Probably just get a military contractor to do it anyway

I think technically he could order someone with the legal authority to use lethal force to do that. So probably the NSA or CIA.

Is the implication here that adult women snuggle/wrestle with their friends? Outside of porn videos?

If this is a transition from how I live now to never needing to work again, I’m guessing the first 6 months to a year would just be disbelief and slacking. Video games, TV/YouTube, etc.

I’d probably do more of the things I do with my limited off time: gardening, taking care of family & pets, taekwondo.

Honestly have no idea what I’d do once I became accustomed to it. Maybe travel? Participate in local politics more? Volunteer? I would definitely have a sense that I needed to do something to make my life “worth it” that I currently get from working to provide for my family.

It’s definitely a result of conditioning, not some fundamental truth of the universe. But nearly 50 years of that conditioning is hard to break overnight.

Lemmy for good content and discussion. Reddit still has niche fan communities that will probably never migrate over here, but I can always hope.

I’ll let others address the “enshittification” angle but I thought I’d point out that “shareholder value uber allies” is a relatively recent … “innovation” … in economic theory, brought about by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Milton Friedman in the last half of last century:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-made-chicago-school-so-influential-antitrust-policy

The rethinking of what the boards of companies are supposed to do (from maximize stakeholder value to maximize shareholder value) and how they can operate (from requiring justification to approve mergers to requiring justification to block mergers) really took off with them, and exploded when former union boss Ronald Reagan found “religion” (because Nancy’s pussy was just that good) and ruined the economy for workers.

Lots of other people contributed, including Clinton after he “won” the 1992 election with 40% of the vote due to Perot splitting the Republican vote. His campaign of fiscal conservatism but without less bigotry became the model for the Democratic Party for the next two decades.

Anyway, Biden’s FTC is finally working to help workers again, which might even release the death grip of the Chicago School from our economy. We’ll see after November I guess.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/fact-sheet-ftcs-proposed-final-noncompete-rule

I’m sure this will come if the wrong way but if you’re genuinely concerned about discovering diversity of thought, you’re going to have to tell us what your positions are for example.

I’m all for finding diversity, but so often what people who post these are looking for is an echo chamber. Like if you’re really wanting to be challenged, and you’re a conservative, go to https://socialistworker.org/ and read up.

But if what you’re concerned about is the nerds in Lemmy seem to be left leaning, that’s just the nature of smart creative people. We value skills and creativity over hierarchy and structure.

The Gate

Yeah I’d try it once. I mean I’m sure I accidentally tasted it when my wife was lactating but I never took a big swig.

Don’t get to excited about 1%

https://youtu.be/F200wpEpJ4w

NdGT points out that 1% difference in DNA has within it somewhere the difference between chimps and humans. Think about that 1% between us and the post humans that come after us, or aliens that are out there already.

I’d make phenomenal amounts of money available to states to implement gun safety legislation at the state level. Red flag laws, domestic violence, background checks, training requirements, locks & storage, etc.

If I have enough Congressional support I’d do head-to-toe Article III reform, add a bunch of courts at every level, maybe add a level between the appellate and supreme, and get a couple more Justices on SCOTUS to cover the added workload of supervising the courts at the level below SCOTUS. There’s currently more circuits than Justices so a couple of them have responsibility to review multiple jurisdictions which I think makes for… challenges.

It’s the hand these lawyers have been dealt to try to make this argument fly. They are duty bound to provide the best representation they can for their client, and if somehow this completely bonkers argument wins the day, I think that’s pretty much it for American democracy.

Or Biden has all this on standby just in case…

The answer is “vote” but not just once. Not just for federal elections. Every election, you should be there. Show up to candidate forums and bother your current electeds.

Every government is like a ship of various size, it takes a while to see the turn even start, let alone have the course actually get corrected. The bigger the government, the harder it can be to get long lasting positive change accomplished. (This isn’t a “small government is better” thing either, it’s just how large organizations work.)

If you can, run for office. If you can’t, find someone you trust who can and support them. Not just Congress or president or governor. City council, county government, school board, on and on…

I will legit try to find countries with constitutions and parliaments that I could relocate to to live and work. The American constitutional Republic will be over if Trump becomes President again.

