I think most people thought that “the” line was crossed at some point several lines ago, but when there wasn’t an obvious consensus that “the” line had been crossed at that particular time, people kept looking around and waiting for others to say that “the” line had been crossed. That’s how we’ve all allowed it to get to such an insane point. We’re all waiting for a revolutionary instead of being the leader we need. I don’t think any of us feels qualified and capable.

I’m gonna guess that this would amount to like $100 per person per year? And in exchange my planet will be less inhabitable, prices on everything will go up, quality will go down, safety will plummet, rights will vanish, our place on the international stage will be forever revoked, and unemployment will skyrocket which will increase crime out of desperation to survive.

I don’t think I’d take that deal for $10k. They need to fire themselves. They’re not the department of government efficiency, they’re the department of stripping the government for parts. They’re cutting shit that pays dividends.

This, starlink regarding Russia invading Ukraine, and I’m gonna guess spacex regarding government contracts? Idk about that 3rd one being investigated but it’s definitely one of the many conflicts of interest.

Actually I did. Stop being obtuse. Scroll down to ranking by downloads/views per month.

You could try looking on podscribe. You know, the source cited by the article. Because they compile data across platforms.

You’re calling me stupid because I respectfully informed you that your source didn’t apply to all podcasts and then went a step further and recommended a better (and free) platform to enjoy podcasts from? Not cool.

I don’t really care if this podcast is #1 or not. I care that Spotify is bad at podcasts and I like to share that there are better ways because I myself didn’t know any better until somebody told me.

Spotify is not the home of all podcasts, and it’s actually a really shitty way to get your podcasts imo. Other people pointed me toward AntennaPod (which is free and open source) and it’s just straight up better. There are several advantages, but the only one I needed to hear about was not needing to connect to a server to be able to listen to a podcast I had already downloaded to my phone. If I didn’t listen to a podcast for a couple seconds from my home wifi before getting in the car, I’d just be driving for a few minutes in silence until Spotify could verify that I was a paying customer before they’d let me listen to free content already downloaded to my device. Ridiculous.

Not shitting on you, btw. Just shitting on Spotify and hopefully introducing some people to a thing that’s made my life better.

Yeah but stupid people are plentiful and overly confident that they can spitball a better idea for solving the problem than literal experts with decades of expertise can because “they’re too close to the problem” or “they’re paid off by big [fill in the blank] to gum up any progress” or whatever. They just don’t believe in complicated solutions or complicated problems because most people aren’t doing anything particularly complicated with their lives. Incurious people aren’t interested in any explanations or nuance.

Same. I had even paid for the paid tier of my 3rd party app because it was such a good value to me that I wanted the devs to have some of my money. Thanks to that app, I was on the site more and pretty much never via computer anymore.

I think it was for the best though. Quality over quantity here. I find it to be far less toxic on Lemmy overall. It’s like how people tend to be nicer in a small town because you know you’re gonna run into these people over and over again, but the big city you came from had more variety in stuff to check out. Definitely a trade-off, but I think it’s worth it to have this much more pleasant space that isn’t so packed with content as to be addictive. Good vibes.

The consequences of trump will have residual effects. The damage cannot be undone in one fell swoop. The country is a big boat and it takes a long fucking time to change directions even if you immediately start steering it the other way.

Then there’s the whole topic of friends and allies wondering if we can be trusted in the long term. Why make deals with us if we’re gonna just elect a stupid asshole who will reneg on anything and everything that isn’t immediately beneficial to that specific person? A lot of countries likely considered drastic changes to policy with us, but decided to hold off until the 2020 election, and then breathed a sigh of relief when we didn’t reelect the dipshit. Fast forward four short years and see that we went back to the dipshit despite all obvious, available information saying that only a fucking moron who is trying to summon the end of the world would allow such a thing; would you trust a country that elected trump, took a break from him, and then elected him back in again? This really isn’t about lackluster democrats and their performance in elections; would you want to make long term plans with a person who was so chaotic? Denmark won’t forget us openly considering taking Greenland by force. Panama won’t forget us talking about taking the canal. Canada won’t forget us talking about annexing them. The EU won’t forget the tariffs. Mexico won’t forget the deportations. We’re alienating ourselves, burning through all of our political capital like trump burns through every business venture. He will fuck every relationship up and the dollar will be fucking worthless as a result if he doesn’t just fucking stop.

I legitimately have zero clue what the country and the world in general look like four years from now, but I can tell you that it will be bad and the bleeding will take years to stop and decades to heal. Even if this stopped today, Pandora’s box is open. If trump died on the toilet today, vance would continue what’s happening.

The entire line of succession isn’t even the problem. The experiment is over. Oligarchs and their pet autocrat run everything and they’re not interested in what you have to say about it. If they decide to just suspend all elections and appoint all elected offices and consolidate all power to the executive, what can really be done to stop it? It would take a revolution, but the bastard cops have fucking tanks with which to kill us all. No other country will come to help us because our military is far more advanced than all others and we’re geographically very easy to defend. Our own country has us by the balls and the twisting is just getting started.

I wish I could be so optimistic as to believe that things could be okay in four years. A lot of people will be deported and/or killed before then, so even if it did end up being okay for you or me, that’s still gonna be too late for them.