it’s also due to the consumers sliding into a character from Idiocracy.

I’ve seen more intelligence from consumers in the modern landscape of bullshit and scams than the Reagan Era landscape we hold to such high esteem.

anytime someone posts a link that requires you to pay for the journalism

People subscribing to random newspapers via links on Lemmy would not be a sustainable model for funding local journalism. And - historically - plenty of people did subscribe to local outlets. Plenty still do. Hell, go on Patreon or Substack and see how well the nascent podcast journalism marketplace is doing.

What changed over the last 40 years was a wave of M&As targeting smaller papers to consolidate the news markets. Case in point, my own city of Houston had half a dozen different newspapers chugging along just fine for decades. But because they were small, they were also very cheap. Loose monetary policy in the 90s made buying up papers very cheap. So the Houston Chronicle went around town buying the smaller papers and shutting them down. Now its the only major newspaper of record remaining.

“Well, people on Lemmy should have paid for more subscriptions to the Houston Post” is a fucking asinine statement, given that their stated reason for failure was cost of newsprint rising in the early 90s and they stopped existing before most of the people on this site were even born.

SecurityCube 360 Pro

The Russian Federation being granted the former USSR’s permanent seat was conditional: the Russian Federation was required and expected to uphold the responsibilites that the USSR had, as well as the USSRs treaties and agreements. Failure to uphold those commitments would mean the Russian Federation was in breach of their agreement with the UN and should lose the seat formerly granted to the USSR.

Sure. But the mechanism by which the UN functions is such that the Security Council has extensive veto power over most actual policy set by the UN. Consequently, any effort to challenge Russia on its failed obligations or to penalize or remove them would be subject to… Russian veto of the action from the Security Council.

That’s because the UN doesn’t exist to set policy against its primary member states. The UN exists to allow member states a neutral(ish) space to negotiate international policy amongst themselves and to organize against non-members and non-state-actors. Even if you could kick a $1T/year economy and largest sovereign landmass on the planet out of the body… who would benefit? Its not like removing Russia from the UN makes the country not-a-state. It’s not like the BRICS wouldn’t continue to coordinate amongst themselves independent of the UN. All you’ve done is cut the cord to the Little Red Phone that helps a future Russian President and a future American President from hashing it out before they launch nukes at one another.

The USSR, interestingly enough, had signed many treaties recognizing the borders of its successor states before it was dissolved, one of which being Georgia. Thus the actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia in 2008 violated one of these USSR agreements they are required to uphold. This was a direct violation and one that is technically grounds for removal of the UN, at least removal from a permanent seat.

You can single out the USSR on this technicality and hold Russia to it. But then you could single out the US for its extensive violation of the Geneva Convensions or its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords or any number of other historical treaties and associated promises.

You could single out the US for the Hague Invasion Act if nothing else. But we won’t, for the same reason nobody’s seriously interested in ousting Russia (or China or the UK or France for that matter).

This isn’t the G7 (formerly G8) where “We’re embargoing you, why are you even here?” would be the response to any Russian delegation. This is the body that exists to negotiate member states out of nuclear war. If anything, the Security Council should have significantly more members, given how nuclear weapons have proliferated over the last 70 years.

Maybe getting Pakistan and India on the panel could avoid the last great Pyrrhic Victory of human civilization.

“Distracting headlines” as a canard gets a bit old. Everything is a distraction from everything else, because we have a heavily monopolized mass media and a shrinking pool of investigative journalists with any kind of budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#United_States

When you had twice as many newspapers and half as many people, the idea of “distracting headlines” was more a matter of consumer choice (you could read serious news at the New York Times or junk pop-media at the New York Post). Now media functions as a cartel, with papers all echoing one another on topics of the day. Or deliberately remaining silent on embarrassments the business community owners would rather not talk about.

This isn’t a “Trump” problem, though. Its a problem of consolidation and privatization on a national scale.

Every time you save a file in Microsoft, your credit card is charged $.50

There are examples of non states working

:-/

Also, Marx may have fucked his wife.

Conservatives, Liberals, Communists

Conservatives: “I want a state that exists to brutalize the third world on my behalf and cycle me through anxiety/relief of foreigners/BIPOCs on TV”

Liberals: “I want a state that will subtly extract value from the proletariat so I can gamble on it in the market and kill anyone who resists in an overseas black site.”

Communists: “I want a state that will coordinate labor between sectors and preserve the civil rights of citizens under a well-organized and easily navigate-able proletarianized bureacracy.”

Lemmy: “I hate these fucking Tankies.”

I feel like I’m looking at a scene from The Reanimator.

That is the plan.

Fascist Keynesianism

The track pads on the steamdeck are excellent for emulating a mouse.

They were passable at best. Finicky and imprecise more often than not.

What is up with Valve and their obsession with those stupid touchpads? I hated that on the old Steam D-Pad. Hypersensitive seemingly every moment except when you needed it to be.

The XBox and the PS figured out how to make traditional controllers very well. Nintendo loves to get freaky with it and does a better than average job of innovating in the space. But Valve just seems to want to cobble together spare parts into a janky whatever the hell this is. I don’t get it.

Whomever is making these things, you don’t have to keep doing this. Just be normal!

Yeah; the response should be that a “reject all” button must be displayed next to the accept all button with equal prominence

I’ll do you one better. “Websites should default to the minimal cookies option, with settings confined to a website option menu that does not occlude the entrance page.”

So if I was to name names, I would be putting my head of the block for the Crime of Libel.

“Hello I’m an anonymous person on the Internet and if I say anyone’s name I will literally be murdered, so you just need to Do Your Own Research”

It’s different groups of people with different interests.

Also doesn’t help that the cookie banners were a kind of malicious compliance. They were made deliberately difficult to navigate around when you didn’t immediate hit “accept everything unequivocally”.

That the response to this malicious compliance is a retreat rather than a doubling down suggests the EU regulators are compromised by the industry and this isn’t a popular reform in any meaningful sense.

ya’ll are taking sex too seriously.

I will stop taking sex seriously when it stops being special. If I only have 20 minutes to properly enjoy intimacy once every two weeks, it is going to be fucking magical. Joke sex is for when you’re in the cuddle puddle in college, knowing there’s half a dozen other hotties down bad you’ve got to get through before the end of the week. Once you get older, you realize sex needs to be professional. There’s special outfits. There’s devices. There’s ritual. You read books on it. You get degrees in it.

If you’re not having fun and if you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and looking awkward or silly, you’re with the wrong person.

Have you ever tried to cum at 40? Fun is for people with a second load in them in another thirty minutes and a three day weekend with nothing to do. Fun is for people who aren’t sneaking this out while the kids are down for a nap. Sex in middle age is Seal Team Six shit. Yeah, we’ve done the drills. We know what to expect. But now we’re in the field and we are on the clock. We get in, we do the deed, we hit the extraction point, and maybe we have time for a cigarette by morning… assuming everyone comes out alive.

You can’t possibly be naked with someone and not feel a little silly

I will hang from that sex swing and not even crack a smile.

“Jobs Americans don’t want to do (at the price point the business is offering)”

So its hard to get an IT professional to work at job at $15/hr in the US. Easier in Southeast Asia. Consequently, we outsource a ton of IT work overseas.

Similarly, construction work is dangerous and exhausting. Hard to find young people to do the work at a $25/hr price point, until you start importing a bunch of very desperate 20-something migrant laborers.

I’ll hold my breath on that promise to vote on ACA subsidies

TDS broke this down. You’re not getting votes in the Senate. You’re not getting votes in the House. You’re definitely not getting this signed by the President. It’s D-E-D dead.