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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 9th, 2025

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  • I’ll take a crack at it:

    • It’s a massive privacy/surveillance concern. Look at the issues that come with doorbell cams and now multiply the number of cameras and scatter them all over
    • It’s another platform for mega corporations to track and sell data to advertisers or any malicious actors, but at an entirely new intrusive level. They no longer have to approximate what’s getting your attention when they literally know what has your attention. Good luck anonymizing or hiding your usage when you can’t spoof the real world in front of you.
    • It’s unnecessary e-waste, at best providing the exact same functionality you’d get from your phone with the added benefit of… not reaching into your pocket? You still need a free hand to use it…
    • It’s a distraction in a way that other tech can’t touch. Pedestrians/drivers getting notifications shoved directly into their eyes won’t end well.
    • It probably has all the same inherent problems as previous generations of smart glasses. Primarily: your eyes aren’t designed for extended/repeated focus on an image less than an inch from your face and at the edge of your vision



  • If you’re old enough to remember the internet as it was 15-20 years ago it’s fairly obvious. Even in the early days of social media a narrative wouldn’t spread a fraction as quickly or with as much explosive rhetoric. In a week after a major incident we might get 4 or 5 waves of conflicting or compounding narratives.

    You can imagine our social discourse as a massive pool of competing ideas going back and forth; a large disruption might cause a sizable wave. You’d expect rebound waves (opposing ideas) from the opposite fringe to naturally counteract and disperse the original and each other, keeping the water choppy but level.

    With a larger network (ie: Twitter in 2025 vs Twitter in 2008) you’d expect to see more inertia and more stability, the fact that we don’t is damning. Forcing the mass uniformity of rhetoric that we see these days (massive waves sweeping across hundreds of millions on multiple platforms) is not something that could be orchestrated by anything less than state actors. It takes the planning and coordination of both the initial narratives and responses.



  • I feel like they’ve been shuffling chairs on the titanic to cover up their falling engagement. Their default sort is now showing things from 4+ weeks ago, “Hot” posts with 0 upvotes on massive subs, hiding total sub member count with a rolling view count, etc…

    Not sure who they’re trying to fool but it’s not hard to tell that activity has dropped. Stale posts, niche subs have dried up, active readers in the single digits, deleted comments, etc… But their stock is higher than ever so that’s nice I guess?


  • ITT people confuse the mathematical limits of consolidating currency with the actual unbounded consolidation of power.

    No, the rich don’t care about the health of the economy. Yes, they will run out of money that can be directly siphoned from your consumer pockets. That’s just the beginning of the real endgame.

    Short on rent money? I’ll be happy to write off your rents in perpetuity if you sign this contract granting rights to your organs upon death. Can’t afford clothes? A lifetime agreed employment spent sorting trash will keep you in free, durable work clothes. Can’t afford to raise your kids? We’ll give you a sweet deal to cover necessities and they can pay it back later. Muggers and thieves got you down? Come sign on to our secure company commune!

    These are the exact conditions that historically lead to feudal systems. People didn’t abandon their homesteads and independence to become serfs voluntarily. It was always out of necessity.




  • As I said in another comment, the reason to not get on their bad side is the fact they’re a highly insular and powerful gang that just so happen to be in charge of his protection detail for his entire (hypothetical) term.

    It’s easy to tweet the truth to power until that corrupt power is the only thing stopping the next Maga nut from taking a shot at you. Whole situation is completely unsurprising and not a mark against his character for me.



  • If you poll on actual policy and don’t couch it in ideology or partisan framing, the vast majority of people agree. From basic economic policy to abortion access to housing regulations to climate action, ~70% or more are in agreement. And keep in mind this is with a constant media barrage promoting division.

    In a better system we wouldn’t be bound to just D and R. It would be something to more accurately represent the nuances of the voter (probably an evolution of the coalition systems in newer Democracies). You end up those popular policies as the core of governance with the outer fringe policies on the political curve getting less sway. Compromise is a part of any system of governance except maybe despotism.


  • But the Constitution did set the country up for states to be like their own nations

    Yes and when the Constitution was written they were basically 13 semi-sovereign states who were such nascent politicians that they couldn’t imagine a government without a king (just renamed president). The constitution should have been entirely reworked after the Civil War and probably needed more major revisions as the population, topography and demographics of the nation changed.

    The state of our federal administration is fucked because the constitution is fundamentally flawed. If it was written for a modern world, the federal government would have the foundation to weather this assault and possibly the teeth to nip the rot in the bud. At the very least it wouldn’t be so rigid that people like you feel the need to cling to a centuries old piece of paper as infallible.

    Using a maliciously broken system as self evidence for its abandonment and prohibition is absurd. There’s nothing inherently more oppressive or evil about a federal government than a smaller state government. If you’re not considering a restructure to address the root flaws then you’re just whinging over which boot you’d prefer to kick in your door.



  • It’s absolutely possible to have a strong federal government without getting into the shit show we have today. The problem is when federal authority gets distilled into a handful of people and detached from popular representation or recall.

    “Getting the feds to back off” has been the laughable fig leaf that the right has used to dismantle the normal operation of our government for 200+ years. Now you’re buying into balkanization when they’ve enacted their coup?

    We don’t need more limits on the only structure that can mitigate/navigate climate collapse; the only thread that historically has opposed the oppression of the deep south; the only speedbump that could even moderately oppose the hegemony of the ultra wealthy.

    The US constitution was designed to entrench the power of the white landowner class, and that has remained true in spite of the consistent creep of federal authority. It’s just not possible to mount any opposition to the massive weight of their capital in any other way.

    So no, don’t restrict the Fed’s authority to do any of that. Just give us the tools to get real, fair representation and hold our representatives accountable. Every other needed reform and restructuring could be done with no problem once we have that.