Evolution - at a species level or a societal level - has no “guiding hand”. It throws shit at a wall to see what sticks, and the best-adapted variants tend to propagate.

Selfish behavior is very powerful in a large and strong society where most people are producing more value than they’re consuming. There’s so much wealth to be found that if you don’t care about the enemies you make, you can just jump from victim to victim as you amass power faster tab the people you leave behind. The problem is, this drives the society towards no longer being one of such surplus.

In a smaller society where people are largely just surviving, selfish behavior will cripple your own ability to survive. If everybody has only a modest surplus, they only want to share it with people they can trust to return the favor when they’re the one in need. If you make enemies with everyone in a small community, you’re going to have a hard time finding community support.

I mean…

[Gestures broadly at the state of the world]

People see headlines and the comment section of the social media platform where that headline was posted.

This, basically

https://xkcd.com/1019/

Shit, even doing shades of purple without getting more granular than the state level would change the map drastically. This winner take all bullshit is the dumbest part of the electoral college.

Personal/Family use is fine, it’s kinda fiddly but so is most selfhosted software.

At an organizational level, that fiddliness spirals into a ton of work, which doesn’t really overlap with other IT Duties in the way that troubleshooting OneDrive usually ends up solving problems with the whole Microsoft suite.

The US may affect the whole world less next year if everyone else works hard to find alternate markets, but it’s going to take longer than that for the rest of the world to totally detangle themselves from our mess.

What if they’re more important than ever before in American history?

“Banned” and “burned” books go hard as hell

Every library I’ve been to in the last 5 years has had a poster of “banned books” specifically to advertise them because people (especially teenagers) love that shit.

Then you better believe it’s trying to fuck you.

They get non-voting representatives in congress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-voting_members_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives

It’s a context thing.

Ohio = a bad place to be. Honestly, as a non-Ohio Midwesterner, I say this should be allowed.

Chat = like addressing the twitch chat. “Chat, are we doomed?” It’s actually pretty interesting from a linguistics perspective because it’s arguably a fourth person pronoun. But in-class I can see it getting out of hand.

Per that last bit, I’m guessing they never had a lawyer present. Would make any of those fabricated statements null and void, if the constitution meant anything.

A relative of mine just had a baby, and her mom came from out-of country to meet her grandchild and help mom and dad in those first crazy weeks with a newborn.

But when she told CBP that she was “coming to help her daughter with the new baby” she got detailed and questioned for 2 hours. Eventually they let her through but they were really trying to pin her coming to work illegally on a tourism visa.

If you or a loved one are in a similar situation, just say you’re “visiting family”. Apparently it’s a legal gray area in this shithole to help your child take care of a newborn.

It’s a little too dramatized to call it a documentary, but it’s a fairly accurate retelling of an important American story. Better than half of the movies I ever watched in history class as a kid.

This is a movie that US citizens should watch. Not because it’s a good film (it is, though), but because it’s an important story in our (very recent) history.

I don’t know if you mean turn Lemmy fans into lemmy fans, or lemmy fans into Lemmy fans. But either way, I’m for it.

Joke’s on me, I still have to use windows at work!

Bill Nye kind of is a dick though.

Some people are really warm in acute person-to-person interactions, but lack the chronic empathy to spread long-term kindness. See “southern hospitality” clashing with who those areas vote for.

Others have a well-oriented moral compass but are just really abrasive in person. That’s Bill Nye. I’ve met him and he’s not like, super mean but he’s got a bit of a holier-than-thou (or rather, smarter-than-you) complex.

Cool how you used the quote markdown for a bunch of stuff I didn’t say.

My argument is “The banks have a ton of capital. They are willing to grant lower classes access to that capital, as long as the bank is able to make some profit from it. If the bank cannot profit, they will just sit on that wealth and lower classes will lose the only access to such capital that they currently have.”

Like I said, the fact that many borderline necessities in the US require access to capital beyond one’s individual means, is a real problem but separate from this argument.

Nobody with financial sense is taking out a 16.9% loan on a car. 5% is pretty typical right now for people with a decent credit history.

Whether or not that’s reasonable, is certainly up for discussion.

Definitely shop around, but sometimes the dealership does have an actual competitive offer. Especially if you threaten to use external financing (and have the pre approval in hand), they might knock down their interest rate to save the deal, as the loan is where the money actually is.