MightBeAlpharius

I once rode a chairlift with the safety bar frozen in place... It was the single most terrifying experience of my youth.

I'm pretty sure that if I'd grown up back then, I would've been dead of a heart attack before I could legally drink.

Out of curiosity, I took a course on the Bible in college, and my professor would have loved this meme.

According to him, Christianity has always counted tolerance as one of their main tenets, but they also completely ignored it from the start. "The biblical definition of tolerance," he would tell us, "was that you might not be happy about people doing things that oppose your worldview, but you were okay with it as long as you didn't have to participate." At the time, that was pretty cut and dry - be chill with other religions, be nice to societal outcasts, don't piss off the Romans, etc. In a modern context, that notably includes not discriminating based on serial orientation, which is where we generally see Christians messing up right now.

Where it really gets spicy, though, is that from the very moment that Christianity emerged as a sect, they were persecuted by the Romans for exactly the same reason as the Jews: monotheism. Christianity was initially a small sect within Judaism, and as a result, both groups were monotheistic and refused to participate in compulsory worship of the Roman pantheon... And both groups immediately started pointing fingers, going to the Romans and saying "no, those guys are the real problem, we're fine!" Even as the sect was still fully coming into its own, that key tenet had already been compromised.

Tldr: A short timeline of Christian tolerance:

Day 1: "We're super chill!"

Day 2: "Man, fuck those guys!"

When I was young, everyone on the internet was an old man, especially if they said they weren't. Now that I'm older, everyone on the internet is a robot.

...Is this that "progress" thing I keep hearing about?

/s

I think you really nailed something there... We don't really have a minimum wage, we have a minimal wage.

A proper minimum wage should be pegged to the cost of living - it's the minimum required to live. Instead, what we've got is companies paying the absolute least that they're required to, and lobbying to keep that number as low as possible regardless of the cost of living.

It a bit surprising given that he mentioned being catholic, too - the catholic church has generally taken a pretty firm stance on abortion.

That said, I grew up in the UCC, and it resonates perfectly with the way that they emphasized tolerance. If somebody wants to do something that you don't like, that's absolutely fine as long as they don't force you to participate - in this case, the tolerant, "christian" take on abortion should be "I don't want one, but if you do, go for it."

You nailed just about everything that I've been enjoying about Lemmy, too!

To me, it's definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren't any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.

...Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.

It's not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.

The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can't immediately tell if it's working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it'll probably work given time, but it won't do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.

The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it's money that stays in the company's coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it'll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.

So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they're a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.

I just searched, and... Apparently they both exist? I swear the only trees communities when I signed up were about cannabis, but apparently there's one about tree trees too!

...This is gonna get real confusing, real quick.

I feel like there's a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.

For something like a road, it's natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.

For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don't know how the server is doing beyond "is it up or down," you don't know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur... And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that "it just works," without considering the costs behind it.