The Dems had a weak message and they struggled to deliver it where it mattered.

They raised a record amount of money, and spent it on door-knocking and cable ads talking about a rebounding economy, the middle class, and diversity.

The voters who decided the election live in apartments and listen to podcasts, and see an economy in the shitter, and see themselves as working class (not middle) and just an average schmuck.

Total disconnect.

They didn’t even need to move to the right to reach these voters, and they alienated a bunch of the left by trying.

Mike Johnson: LA LA LA LA LA LA LA 🙉

Looking forward to the Matthew Miller clips from this one.

People getting put on the no-fly list cuz of racial profiling, I guess?

Yellow Mountain Imports is great.

I think the two most salient points here are:

1. Podcasts

TV and radio are dead, social media is a wasteland. Podcasts are reaching young folks, especially men.

Which brings me to…

2. Young men are in freefall

They’re doing worse than previous generations did at their age, across every metric you can imagine, and they’re also doing worse than young women.

That’s not to say we should stifle women’s success!

But if all you have to offer young men is a lecture on their unearned privilege, I think it’s not surprising that they take their business elsewhere.

Importantly: This doesn’t make them right.

But if we don’t figure this out, we’re fucked. We have to have a positive message for men who are struggling and desperate. If we don’t offer a plan, guess who will?

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

If you have multiple cats and kids, it becomes like The West Wing.

The goat scream?

DNC in 2028: We’re finally ready to learn our lesson from 2016+2024 and listen to our base. We hear you loud and clear: “No more female candidates.” We will be reallocating AOC’s delegates to Chuck Schumer.

“Done is better than perfect.”

It’s the private equity playbook. Sell all the real capital assets to cover existing debt, rent replacement assets from the owners themselves using new debt, run operations so lean that you burn out 100% of your labor force, then declare bankruptcy and settle your own debt while keeping all the assets.

It has already destroyed swaths of the private sector, and now they wanna do it to the entire economy.

I was using the mobile app.

A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

• I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
• Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
• Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
• Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
• Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
• Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.

Go for it!

There’s a lot of potential here.

lemmy_check: crowdsourced fact-checking

lemmy_see: spot to compare pics of arbitrary stuff (lemmy see your favorite mug)

lemmy_know: ad-hoc polls, recommendations or requests for how-tos (lemmy know how you season your mac and cheese)

lemmy_tell_ya: rants about whatever

The only thing I hate about Winter is not Winter’s fault, and it’s basically what you said:

Work is somehow perfectly scheduled so that you’re inside, staring at a brick wall for 90-100% of the daylight hours for 5 out of every 7 days.

Winter is beautiful in ways that are completely unlike the other seasons, but unless you’re very fortunate you only get a few glimpses of it.

I feel like if you were designing a society to make people suffer, that’s how you would do it.

Extraneous apostrophe’s

• Balaclava
• Balacmagma

That video was a mess. Miller trying his best to not allow an actual question.

To be fair though, that reporter’s gotta step it up. You can’t give these guys an inch of wiggle room.