Nooooooooooooooooo shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

The fact that we have to argue these basic ideas like what corruption even is, since they claim this isn’t corruption, tells you everything that is broken about our system of government.

Our media treats plain baldfaced lies the same way we do as truth with mountains of evidence, all on the worry of someone suing them. That’s not journalism, that’s being a pussy and letting the people you’re supposed to be speaking truth to power to walk all over you.

These aren’t questions. This isn’t a discussion. This is corruption, it’s that fucking simple and if you can’t see it you either aren’t paying attention, you’re an absolute idiot, or you’re one of the ones benefiting from the grift. There’s no other fucking reasons to justify not seeing it.

I mean, going a step further, it’s not like fraud means anything anymore, just pretend your Enrique Tarrio and take his check.

Since we’re basically in a free-for-all in terms of identity theft in this country, seeing how many people scammed the US unemployment systems during COVID, I bet these people would not have anywhere near the systems in place to actually ensure they’re sending checks to the real people, and not people impersonating them.

Who frauds the fraudsters?

Stop calling it a ballroom, it’s just a dancehall.

I mean Trump clearly doesn’t have any actual balls, if he was ever in a position where he was forced to have a fistfight with someone he pissed off, he would eat his own underwear like Cartman to get out of it.

Dancehall doesn’t work either because this motherfucker can barely stand up, he can’t dance, he only cares about seeing women dancing. Just call it the Federal Hooters Building, the crappy food would appeal to Trump as would the theme.

Wots all this then?

lmao God I can feel the frustration rising in me just thinking about it. I know these are digital rather than physical objects… but do these people fail to have object permanence?

Wow, usually people lose their shit and complain that Element is too complex and that me and the devs are being assholes asking them to use it… You know kind of like all the people here on the Fediverse who think we need to make it bigger and bring in everyone from everywhere and that the devs and users who defend them are awful for not focusing on user interface first and making it less confusing to choose a server…

Anyway, thanks for being on team reasonable, because I’m with you on this 100%, but I can’t change how little people want to learn anything sadly so I make compromises with people who cant or wont learn how to do things. It sucks, people really don’t seem to understand that security and convenience are a balance, and every time people argue for shit to be easier they’re actually arguing for everything to be less secure. You sacrifice security for convenience, every time, and the opposite happens because you can sacrifice convenience for increased security measures. Security has to be complex by nature to be effective, and the core of Matrix is being a secure, encrypted protocol, which they have already actually put a ton of work into making easier for fucking normies. Yet, it’s never enough for people. Always screams of “It’s too complex! I hate thinking!”

Oh I was well aware at the time, but I had a lot of friends who still struggled with trying to use Matrix/Element so at the time I was seeking a simpler solution for them.

They don’t understand that things will never return to how they used to be.

They also fail to understand how much worse things are going to get from here before they even marginally get better again.

Our aging infrastructure simply won’t end up having enough resources to be shored up to modern standards, and a lot of the country will start living with rolling blackouts and power for only short stretches in the day as that will end up being the only amount of power the failing grid can support without burning cities down. This will be exacerbated quickly by AI buildout.

The blackouts can also double as a way to censor the internet, adding new controls to the networks while power is down for everyone else, and when things come back online, it’s more and more tightly controlled.

A few years ago I saw a very old logging truck filled with logs stuck in the middle of a small city street for two days while it got repaired so it could be moved. Just wait until half of our roads are clogged with dead vehicles that we no longer have the resources or tools to move because all other big industrial vehicles have broken down as well. How long before every street is littered with dead vehicles we can no longer afford to move and Americans are forced into walking and cycling to get around them since major arterial roads may not be completely blocked.

Food will be scarce and costly, we don’t have a rural landowning population that can grow their own food anymore, especially as a lot of private land has been poisoned and isn’t fit to grow food on. Hell, if you have an old septic tank, you have to be sure you know exactly where it is and plant food well away from it, if you even have the room since those things can take up a lot of space underground.

