BillyClark

@BillyClark@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the best arguments against this type of propaganda is to look at what actually happened in places where they treat their workers more fairly.

  Like, you hear people say that fast food would become prohibitively expensive if we raise the minimum wage, but when you look at countries where they have decent minimum wages, the fast food there is basically the same price. Maybe pennies more.

  The best way to combat this propaganda is simply to experiment or call their bluff. You know, try it out and see what actually happens. When NYC does this and nothing bad happens, maybe that will be a clue to other cities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paid Time Off Hypocrisy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is what happens when you remove Republican incentives to lie, of which there are a lot. Most of their policies will still be bad, but almost everybody has a good side to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Min wage in most states is so sad⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You sound like much more of an ass. You obviously first responded without actually reading my comment. Wasting everyone’s time instead of simply reading the comment you were responding to that had that info in it.

  And now you can’t even defend your previous points. You have to move the goalposts and bring up new points, half of which, again, I already addressed in that first comment you didn’t read. I’ll address your points and then I am done with you.

  1. Trivial. Number all ballots the same then pick one of those numbers randomly. The votes already have to be counted together. If what you’re saying is hard, then normal voting would also be hard.
  2. That already happens with our current ballots. Sounds like you don’t even vote if you don’t know that.
  3. No. Rephrasing something isn’t an argument and it doesn’t make it true.
  4. The minority power point is by far your worst one. Random ballot actually gives better proportional representation on average, and makes gerrymandering more difficult, again, as I said in the first comment you didn’t read. Unless you really believe democracy is supposed to strive to be “the tyranny of the majority,” in which case, you’re beyond help.

  I’m done with you but if you try to argue things in the future, how about doing the absolute minimum and at least read what you’re arguing against? Other ideas: Read a tiny bit of a related Wikipedia article. Double check your arguments before submitting them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Min wage in most states is so sad⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally exactly the opposite of what you said. I addressed those exact two points in the comment you replied to as being strengths of random ballot.

  The most obvious specific benefits of random ballot to the voter are less voter dissatisfaction and feeling more like your vote counts.

  Less dissatisfaction because politicians will try to appeal to every voter. They don’t want to leave it up to chance.

  More like your vote counts because your vote has an equal chance of choosing the winner as anybody else’s vote. It doesn’t matter how anybody else votes.

  If you want to say that the opposite will happen, then you not only need to give specific reasons, but you should also know that there is already a lot of research on these types of elections. That’s why my comment seemed so informed, while yours didn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fuck the giant corporations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Haven’t I heard artists complain that the ticket sales monopolies like Ticket Master suck up a lot of the money from ticket sales? Was that bad info?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Min wage in most states is so sad⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There are also several proposals of random voting that have a lot of good things about them. In one system, you pick a random ballot out of all ballots, and whoever that person voted for wins for all positions.

  Or, you can do it per elected position. Take all of the votes for each elected position and pick a random vote.

  One advantage of random ballots is that no elected official is safe. A candidate who gets 60% of the vote can lose to a candidate who got 20% of the vote.

  Why is this good?

  Well, for one thing, it would be much harder to gerrymander. Gerrymandering generally means you have one party win most districts by a tiny amount, and the other party wins very few districts by a large amount. This strategy simply doesn’t work with random ballots.

  Another benefit is that politicians would be incentivized to get as many votes as possible, far beyond 50%. Even a politician who gets 90% of the vote would lose 1 in 10 elections. So, politicians would work for everybody’s vote, not just for the slim majority’s vote.

  It has other advantages beyond that. Mostly in the realm of the fairness of votes. You vote feels completely fair. It’s just as likely that your vote will decide the winner as anybody else’s vote.

  One big disadvantage is that there might be an extremely popular politician, who has 99% of the vote, and who still loses. This can be mitigated a bit by keeping terms short. The politician could come back in a couple of years.

  Another disadvantage is that it is very difficult to recount the ballots. You basically just pick another random ballot and all of the winners might change. And related, it’s more difficult to detect cheating after the fact. Like, what if the ballot wasn’t completely random?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fuck the giant corporations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I imagine you’d only go to local movie theaters that show indie movies, then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fuck the giant corporations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I have heard that movie theaters make most of their money from their concession stands, and that the ticket sales largely go to the movie distributors.

  So, their business model is marking up popcorn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Minimum wage isn't survivable anymore⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if they had an extra $500 per month somehow, it’s not enough to just survive. For one thing, if you’re human, you need to at least entertain the possibility of vacations.

  Why can’t we expect people to survive AND to have a decent quality of life?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An insurance I don't love⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In America, we don’t learn from watching others. Hell, we don’t even learn from our own mistakes.

