sparkle

Man this is fucking RICH coming from you who has spouted Israeli ethnonationalist & Palestinian-genocide-denying rhetoric on this site. I was there for multiple instances of it. I'm not normally so direct with my comments about users I'm familar with (it can get real toxic real quick), and I think NATO is necessary and all, but your comment attacking hark is so laughably hypocritical that I can't help it.

Well, I tried. Foiled by Biden's America's Big Censorship once again

Latex pillow. They do NOT lose shape/consistency at all. Trust me, I bought a latex pillow and I pretty much always use the latex pillow now. I use the larger memory foam pillow when I want a harder/thicker pillow, but otherwise I prefer the latex pillow since I don't have to worry about constantly fluffing it up or anything. I still flip it around sometimes to get to the cold side of course, but not as much for other pillows. Some people want "ergonomically-shaped" pillows, which have a bump for neck/spine support, and those kinds of latex pillows exist too.

A lot of people swear by millet pillows and buckwheat pillows (and other hull-filled/non-synthetic pillows) too. What I can say about them is they're firm and heavy (buckwheat pillows are harder and millet pillows are softer), they stay cold, they have a strong smell, and they whisper statistics into your ear when you're trying to sleep (they're very noisy, especially ones using a less soft/less stretchy fabric like canvas or sateen). They're probably better if you want more neck support. People like PineTales pillows, especially side-sleepers (I've never tried them though).

The best praise I've seen a pillow brand get though is Purple pillows, again from side-sleepers, but they're $100-200 and I haven't tried one. I don't particularly want to finance a pillow.

Every time I have to use a typical pillow I'm like "wow this fucking sucks" and I have to fiddle with the pillow constantly because it loses its shape/firmness after a few minutes and stops feeling comfortable. Not something that happens with good latex pillows, and it's less of a problem with memory foam & hull-filled pillows than in other pillows.

#2) Wage growth through WFH. This path is currently so crowded that few have a chance. Hopefully once a few office mortgages are done and boomers with office fetishes die, more jobs will move this way

It's insane how much time and money we waste on just commuting for jobs that we really don't need to be travelling to, and additionally how much we waste on just fucking around in the office without actually doing anything productive (because there's nothing productive to do). A lot of people could free up a whole half of the rest of their life by just being able to work from home, I wager. Whether people realize it or not, the commute (including the gas money and fares) is part of the time they dedicate to work, and having to waste time on it without getting paid means you're getting lese compensation for your time. Some people don't value their time enough for it to matter, but some people (like me) do.

If you average 2 hours a day on your commute, that's almost an entire month of unpaid time you're using on your job (it's not 30 days of pure time if you work an average of 4.5 days per week, but I'm including costs associated with the commute like gas or car maintanence and repair, which for most people would bring it up from the original 20 days to at least 30 days). Most people who don't live in a city (or who have a job a far enough distance away) waste a whole fucking half a month to an entire month every year – 1/24 to 1/12 of their entire life – just driving to work. On the commute alone. I would take a massive pay cut to not have to make that commute, as well as not have to waste time sitting in an office that I could be using with my loved ones or to do the things I enjoy, which a good WFH setup actually allows you to do.

I'm moving to Chicago so I don't have to have a car nor waste that much time travelling to places, and not just work but also to stores and hobby stuff. Apparently this is something a lot of people have been doing within the past few years because of how affordable Chicago is in comparison to pretty much every other big city. Ahhh, gentrification my beloved.

Overall I think we're having a massive reversal of suburbanization/white flight and a move back to cities by people who want to "take back" their time and freedom of movement. As well as just generally not wanting to live in a conservative hellhole.

Herein lies the basis of the alt-right's culture war BS. The entire thing is resolved by accepting that systematic racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination against certain minority groups are alive and well, as well as accepting that that's a bad thing. But most people don't see anything past overt hate crimes (mainly assault) on the basis of social identity to be racism/homophobia/etc. Then, with that view, their rationalization becomes that all racist actions are on an individual level, that the individuals or groups perpetrating killings of minorities are the only problem and they're exceptions which don't appear enough to warrant a major response anyways, and as a whole society doesn't have a problem with racism or sexism or whatever anymore and there's not much society and the government can/should do to stop it. These people genuinely think that, and it's easy to see how you jump from that to " is discrimination against white/straight/cis/male people". To them, it's "systematic racism/sexism/homophobia doesn't exist, and if it does, it's not enough to be a big deal, so any correction to it is bigotry".

