pjwestin
@pjwestin@lemmy.world
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 4 comments
- Comment on Does anyone else think the NYPD photos of the UHC CEO shooting suspect don’t match? 2 weeks ago:
“OK, now do these two pictures-”
“Not guilty!”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh , sorry, too soon? I’ll wait.”
- Comment on Does anyone else think the NYPD photos of the UHC CEO shooting suspect don’t match? 2 weeks ago:
No, I think they match, but if I wound up on his jury, I might start to doubt it.
- Comment on Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing 2 weeks ago:
A longtime employee of UnitedHealthcare said that workers at the company had been aware for years that members were unhappy. Mr. Thompson was one of the few executives who wanted to do something about it, said the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the company does not allow workers to speak publicly without permission.
In speeches to employees, Mr. Thompson spoke about the need to change the state of health care coverage in the country and the culture of the company, topics other executives avoided, the employee said.
The speeches:
- Comment on alpha 2 weeks ago:
True, although I met a girl with celiac early in the gluten-free fad who claimed that she couldn’t trust a lot of restaurants’ gluten-free options because a lot of them weren’t actually gluten-free. Restaurants were just chasing a trend that they didn’t fully understand. Things are much better now, but I think early on a lot of restaurants were treating gluten-free like the Atkins or Paleo diet, not an allergy.
- Comment on alpha 2 weeks ago:
Peter Gibson, the guy who discovered non-celiac gluten sensitivity, retracted his own study a few years later, but it had already become a fad diet, so it just stuck. That being said, there have been some studies that seem to confirm its existence, but the evidence is pretty thin. (To be clear, celiac disease and wheat allergies are 100% proven and can be reliably tested for).
- Comment on Brazilian's impression on the united states(i have never been there and this is based on nothing) 3 weeks ago:
No, I’m saying that the map labels Louisiana the crappiest state, but it isn’t because it has New Orleans. Otherwise, the OP’s map isn’t bad.
- Comment on Brazilian's impression on the united states(i have never been there and this is based on nothing) 3 weeks ago:
Crappiest state is either Mississippi or Alabama. Louisiana at least has New Orleans. Otherwise, not bad.
- Comment on Is it possible to have a "free speech" platform that simultaneously stops "hate speech"? 3 weeks ago:
It depends on how much of an absolutist you want to be. No government allows absolute freedom of speech. Libel, slander, and incitement of violence are all forms of speech that are illegal in basically every country. If your platform refuses to remove these forms of speech, you would be protecting what is generally not considered to be free speech, and it’s possible you could even be held legally liable for allowing that kind of speech to spread on your platform.
If you decide not to be a free speech absolutist, and instead define free speech as legal speech, then things get complicated. In the U.S., the Supreme Court has held multiple times that hate speech is protected under the First Amendment, so censoring hate speech would mean your platform wasn’t allowing all forms of, “free speech.” However, the U.S. has much broader protections on speech than most Western countries, and hate speech is illegal in much of Europe.
So, TL:DR; free speech is a sliding scale, and many countries wouldn’t consider hate speech to be protected form of speech. By those standards, you could have a platform that censors hate speech but still maintains what is considered free speech. However, by other countries’ standards, you would be censoring legal speech.
- Comment on Frog's Gift 4 weeks ago:
It also can’t be understated how much private corporations benefit from technology this research yields. We spent $25 billion ($175 billion in today’s money) on the Apollo programs alone, and NASA research has led to everything from cell phones and laptops to the rubber molding process used for sneakers. The DoD wasted a ton of money in the 80s on this new technology that involved getting computers to communicate with each other, and now we have the internet.
The government spends money in ways that could never be justified by cooperations, then the cooperations enrich themselves with that research and use the profits to lobby Congress for lower taxes and limited spending. It’s absolutely infuriating.
- Comment on "The American experiment endures," Biden said. "We're going to be OK." 1 month ago:
I was about to downvote until I saw the community.
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
The party that ran a populist message won. When their economic situation is dire, people turn to populist leaders. When there’s no populist movement in the left (usually some for of socialist/labor movement) they turn to right-wing populism (fascism). Democrats spent the last 12 years stamping out any kind of pro-labor movement that started in their party in favor of neoliberal centrism, and now their losing to right-wing facism.
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
I’m just so fucking tired of hearing why the policies that I and most of the country want are unpopular from people who can’t win a fucking election.
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
Yeah, except progressive positions are broadly popular. Raising billionaire and corporate taxes? Popular. Single-payer healthcare? Popular. Universal Basic Income?Popular. Bernie Sanders? Still pretty fucking popular!
Meanwhile, how popular was the flaccid centrist platform the Democrats put up this year? Is Kamala gonna be president? Are they gonna keep the Senate? Is the house looking good? No? Then maybe it’s time for all the popularity experts in the Democratic party to shut the fuck up.
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
Democrats aren’t progressives. Maybe if they were, they wouldn’t lose all the time.
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
Oh, I get to blame it on anything I like? Really? Then I’m going to blame it on Democratic party that was actively working against Sanders, a coordinated effort to anoint Biden after he won South Carolina, the billionaire who only entered the race, and an actively hostile media, and a billionaire who spent his on money on anti-Bernie ads. There were more headwinds against Bernie in those primaries than there were against Hillary, Biden, and Kamala in the general. Pretending that it was just, 'people picked Biden," FFS.