  Come to think of it, we barely even learn in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How about instead, a longer healthier retirement?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Why is Dr. Oz making a comment about the deficit in the first place? He’s supposed to be a medical doctor, not an economist.

  Doctors should be saying what is healthiest, not what makes money for the government. His priorities are out of whack.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's never been about helping people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just for perspective, a person who invested in the stock market recently and got a 5% return would be said to be investing poorly.

  5% may not seem like much, but just for comparison, 5% of a trillion dollars is 50 billion dollars. I think you can see the point. Musk could solve world hunger, and it would be like chump change to him, even if he did fairly poorly with his investments. He wouldn’t even have to touch his savings.

  He’s refusing to help people whose lives are being ruined without that help, or who are dying, even though the only penalty for Musk is that he would be getting inconceivably richer at a slightly slower rate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The uber wealthy arent leaving. Its a lie.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Without the actual article, it’s difficult to say, but a millionaire is not ultra rich. That’s a middle class person who is doing well. So if by “millionaire class” they mean even people who have less than let’s say five million dollars, then the data will include a lot of working middle class people. Especially in places like NYC where housing prices can be sky high.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Waiting and getting treated is better than waiting and going bankrupt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I saw an analysis about this a few years ago where they showed that the wait time for care in Canada was generally less than the wait time in America for most stuff.

  Certain things like non-emergency (but important) surgeries could take longer to schedule in Canada.

  But that was years ago. Probably both sides have had changes since then.

  The most important takeaway is that if you think wait times would definitely be worse with socialized medicine, you have fallen for conservative propaganda, you idiot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Well if that isn't just about the most evil thing you could openly admit to doing.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Teacher’s Unions aren’t perfect and there have been some valid complaints about them, but that’s basically every union. Honestly, my biggest complaint is that teachers have unions and they’re still not paid enough.

  But at any rate, this is typical conservative rhetoric. “We’ve found (or invented) one thing we can complain about, so rather than having a rational, calm discussion about the state of things and how we can improve that thing, we want to cause the most drama, scare everybody the most, and tear everything down, while promising to replace it with something better, a promise that we’ll never, ever, in a million years, deliver on.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This crazy assassin character, who doesn't know what shampoo is, somehow would bother shaving her armpits⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mark Hammil does an excellent Harrison Ford impression, so there’s a possibility that the “kid” is part of the impression, rather than a direct quote. Also, I was doing the quote from memory, so it’s also possible that I remembered it wrong.

  But I also like the thought that Harrison Ford calls everyone kid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This crazy assassin character, who doesn't know what shampoo is, somehow would bother shaving her armpits⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s this story that Mark Hammil tells about being on the set of Star Wars and he mentions to Harrison Ford that their hair should be wet, since it was just wet in the previous scene.

  And Ford says something like, “This ain’t that kind of movie, kid. If the audience is talking about our hair, something has already gone wrong.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's great to see a politician that's progressive and Not a Millionaire.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I seem to recall this was from a few years ago. At this point, I wouldn’t hold it against her if she’s made more money. Big name politicians can make extra money through things like speaking fees and book deals. Honestly, I’d be surprised if any famous politicians aren’t taking speaking fees. Plus, her salary is $174,000/year according to Wikipedia.

  I like to at least pretend in my head that I’d be an ethical politician were I ever elected (a job I would never actually want), and if somebody offered me a speaking fee that was sort of the average amount a politician might get, I think I’d still be able to convince myself it wasn’t a bribe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨just temporarily embarrassed billionaires, one good idea or lottery ticket from making it rich⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Strangely, I guess, if I try to imagine myself having one billion dollars, it’s just an amount of money that the only way I’d even make a dent in it is if I either was specifically making bad purchases or if I had lost my mind. (For example, just gambling it all away.)

  Even if you simply threw it in a normal index fund that isn’t focused on dividends, but growth, you might still make 1%, or 10 million a year in dividends. So just the dividends you accidentally make would let you live a very luxurious lifestyle.

  I could imagine having one billion dollars if it was just the worth of my private company that I didn’t want to split up or something like that, but otherwise, it’s really just too much money. I’d be donating to charities just to keep my net worth at a level that I could look myself in the mirror and not feel like a villain, and so I’d actually be in favor of things like wealth taxes. It would just make my life easier.