Libertarians' play on this says that the "free market" would stamp out bigotry because it would totally be unviable, because human beings are rational and the people with the most voting money wouldn't support discriminatory business practices... since, again, the bigots are a few select people who the population would boycott. The class-based private education and lack of public education would totally mean more people would grow up to be less bigoted too. Making it illegal to discriminate in business would only hurt the poor business owners who want to ethically discriminate based on identity!

Then, on a different corner of politics, you have the leftists who genuinely take "no war but class war" as a description of what's happening – it's a phrase originally meant to invoke the idea that we shouldn't be marginalizing groups or fighting any war except a class war, and that racism/sexism/etc. are useless infighting – but some ("tankies") have taken it to literally mean that the only real oppression in our society is class-based, and "identity politics" and working on systematic discrimination are how the capitalists keep us distracted, so we shouldn't worry about that.

I've seen the first view on Lemmy a lot in the past when it comes to specifically sexism – the site's largest demographics (young nerdy men) makes it unsurprising, but it's still a bit shocking to see considering the left lean of the site. I think it's gotten a lot better ever since a few months ago though.

The term AGI has been used since more than 2 decades ago, and AI never specifically implied something with human intelligence (maybe in the 40s-50s when it was just being invented, but not after that). "AI" has always refered to things like Siri and the YouTube algorithm and pathfinding AIs and trackers for anti-air systems and whatever else.

I remember that before I started programming I'd get annoyed at machinery like 3d printers for the "stupid AI" not working. Then I'd probably bang it or something to try to get it to work lol

I mean... it's pretty compatible with leftist ideologies. Especially a moneyless form of socialism/communism

Not to excuse the Democratic Party, but I would argue that it's inevitable that they choose shit candidates for the presidency when we consider how much indoctrination Americans get over their capitalism/corporatism and how they justify and normalize the shit America did and the status quo, while omitting a lot of the important progressive historical events or (in the case of figures like MLK and Gandhi, or context behind Iran/Latin America/Israel&Palestine) don't tell the full story. Like most Americans aren't going to learn that the US denied millions of Jews, Roma, and other groups being displaced entry into the country right before the holocaust, leading to the deaths of millions. You also won't learn that the US installed multiple fascist dictators, monarchs, etc. in countries after overthrowing democratic governments to serve corporate intrests or over their fear of leftist leaders. At best you might briefly touch on the wars with Iraq in government class or something.

Then you're basically indoctrinated by history classes and society that anything left of American corporatism is communism. To the point that modern conservatives genuinely think FDR policies are extreme socialist/communist policies.

With our current voting system, an actually social democratic president would not get elected. FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Carter were the closest we could get in that regard, but those days are long gone.

That being said, I do think a lot of people genuinely voted for Hillary because of her and not solely because of Trump. Especially women and LGBTQ who wanted like... more gender equality. I think more accurately would be that there are very few white guys who voted for Hillary for any reason other than Trump being worse.

Italians:

I have to hard disagree. I went back to Reddit for a few days recently and the comments were a a cesspool of far-right views & alt-right views. It was like 50% off every comment section turned into r/TrueUnpopularOpinion, under any post that's slightly political you'll get downvoted for stating that trans people exist or that misogyny exists, and told how white people are disprivileged and discriminated against

The worst one by far though was under a pizzacake comic about how women dealing with dangerous/creepy men going after them frequently from childhood leads to them being extremely cautious/scared of men, which men then take as the woman being a bitch. You can only imagine how heated that got and the brigade of conservatives and centrists defending the conservatives lol

Even worse, an SF based fiscally conservative corpo-Democrat. This is the same guy who suddenly changed his mind and didn't pass universal healthcare in California when he supported it beforehand (guess being bankrolled by healthcare companies made it harder to sign), I don't think anyone would want that. Also he's just an unlikeable piece of shit, he's what pops into the average person's mind when they think "the elite". His shitty economics seem to have fucked up California quite a bit and he's barely any better than the average libertarian (but unlike the Libertarian party candidate, at least he doesn't want to abolish the Department of Education and all government healthcare, but that's a pretty low bar)

I will commit seppuku before I vote for Newsom. Disclaimer: I am not Californian

Money, nepotism, and other corrupting things are pretty big factors in politics