Further, when septic tanks, sewers, and water systems fail to be maintained, we may have to resort to old style outhouses, which will further poison towns and cities until it becomes a massive public health hazard that nothing will be done about because our country is too broke. Laws that prevent citizens from collecting rainwater will be increasingly seen as draconian since rainfall will be one of the few (relatively) sources of clean water available, and even after collection it needs purifying with boiling and a small amount of bleach.

We are so deeply and absolutely fucked.

This is why corporate promises can never be trusted, because a new CEO can change those promises on a whim.

It’s part of why despite being interested in Beeper, I never signed up for it because I had questions about if those privacy promises they made would be kept if they sold to a bigger company… which they eventually did.

On the plus side Bitwarden already made an official open source self-hosted version, which can be forked and/or return to the community developed Vaultwarden roots.

Meanwhile KeepassXC keeps on chugging along.

Because it unequivocally is in decline?

People need to be realistic. We’ve been a poorer nation than we’ve pretended to be for a long, long time.

Like look at modern public buildings, not built to last, not like old stone and brick courthouses from the last century and the like. They’re just made with the same cheap materials as everything else.

The decline started with Nixon, got kicked up a gear by Reagan, but the first real crack in the armor was George W. Bush and his middle east boondoggles in Afghanistan and Iraq. After that the world was willing to look at it as somewhat of an erroneous event and expected cooler heads and serious people to prevail.

Now that instead of serious people prevailing, we’ve been spinning down the drain, and that’s literally the plan. The wholesale dismantling of US democracy was crowed from the rooftops as Project 2025.

The serious people in other countries aren’t going to be fooled again.

To quote George W. Bush “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, sh–, uhhh, you can’t fool me again.”

I’m surprised he has that much self-control at all.

Wild, I have never had that issue on desktop or in Jerboa.

If you forget to select a language when making a post, the language becomes “undetermined.”

The vast majority of people do not take the time to mark the language of their post, and so Lemmy files them under “undetermined” because there is no language information.

When making a post, when you choose the “Undetermined” from the language-selector, it just pops it back to asking you to select a language, because the point of “Undetermined” is that no language metadata has been added.

So in your user settings page, if you remove “Undetermined” from your list of languages, you will not see most posts since most people do not actually choose a language for their post.

I personally do not find this confusing at all.

They have just stolen the language of kindness and try to present their hatred as kind.

You completely missed the point that you are making good ugly people feel shame and like they’re being associated with these people because they were born unfortunate looking. Because your implication is that being evil actually impacts how you look, which further implies all ugly people are evil. The people I give a shit about in this situation are the people caught in the crossfire, I’m not here to save MAGA feelings, I’m here to save the feelings of people who have been shamed for being born with similarly unofortunate looks being shamed further by being told that if they’re ugly it must be because they’re evil inside.

But you do you.

You know this is really cruel and dismissive to kind, loving, wonderful people who happen to not measure up to social beauty standards.

There are beautiful evil people as well.

Yes, the MAGA cult is ugly but the only ugly that matters is the ugly inside, and MAGAs are ugly inside.

Literally everything the administration does is rape-coded.

“Oh, you don’t want these people in your city harassing your citizens and you’ve gone through the trouble of making laws with intent to enforce to prevent it from happening? Well then we’re just going to do what you don’t like even harder then!”

Literally everything is “oh people don’t like it well here’s more of it then since you don’t like it” when it comes to these asshats.

It’s way beyond “the cruelty is the point” by now.

To the shock of absolutely fucking no one. We’re officially at the “the rules are made up and the points don’t matter” part of the US decline.

I don’t actually dislike AI. I dislike that corporations view it as a way to stop hiring humans entirely. I dislike that it’s being used to create massive amounts of disinformation. I dislike that corporate AI is all about massive datacenters that are ruining ecosystems and towns.

I think AI when deployed properly (especially when it’s used for a specific specialized purpose instead of general purpose), it can be a great tool. The hype of it taking over is only because rich people can’t stand paying a dime to a human, they want a slave that never sleeps or asks for a raise. There’s open source models you can run locally that don’t take a datacenter. I dunno, it seems like it’s useful (not as useful as claimed) but it’s being exploited mostly by the worst people possible.

“There is no war in Ba Sing Se” energy.