His record is meh. The economy has been doing alright, and he has made at least some progress on climate change. He did get a much-needed infrastructure bill passed through Congress. He also did follow through on the withdraw from Afghanistan, and Republican attempts to stir up scandal have been largely for naught, mainly focusing on Hunter instead of him.

Now for the bad: the signs of mental decline are hard to ignore, and his insistence on running for a second term puts the country at risk of a second Trump term. Fair or not, the honorable thing to do would have been to put the country first and step aside so that the Democrats could have had a proper primary and let some fresh blood in. If Trump is elected, and polls suggest he might, Biden’s legacy will be ruined.

His “human rights based” foreign policy is a joke, with his term marked by support for brutal wars in Gaza and Yemen and the return of the Taliban to rule in Afghanistan. (Though, to be fair, I agree with his decision to withdraw.) I do think his administration is likely responsible for the Nordstream bombing as well. While it could be argued that the bombing was justified due to the Ukraine war, it undermines the idea of a “rules-based” order that the West is supposedly fighting for.

Most recently, his party’s attempt to reform immigration has stalled in Congress, Ukraine aid is at a deadlock, and the possibility of war with Iran hangs on the horizon. All of this remains to be resolved.

I live in a pretty solid red state, so I might vote third party, but if was a more competitive state I would probably vote to reelect Biden. Unfortunately, I think the best case scenario is that Biden is reelected and either dies or resigns to make way for President Harris. Not ideal, this.

Does the +Police vote even care that much about marijuana anymore? I feel that marijuana won the cultural war forever ago, it’s just that it takes a long time for political change to follow.

Believe it or not, the money isn’t the hard part. The endless environmental studies, NIMBYism, and debate make it nearly impossible to build projects of any size in the US anymore.

Thing is, industrial revolution bleeds into colonialism. Sure, there was colonialism before industrialization, and colonialism would look very different in a time before nation-states as we know them today, but those resources will have to come from somewhere.

Metallurgy is always where they get you on these things. You can bring stuff like division of labor, assembly lines, and replaceable parts back in time pretty easily, but good luck getting aluminum for your bicycles in any kind of quantity. Not sure how well a bronze bicycle would work, but I bet it could be done.

So THAT’S where they were going

The thing is, the concern people have with lemmy.world is the same concern we used to have with lemmy.ml. The question of how big an instance ought to be is still unanswered. Maybe lemmy.world is below that level and people will naturally shy away from it once it gets there. On top of that, limited resources on the side of instance owners will drive decentralization. For example, Lemmy.ml shut its doors to new users once it became overloaded. Similar things could happen in the future.

Even if a major instance did go down, we’d just lose the content. The people, for the most part, would migrate to whatever new instances sprung up to replace it.

There was one Voat. When the one Voat goes bust, Voat goes bust. Like any enterprise, it’s failure can be attributed, at least in part, to poor management.

There are many Lemmy’s. If one Lemmy collapses, another Lemmy can take its place. The individual instances might be less stable than a centralized social media site, like Voat was, but when federated the whole unit is more resilient than centralized social media.

The tech bubble is over (kinda, they’re trying to spin it back up with AI) and so is the free money party. Rates are rising, and investors aren’t content to throw money at companies that still don’t know how they’re going to make any money. To make money, they’ve got to squeeze it out of somebody: either users or advertisers.

In Twitter’s case, they squeezed it out of a vain billionaire who they convinced to buy the company. The shareholders got their money, and now making a profit is somebody else’s problem. Reddit could’ve similarly tried to court a buyer, but there’s no guarantee they would have found one (maybe Meta?). Instead they’re trying to a gin up some revenue either out of third party apps or by pushing third party app users onto the main app so they can advertise to them. I haven’t been following Discord and Meta’s stuff, but the reasoning is probably similar.

Funny yet sad that it’s come to reddit botting their own platform to try and shore up support for themselves.