Tribalism I guess. My family, friends, town, country, etc are the good people. The others are bad.

That and bigotry. They’re basically two sides of the same coin though.

It’s amazing how the powers that be have gotten our culture to the point that so many people give zero shits about their fellow humans. People living paycheck to paycheck on median incomes still have the “fuck you; got mine” attitude.

Everybody in this country needs to lift themselves up by the bootstraps and do what I did: have a chronic disease that is so ridiculously expensive to treat that the pharma company pays your deductible and out of pocket max for you so that you’ll stay on it. Then you get actual coverage for the rest of the year!

I’m a software engineer and my health insurance pays out significantly more than my gross pay every year. U-S-A!

Off the top of my head, these are the kinds of things my conservative family members or distant acquaintances would say and agree with:

What if somebody else gets more than me?

What if somebody who doesn’t “deserve” benefits gets them?

Why should I give a shit or have to pay for other people? (Unaware of how insurance itself works)

The economyyyyy!

Does he think Europe has cut-rate health care? Canada?

Assuming we’re talking about one of my fellow Americans? Yes. He’s been conditioned to think that.

People are certainly susceptible to Rosy Retrospection, but let’s not forget that 2023’s word of the year was enshittification for a reason!

I’m glad I got caught up in the great exodus when they fucked over the 3rd party app devs. I’d read Reddit with Apollo, and it was mostly passive consumption of the posts and discussions being thrown out there by the faceless masses.

Here, it feels more like having actual discussions with real people, and I started actively participating right away. (Granted, this place isn’t impervious to bots and trolls, but for now it’s a smaller target at least)

I think you’re probably right, but I also suspect that the upvote button avoids a lot of “this” and “you are so right” replies burying the substantive ones. It’s certainly kept me from making low value or redundant replies in the past.

It’s also interesting to occasionally scroll though my post history and see which comments struck a nerve with fellow lemmings. It’s a secondary simplified version of the social interactions and discussions here.

Sounds like one of those rare cases where engineering and marketing might agree on something.

Have you tried Linux Mint yet?

I recently installed it on a Dell laptop (work) to dual boot, and it seemed pretty much as simple as installing windows.

I’m a daily Linux user and had been using other distros in VMs, but I still wanted to try it.

Paragraph 1: “bad faith” is arguing or acting in an intellectually dishonest way. Like if I were to say this paragraph was written in bad faith, I might accuse you of knowing the term has nothing to do with religion yet still trying to shoehorn it into this whole “religion of LGBT” thing you have going.

Paragraph 2: wat

Also the belief that some groups are inherently superior or gifted. Not a great look in context!

I think the word you’re looking for is culture. You know, the thing where people share ideas and traditions as a group.

And comparing symbols of individual acceptance that certain people are OK to exist with government mandated displays of religion mandated rules seems strange. Almost “both sides.” Almost bad faith.

It’s probably not an uncommon thing for us adult atheists to have been curious children and edgy teenagers.

Yeah my first thought was that this looks like an extremely optimistic take drawn by somebody without the issue.

Even having plans AFTER work can mess things up.

I’d say one step away from an Idiocracy reference, two steps from eugenics, lol.

Insert that photo of a pregnant lady smoking while talking to the news about how something else is making her concerned for her kids.

Yeah, if it’s a problem that our power grid is having distributed green energy connected all over the place, we need to make the damn utilities change.

We have the combination of knowing a little bit about how it works while also not trying to fire a bunch of humans or sell some shiny new product while the getting is good.

They’re all great things to point out and discuss, during primary season.

Well they’re always relevant and worth discussing, but don’t make any sense in the context of the general election.