He’ll certainly start his retribution with the big fish of anti Trump people and organizations, but it won’t take long for it to “trickle down” to everyday people as well.

I’m lucky enough that it’s feasible for me to find work in my field outside the US. Others aren’t so lucky.

The problem honestly is your concept of hormones is incomplete. There are no hormones that only do one thing. They might have a primary function. But they all have secondary and tertiary functions. They all regulate other hormones. Evolution doesn’t do single functions.

If you knock down a “fight” hormone you’re probably going to mess up the homeostasis of the body in other ways. You can probably “fix” that artificially, but you’ll be constantly chasing the next side effect. Humans are chemical Rube Goldberg machines of infinite order. Disrupt one thing and it all goes out of whack.

I mean Serling and Sterling are so close it seems stupid to me to call it Mandela effect. More like humans gonna human.

Wait… do capitalists genuinely think workers derive positive feelings of some sort from the idea that we’re increasing shareholder value?

I mean, I definitely think in terms of increasing shareholder value, but only because that’s what keeps me employed and sometimes gets me bonuses and raises. I know that if I stop increasing shareholder value long enough I’ll get canned.

But at no point have I ever looked at the stock price of my multinational, gigantic corporate employer and felt happy or proud or whatever this schmuck must think we (used to? should?) feel.

Unchecked, unanswerable power corrupts. On lemmy everyone is free to create their own sub. Heck they’re free to create their own instance. That makes the “power” of moderators pretty tame.

Compare that to the power a corporate CEO has over the typical employee. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s redefinition of the primary responsibility of the directors of a corporation to be “maximize shareholder value” instead of “maximize stakeholder value.”

Even in (small d democratic) politics, at least an aggrieved voter can run to replace a corrupt, abusive politician. Not many companies, probably no publicly traded ones, have a mechanism for the workers to replace the management. That’s where major corruption by power can be witnessed.

It’s easy to focus on the negative, especially because that sells more toilet paper and beer on TV (and Internet sites).

But as Mr Rogers instructed us, when you see bad things going on, look for the helpers. There are a lot of people out there working to put the seams back together even as others are picking at them.

So far, the seam fixers have been winning. I think they’ll still win. For all its downsides, there is a huge upside to globalization: the wealthy people have more to gain from a mostly peaceful planet than from a mostly war stricken planet. Now, there’s profit in that “mostly” that is - to my way if thinking - bad. It’s something that (small “d”) democratic people should push back against.

Like, think about the American bullshit in Iraq and Afghanistan. We actually stopped being at war in those places in the recent past. We don’t have large deployments of active duty troops out there killing poor brown people. That’s good.

Biden also seems like the most likely guy to strongly resist the inevitable calls for war from the military industrial political media complex. Not only does he have personal experience with the loss that comes from war. He has decades of experience in government which makes him less likely to be hornswoggled by generals who want to blow shit up. (If he can purge all the white supremacists from the military that will also help.)

Don’t only look at the bad news. There’s good news out there, too.

I love how all the people talking about how semi auto guns have been around for X years and blah blah blah completely ignore the massive uptick in production, sale, and distribution of those guns in the past 30-40 (or so).

People have more or less been able to buy assault style semi auto rifles for a long time, but they only “recently” (I guess 30-40 years might not be so recent?) started actually buying them in large numbers. Mostly thanks to the NRA, if I had to point a finger.

The problem is that a really angry or disturbed or whatever person with access to a high rate of fire weapon and lots of ammo (because they’ve been told that next election Jack Johnson or John Jackson will be taking their guns) can literally just pick it up and go kill half a dozen or more people in 30 minutes. There’s nothing we can do to intercept that. (And “good guys with guns” have a terrible track record, including cops.)

We even had a little experiment in the 90s where people were buying a lot of these and then we banned them. Mas shootings (4+ victims according to the FBI if I recall correctly) had been going up but then they went down until …

W and his Republican stooges (or maybe he was the stooge?) let the ban expire, mass shootings started ticking up.

The drivers that lead people to mass violence probably are the “root” of the problem, and I would guess hypothetically that if we could snap our fingers and solve those it wouldn’t matter how many or what type of guns there are out there. The problem is that we aren’t even trying to fix those problems, and the Republican Party is actively making them worse, AND we’re making these literal weapons of war easily available to everyone.