what your perspective is.

If you’re not American then we don’t have any shared political system for which we can improve America. And therefore we have no serious system to help each other out.

None of this works unless we’re working to build the same thing or same concept.

Good luck building up a coalition of people who will cooperate with you.

And worse: good luck politically defeating those who are smart enough to use basic psychology to coordinate the masses. Its not evil to do so, its just practicality. We know how people act and how they think. Its not so hard to then use psychology and sociology to build up our own coalitions.

As Terry Pratchett wrote in The Hogfather : We tell little likes like Santa Clause because we’re training children to believe in the big lies like Truth and Justice. And only when we all believe in that stuff can it possibly work. “We’re the best country in the world” is part of that, its a little lie that helps smooth over problems and helps us work together. And in my experience, its effective at it.

Last time I checked, we were able to deploy the Office of Censorship to censor US Postal Mail. Conscript Disney and Loony Tunes to build up a massive database of wartime propaganda. Use it to influence the entirety of the US Civilians. Use it to drum up support for War Bonds to help expand the US Debt to pay for the war, raise taxes to 90% on the highest end and build a better country while defeating both Fascism and Communism.

We, as a country, decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. And not only that, we also got rid of these dangerous emergency powers (of explicit Censorship / War Information / Propaganda) before we corrupted our society into an irreversible state.

And therein lies the problem with people who just yell “fascism” whenever they disagree with someone. Yall obviously don’t know the history of this country.

We need to build a shared culture so that we can work together.

My house will become the best house should be a message we all can get around. Otherwise, why should I work with you to build society?

If you don’t like shared work or shared culture to begin with, it’s a bit problematic in that your own political ideologies are destined to die. At the very minimum, your ideology must be self sustaining.

I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of personal computing device would fit in these power envelope.

I dunno if this is what I want, but I like the idea anyway. ESP32 is like 500mW class or so (very rough estimate because I don’t care to look it up right now lol). So you can get more than 24-hours of processing with 4x AA cells or 18650 Li-ion.

I feel like there’s something ‘under’ the classic smartphone that might still be useful as a personal gadget. But alas, smartphones are an always in your pocket device today. Bluetooth keyboard + Phone would be a more practical note taking application.

Maybe this same thing, but instead as a minimalistic SSH shell for computer IT tasks? I like the design of this things keyboard at least.

It got worse.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/elon-musk-vs-organic-farmers-bastrop/

As it turns out, Elon Musk had a bunch of farms + horses from all the land he bought in the 2022-era. Elon Musk was actively trying to get rid of horses on his new property.

Its not that Elon Musk was going to “buy her a horse”. He had tons of spare horses and was looking to dump them onto someone else.

Richard Cory

A surprising poem on a dark subject matter. Perhaps one of the best poems that demonstrate how mysterious other people are and how hard it is to truly connect with strangers.

No one is talking about automated theorem provers (see 4 coloring theorem) or symbolic solvers (see Mathematica). These tools already revolutionized math decades ago.

The only thing that came out in the past year or two are LLMs. Which is clearly overhyped bullshit.

Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.

But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.

Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There’s always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.

Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that’s good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I’ll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that’s really not much money in the great scheme of things.

At very least, Kagi now has a “Fediverse search”, and now that “search-lemmy” seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain’t so good at this yet).

I’m just gonna plug “Kagi” here.

Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but… as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I’ve personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.

Its an all-stock deal.

Meaning its down to like $47 Billion, last time I checked. As the stock price drops, the cheaper the pay package gets!!

Elon Musk sued the founders of Tesla for the right to be called a “Founder” of Tesla. Then he fired the founders and pretends that he’s the one who innovated everything.

Elon Musk goes on for the next 10+ years to become the richest man in the world with over $100 Billion net worth. As it turns out, faking it works. Well… until you need to design a new car and the best Elon can do is make a Cybertruck.

I mean just that.

Open source developers are not paid in money. One of the other major motivators is ideology, so that becomes a major motivator in practice.

I mean, I don’t have much problem with people disagreeing with me. But I’m pretty openly pro-capitalist, though I’m not a dumbass libertarian.

I recognize the need for the “capitalist edge cases” (externalities, monopolies, etc. etc.) that must be regulated and fixed for the system to work. I also recognize that we’ve failed to regulate externalities (ex: CO2 emissions), and failed to regulate monopolies / anticompetitive behavior (see Google).

So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.

We just gotta do the same thing today.

Overall, I accept that the commies / tankies were here first, and the history of Lemmy makes it clear why that happened.

Lemmy, the social network, started off as a leftist hangout spot.

From the perspective of “Open Source developers who are anti-Reddit pro-Fediverse”, it makes a lot of sense for Leftist/Communist and anti-corporation leaning people to hang out.

After all, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more driven to action (ie: write tens-of-thousands of lines of code and release for free) people get. In some regards, its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology. IE: Free Software is driven by ideology, not by money. So you get ideological people, especially when the software is small and niche.

The July 2023 Reddit Blackout was a big challenge for Lemmy’s old community and the new community, as the new community basically “invaded” a large scale leftist hangout spot. But hopefully we all learn to work together and the nature of our neighbors moving forward.

I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion. Which is enough of an alliance to keep us together, for now.

It does mean that we’ll have to keep up with the far-left old-timers on this network who wish to push their viewpoints. But they are the legacy and the start of Lemmy in some respects, even as the hypergrowth (starting in July 2023) has moderated the community pretty severely.

The layoffs were known last week though.

Sure, the news is finally talking about the layoffs, but people were locked out of their badges and complaining last week about this. So now its official today, but it was public knowledge last week when that price declined dramatically.

So the employees were nominally on the books until today. Big woop. They stopped working a week ago and complained about it online. You can’t hide a mass of 10,000+ sad and angry employees talking shit about Tesla. The stock moved on that before the official layoff announcement today.

Zoom out about a week.

Its fair to say that last week, TSLA was oversold and is now bouncing back from that. But the -55% profits and -$2.3ish Billion FCF are bad numbers.

TSLA is down from $180, where it was just a few weeks ago. $140 prices this past week apparently was too low, but there’s no chance in hell that TSLA goes back up to pre-Q1 announcement numbers. Q1 2024 was awful. Declining sales around the world in all major areas: China, Europe, AND USA. They’re weak everywhere.

Human hermits?