The national guard is mobilized to address state emergencies and support the military abroad. Any state’s national guard is woefully inadequate to defend against foreign threats

Nothing gets past you two

As someone who shares the views of the parent comment, I think anarchism is the end-road, utopia progression of these beliefs.

I think that conservatives are right to be skeptical of big government. Concentrated power always corrupts without fail. Whether that’s big government, big corporations, big religions, that remains true.

I think some pragmatism is required especially for things such as emergency services and common defense because market forces are kind of like Darwin’s evolution. It selects for the best chance of making the number go up and doesn’t specifically select the best outcome for all participants.

Bonus Analysis: (own section because my post was getting too long)

Republicans, in my analysis, however aren’t really that concerned about big government. The Republican Party is a big organization that has been corrupted, they are more concerned about feigning concern to further their own wealth and power. And thus the turn toward fascism.

We used to have a better standard of living. We used to have less depression. We used to have more membership in civic organizations and churches. Our country used to be far more distributed and decentralized than it is today.

It’s not surprising to me that all of those factors decreased and hate and division increased while power and wealth has became more and more concentrated the last 30 years.

Everyone knows that racism and hate was invented in 2006 by Mark Zuckerberg.

Social Media isn’t innately harmful. But it’s been abused by the powerful to control the masses. The same as religion, print, radio, and television before it

You can convenience or security, never both. Unfortunately bluesky’s compromises towards convenience hurt it’s security measures against enshittification

I think being added to join-lemmy definitely helps but people that are already on Lemmy aren’t going to that site so it definitely shows that we are growing (or at least replacing people at a decent rate)

Sounds like you have a good instance, congrats on the growth

This is the only comment your instance knows about because of the way federation works. I can see his comment history goes back 1.7 years

Kids love cyber trucks, teslas, Ferraris, or any car that is perceived as very expensive

It’s just the default front end that does that. Using a front end like voyager can automatically redirect links to the instance you are signed in on, more apps and the default front end ought to do that quite frankly

I think a lot of the pushback can be chalked up to jealousy as well. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, then you can’t afford to take a 15% pay cut. Then of course, you taking leave means that they will have added responsibilities until you get back as well.

But it’s your right, if you can afford it then you absolutely should take it if that’s what you want. You can’t get this time back

What if we had taken the billions of dollars invested in AI and invested that into public education instead?

Imagine the return on investment of the information being used to train actual humans who can reason and don’t lie 60% of the time instead of using it to train a computer that is useless more than it is useful.

Any attempts to implement new taxes are going to hit the middle class the hardest as the wealthiest have the money to be able to move and organize their wealth to achieve maximum tax avoidance. Meanwhile the guy hustling to provide a few rentals to college kids. Or the unlucky couple who lost both sets of parents in the same year are going to see huge burdens because they don’t necessarily have a lot of income but have “wealth”

It’s really not so difficult to file your taxes if all you are a W2 earner and maybe a 1099 for interest income. (Which is the majority)

My state had direct file for the first time and so I was able to file for free, from the web, without any 3rd party software and it was so simple and I got my return in a week.

We need to make this available in all 50 states and advertise it. HR Block can kiss my ass

Ironic considering Lemmy.world is Dutch I believe

I’m mean there is no real downside to having and sharing an opinion outside the “hive mind”

“Karma” on Lemmy isn’t tracked. Having a negative score comment or post doesn’t affect your account or experience at all. I’ve posted plenty that has gotten downvoted into the negative and I haven’t even gotten a warning because Lemmy is an actual free speech platform unlike twitter or Reddit.

That doesn’t mean that everyone has to like your opinions though, hence the downvotes, but that’s ok.

You get used to being house poor. You learn how to budget how much it really costs you to live.

It beats paying someone else’s bills. That’s for sure

When you think things are bleak as far as repairs/maintenance, look to local lenders in your community. Unless you made a significant down payment they probably sold your mortgage to Freddie but they still can give you loans on your home equity especially if going to pay for things that are going to put more equity in your home.

Everyone knows that grandparents have never had sex and should be protected from such obscenity

Then you should expect enshittified experiences if you aren’t willing to pay for them

This isn’t my experience at all, maybe I just have curated my subscriptions enough that I don’t see that much. Or maybe it’s just because I’m so used to just tuning out socialist/communist comments on threads that have nothing to do with politics.

It’s also worth noting that Lenny’s algorithms sort by either top (which is just votes), hot (which is based on votes and comments which will surface contentious topics like politics more often), new (which is just when it was posted), and scaled (which is just hot but proportional to the size of the community so it will surface smaller communities more often).

If you sort by hot it’s going to give you a similar feed to Reddit. I prefer to sort by top by 6/12/24hr and by scaled personally.

I do agree that there are tasks that are good to offload to AI. I don’t believe that reading and writing should be. AI can be a great tool. Ironically, since you mentioned memorization, I can’t possibly retain 100% the information I’ve learned in career and so using LLMs to point to the correct documentation or to create some boilerplate has greatly improved my productivity.

I’ve used AI as a conversational tool to assist in finding legitimate information to answer search queries (not just accept its output at face value) and generating boilerplate code (and not just using it as another stack overflow and copying and paste the code it gives you without understanding). The challenge is that if we try to replace 100% of the task of communication or research or coding, you eventually lose those skills. And I worry for Jrs who are just building those skills but have totally relied on AI to do the work that’s supposed to teach them those skills.