I wish I had understood the freedom I really had back then, and used it better

Billionaire wants a totalitarian state, who’s surprised?

It’s not so much that I can’t make phone calls, as much as I don’t want to. 75% of the time you just end up playing phone tag, and I’d rather just email so they can reply at their convenience and there’s no question about who said what

Phoenix is a testament to man’s hubris.

My personal favorite response to that question is “a person who covers their drink when you enter the room”

Neat! I’ll probably try it out. Like it or not, short form video is really popular now, so this feels like a good thing to grow Pixelfed and the fediverse

I don’t get it. Can you explain?

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald and the brave men who died on board

In my experience, predominantly male environments are fairly disdainful of anything non-technical and include a lot of unexamined biased views toward women. Workplaces with more women, or a balance of both, don’t have the same issue, in my experience.

I’ve worked predominantly in two fields - engineering and environmental policy. I find the culture of engineering to be pretty toxic - too many conservative men. Environmental policy suffers from too much being demanded of workers, I think mostly because of the expectation that you’re motivated by your passion, rather than being paid for your time. I don’t know if that is directly tied to the gender balance in the workplace, but certainly women historically and presently are not compensated fairly for their work.

It’s a shame that I’m better at doing engineering, because I vastly prefer to not work in a place where I can hear my boss listen to Hannity every day through the wall.

What exactly is an “AI PC”? What makes it better than a non-AI PC? Is this a product that consumers are asking for?

What do people mean when they say “the internet” in this context? The social internet of the 2000s?

I say this it feels unimaginative to me to say that the internet is dead. Social media? For the major platforms, sure. But the Fediverse feels alive and novel, and the Internet itself is certainly not going anywhere - could you imagine if email went away?

I don’t know, I am in large agreement that the internet has gotten worse, with that accelerating with generative AI. But I also feel like being driven away from Big Tech platforms has led me to learn more about how the Internet actually works and to discover topics and communities that I hadn’t before. Maybe the internet isn’t wholesale dead, just changing

I like the Green Party’s eco-socialism, but their anti-vaccine lunacy and inability to do anything electorally beyond run a presidential candidate every four years doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies.

I like Cornel West, and I appreciate his long-standing commitment to left-wing and anti-racist values.

That said, I live in the real world, where Donald Trump is running as an open fascist promising to make America a dictatorship if elected, and Joe Biden is the only candidate running with a realistic chance of beating him.

So I’ll be voting for every Democrat I possibly can, while wishing they were better than they are, as always.