• 4 Posts
  • 104 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It seriously saddens me how much 25 years of GOP propaganda against the Clintons has turned reasonable people among Democrats and those further to the left into parrots that try to pin everything on Hillary or Bill.

    There are legitimate criticisms of The Clintons. But they are way less involved than people give them credit for.

    To your comment, I have seen no mention of Hillary - then Secretary of State dealing with multiple conflicts - having any involvement in ACA. She had plenty other work. And there were other key advisors Obama picked that were the actually directly tasked with putting together ACA and making it pass.



  • This article is such a mess. It just clobbers together talking points, speculation, and suspicion into a word salad

    The MOUs in the past were a marketing steps to prevent each state from inventing a new set of rules. It worked.

    Yeah - of course such “self regulation” is never as good as an advocate’s wet dream. Any law passed will also be bypassed. They will never try to build a taller wall. It’s in their business interest.

    But there is a legitimately win-win situation in a national MOU taking say the CA law and applying it nationally. If you at all feel the CA law is good, it will spread it to shit states that would never care about their citizens’ right to repair on their own.

    For the corps it is indeed a nightmare to let 50 states pass 50 different set of rules. The whole point of the IS market is that that does not happen. That there is one set of rules.

    But yeah. They will fight any law that is passed. Any MOU they sign will not be perfect. And of course before the ink is even dry on the MOU the corps will be working on ways to subvert and bypass it.

    PS: No MOU actually prevents states from passing new laws. It just tries to make a marketing claim “you do not have to spend effort on it- we are doing a good job already”. But that only lasts for as long as the MOU is not bypassed.




  • Reddit’s bottom line in the short term is unimpaired that is how they won.

    But in the long term- they are dead. I mused on this before.

    Social network need monopoly - otherwise the business model struggles. One Facebook. One Reddit, one Instagram. Facebook, Insta, Snap, and TikTok however are struggling because they are now the same thing in different packages.

    Not so Reddit. Reddit was a true monopoly. Nothing else compared. Well no longer. All their hiking have spawned a true credible alternative in Lemmy/Kbin. This will kill them. No matter of it’s Fediverse or something else - now there use than one place for Reddit. That means a third, fourth and fifth place is in the realm of possibility. And they WILL emerge. Others will try to enter the Reddit space.

    Reddit had a niche and it was so dominant. No one truly tried to enter my ya niche. But that was not good enough. The enshittified it over and over again. And now the. Have competition. As they will never have a monopoly again. They will struggle to get their ads money. They will struggle with the margins. They will struggle. Yahoo will buy them in 10 years and do the mercy blow.


  • This is more the oligarch / dictator wannabe. He is saying fascist things because that gets votes but like Orban if becoming a socialist, a devout Christian, a hard core libertarian gets his base riled up - he’ll do it.

    All he wants is to make sure to be able to steal more money and not get prosecuted by the next government.

    He is Orban (originally a left wing crusader), Lukashenko (originally a man anti corruption fire brand), Putin (originally a pragmatic technocrat) / they are now all hard right wing , “religious” (ignore all their lovers and affairs) men of the people (ignore the palaces and yachts). All of them flap in the wind of populism. It just so happens that all the slots are primed and ready to vote for fascism.