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
You’re right, I forgot that Bloomberg was still in and running a campaign entirely designed to block Bernie. Nothing says, “Democracy,” like an oligarch entering an election and using his personal wealth to undermine another candidate, right?
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
Except it wasn’t just him and Bernie. It was also Warren, so the progressive vote was spit, while the centrist vote was coordinated around Biden. Nice try though!
- Comment on US Democracy 1 month ago:
I think you’re forgetting the part where Clinton paid off the DNC’s debts and became it’s only financial lifeline, for which DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz abdicated control of party to Clinton’s team long before she secured the nomination.. Or that the AP controversially called the primary for Hillary just before California voted, giving voters the impression the primary was over before voting finished. Or that the DNC argued in court that they had no obligation give Bernie a fair, democratic primary. Or that Representatives Ford and Smith admitted the party did coalesced around Biden in 2020 to block Bernie. Or that polls had Bernie beating Trump by a wider margin than Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
- Comment on How do Americans win their country back? 1 month ago:
I’ll also add that you need to primary basically anyone that has been in politics for more than 15 years. There is just too much, “common sense,” in this party that is just wrong. In 2016, it was smart to run a centrist campaign that tried to move moderates away from Trump, and it failed. In 2024, they ran the same fucking campaign, and it failed.
There are well intentioned people that somehow still think that the 1992, third-way strategy will deliver gains through incrementalism, and it’s just not going to happen. Primary them, so that they at least have to contend with the new political realities. Trump picked up working class voters across across all demographics, not just the white working class. Everyone wants change; offer real change.
- Comment on ... 1 month ago:
Thank you. Something about me was rubbing me the wrong way, but I couldn’t articulate it.
- Comment on 'It Has Plateaued': Should We Be Worried About Console Gaming's Future? 1 month ago:
Well, there also seem to be credible leaks that it’ll have some sort of duel screen system, potentially functioning like the DS. It’s probably going to be more than just a bigger switch.
- Comment on Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit? 2 months ago:
It’s the only site with a similar post/comment structure and a large enough user base to be viable, so in that regard, it’s the only alternative. Culturally, it’s much different. It’s far more left-leaning and hasn’t fallen victim to the same salf-importance and group-think that Reddit users have. It also doesn’t have the same wealth of knowledge Reddit built up over 20 years, though, and it’s prone to petty infighting between communities and instances (and even admins).
Ultimately, I prefer it to Reddit, and never feel the urge to go back. I’m not convinced that Federation is a silver bullet for all of social media’s ills, but I think Lemmy is an interesting project, and I’m interested in seeing how it develops.
- Comment on Absolutely nothing happened June 1989 2 months ago:
Eh, it’s a mixed bag. There’s a very high concentration of centrist, “vote blue, no matter who,” liberals in Political Memes. They’re not the whole instance, but they’ve made a nice little echo chamber that makes them a pretty loud minority.
- Comment on the flies 2 months ago:
Interesting. A while ago, I read that zebra stripes were meant to confuse predators. Basically, the idea was that when they ran as a herd, their stripes made it difficult to tell where one zebra ended and the other began. I wonder if that’s considered bunk now or if this is supposed to be an additional benefit.
- Comment on Disney lost nearly a third of a billion dollars on two Marvel movies 2 months ago:
Watchmen is a perfect example of how Zach Snyder doesn’t understand what he’s adapting. The original story is a deconstruction of the superhero, showing how sad and broken these characters would be in real life: right-wing murders, rapists, schluby middle-age guys with ED…Snyder takes those characters and films them like they’re cool and bad-ass. Aesthetically, it’s a beautiful, shot-for-shot adaptation, but at no point did it occur to him that the guy in a trench coat muttering to himself about filth and whores wasn’t supposed to be cool. It didn’t occur to him that a group of people who completely fail to stop the villian weren’t supposed to have action sequences straight out of The Matrix. It didn’t occur to him that a story about what superheroes would look like in the real world should be realistic.
The part that truly enraged me was a small moment at the very end. In the comic books, after everyone leaves, Dr. Manhattan goes to see Ozymandias one last time before leaving Earth forever. Ozymandias asks him if he was right in the end, and Manhattan tells him, “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” Ozymandias asks what he means by this, but Manhattan leaves without answering. In the movie, Snyder replaces Dr. Manhattan with Owlman in this interaction. Ozymandias’ story ends with a character who is essentially God telling him that his entire plan was pointless, and Snyder swaps out God for the story’s everyman character. It’s a perfect distillation Snyder’s inability to understand even the simplest subtext.
- Comment on Anon pregames 2 months ago:
LOL, you said that 4 hours ago. If that’s really true then get the fuck out if my notifications already.
- Comment on Anon pregames 2 months ago:
“Fin.” said the guy who spent a week trying to get the last comment. Fucking clown.
- Comment on Anon pregames 2 months ago:
LOL, yeah, definitely didn’t say that, but that’s about the level of comprehension I’d expect from a dude who thinks someone who’s drinking til they puke is more sober than everyone else.
- Comment on Anon pregames 2 months ago:
Will do! Thanks for dropping in on a week old thread to let me know what a dipshit you are!
