People bitch and moan about things–irrespective of forum–because they have both things to bitch and moan about, and the time and energy to spend bitching and moaning. That suggests that things are pretty fucked for them. Sure, there are some people who lie, and their bitching and moaning is for show, but chances are that something is fucked in their lives that they want to do that.

To assume that a forum can be created to channel their bitching and moaning about fucked things away from the public eye implies several things: it is okay for things to be fucked for some people, and those people need to keep their bitching and moaning in line with rules and shit, or else to themselves. Instead of “I don’t like this, so I’ll either not read it, or I’ll downvote it.” That would be far more reasonable

That implication, that people need to keep their bitching and moaning to a certain format, style guide, and location, is pretty fucked up, because it takes the status quo of the current state and insists that it is correct. (Which, it, very clearly, is not.)

Neither you nor anyone on lemmy get to have a private instance that is still a social network open to the wide world to register on, read, and post on. You pick one or the other. Pretending that you can have both is, of course, what makes you (and the admins and mods sweating so hard) a bootlicker to the people and forces insisting that the status quo is fine, and people need to be ‘more civil’ about how they bitch and moan (read: they need to accept that their fucked state is just fine, so they can be fucked over more).

The french revolution was not a good time for anyone. Did it make things better? I dunno, I wasn’t there. But it happened because things were really fucked for a lot of people. Who are you, to look at history, and say “yeah, they did the French Revolution, but in the end I think it made things worse for people, so they should have just stuck around with the boot on their neck instead?” They didn’t know how things work out, they just knew that their current state was untenable, and needed to be changed. Anarchy and violence suck, for everyone, to be sure, but they suck more for the people who benefit most from there not being anarchy or violence. That’s just tautological.

All the other social network alternatives are owned, operated, and moderated by the problem, so obviously any Lemmy instance owners, admins, and mods cowtowing on Lemmy with respect to how the problem wants things handled is… Bootlicking. Yeah. That’s bootlicking.

If it doesn’t literally break the local laws (which were written by and for the problem in many jurisdictions, so that’s another source of fuckery to birch and moan about), then the mods need to calm their shit and moderate… less. Community and instance rules past that are all nice to haves, not must haves, because, and this is important, they were written by some rando preparing to be a real NIMBYist. If the community wants to laud a guy who did murder as the people’s hero, and laud his methods as the methods of the people, and you don’t like that the community is doing that on your hardware, fucking turn that shit off. The mere existence of large instances that draw the majority of discourse does not mean that the community needs to fucking adhere to the guidelines imposed by the instance admins. The instance is there for the community, not the other way around. It means the instance admins are in the position to be fucking public fucking servants. If they don’t want to shell out the money and expertise to be public servants (which, by the way, means serving the public how the public wants to be served), they need to fuck right off. None of this “start your own instance and run it how you want” bullshit while the old instance still exists makes any fucking sense.

When the people in power act in a way that the people see as not in the people’s interest, that’s when the people are fucking pissed off. If that shit applies to governments and health insurance companies (which it clearly fucking does), why do you think it shouldn’t apply to, oh, I don’t know, Lemmy instances and their stewards?

Completely agree, and will definitely make that change. As soon as Panera Bread starts selling Chunks.

I find that system inconvenient, as it does not inform me of how I should eat any given item. Classification for the purpose of classification is insufficient. However, an alternative that allows me to prepare my ustensils based on the classification is useful, and therefore I propose…

Soup, salad, and sandwich are the three states of food, and they can go through phase transitions. They are closely accompanied by spoon, fork, and knife, respectively.

• A soup is any food that requires a spoon, and thus includes soups, drinks, cereal with milk, etc. Tipping a container is merely the use of the container as a large and unwieldy spoon, a straw is similarly a spoon when its topology is combined with suction.

• A salad then is anything bite sized that can be forked, and one’s hands are little more than fleshy forks, the fingers prehensile tines. Popcorn, salads, cut up steak bites, a handful of cheerios, etc.

• A sandwich is anything that requires it to be cut in order to be consumed, and one’s incisors are merely built-in knives. A sandwich is thus the vast majority of the cube rule’s content, and only because the cube rule focuses on the physical location of the starch. This is, of course, entirely irrelevant when it comes to the consumption of food.

• To observe a phase transition, one can cut up a sandwich without consuming it, thereby turning it into a salad; can drown a salad to turn it into a soup; can freeze a soup to turn it into a sandwich, etc.

Shredded cheese is a salad.

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.