  I think people who imagine themselves as billionaires and are still stingy with money are either not accurately imagining that amount of money, or they’re too stupid to have any amount of money, or they’re villains, just like every billionaire today is a villain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨President Trump reacts to President Biden’s cancer diagnosis: "I don't feel sorry for him"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that the Democrats intentionally pressured to delay those prosecutions with the following idea, “If we wait until the last minute, then these prosecutions of crimes, which we 100% know Trump is guilty of, will torpedo Trump’s presidential chances, and the Republicans won’t have any time to boost a different candidate.”

  I think they didn’t expect that the most slam-dunk case, the classified files case, would be pulled by one of the most outlandishly corrupt pro-Trump judges we’ve ever seen, Aileen Cannon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨President Trump reacts to President Biden’s cancer diagnosis: "I don't feel sorry for him"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Boneitis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is what happens when Billionaires own the news media.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bezos bought the Washington Post after he had already been the richest person in the world. What do you think you mean when you say “how they get their status in those circles”? He’s got the status. There are only two people who have more wealth than him today. You think he’s just embarrassed hanging out with those two guys? Give me a break.

  His best move to close the gap right now with Musk is to advocate for a wealth tax. If Musk paid 1% of 800 billion and Bezos paid 1% of 280 billion, that’s actually closing the gap.

  And what are you even saying about how taxes are spent? Everybody has to pay whatever they’re told, even if it’s spent poorly. But if the government could demonstrate that they were using the tax money well, do you think Bezos would change his mind? If not, then it’s not even the bare minimum criteria for a point and you shouldn’t have brought it up.

  And whatever else you think of the American government, it at least enabled Bezos to become the richest person in the world. There are a lot of countries where that couldn’t have possibly happened. We’re talking about Bezos’s taxes here, not taxes in general.

  I’m not sure why you are apologizing for the richest people in the world being bad citizens. It seems like an obviously losing argument, as well as counter-productive to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This is what happens when Billionaires own the news media.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t think of a way to understand this type of billionaire as if they are a human. Paying new taxes or not paying new taxes will make very little difference to people like Bezos. He would continue to live the exact same lifestyle… maybe on a smaller yacht, but probably even that wouldn’t change.

  It’s hard to even say that he wants to be richer than other billionaires, because they’d all be paying the same taxes, too. At least the American ones.

  It’s literally just a number in a computer that he wants to be bigger. Yes, for him, that number getting bigger used to improve his life back when it was in the range of something that a person could spend in a lifetime, but now, it makes zero difference in the real world.

  Bezos’s net worth is just a number. It makes no difference to him if he pays more taxes. Why would he go so far out of his way to fight against taxes? He could alternatively just fucking ignore the politics, pay whatever they say, and then at least people would only hate him for being rich, and not for being a piece of shit. It just seems like the choice of somebody who is not human.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨10.99 for a beer with..... ai pictures on it.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the worst thing to come out of this AI thing is how all the conspiracy theorists now have a new target, calling everything AI without even understanding what it means or how to tell what’s AI. Somebody here even posted the contact info, and now the brewer has to deal with that shit.

  They have a saying in politics that if you’re explaining, then you’re losing. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t something similar in marketing.

  If you’re an unethical participant in some industry, and your competitor has some distinctive-looking artwork on their product, all you have to do is make a few anonymous posts that the artwork is AI, and boy, howdy, that BS is bound to spread itself to all the mainstream sites via conspiracy theorists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Dangers of Socialism they warned us about...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen several times where somebody posts a picture saying “Look what socialism causes,” and the picture is like a tent city in modern America that was created under capitalism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's going on with Tesseract and why are people upset?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  For anybody who doesn’t know what a front end is, the job of the front end is generally to take data from the back end and present it to the user. So for the fediverse, a front end might be the web page or app. The back end is the actual instance where you made your user.

  Lots of front ends do filtering, but at the explicit instruction of the user. It’s better to do it on the back end if you can because it’s wasteful to send data to the front end only to throw it away. But there is a place for front end filtering, just not in secret.

  So in this case, a person who used tesseract as well as, say, a lemmy web page interface, would probably expect to see the same data in both places, but the tesseract front end would actually be hiding a lot of stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You have to look at how it was presented. Part of a speech that was supposed to be humorous, but we all know he really wants to run again.

  Also, that proposed amendment is a troll in my opinion. The guy who proposed it, some representative named Andrew Ogles, knows it has no chance of being ratified. So, why would he propose it? The likely candidates in my mind are to kiss up to Trump and to “trigger the libs” or whatever, at the same time. Proposing something that will never happen just for giggles is a pretty classic troll.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I take all of my points from wisdom, and place them into intelligence!

  Now, to challenge myself to build the world’s most polluting machine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are two reasonable ways of interpreting The Colbert Report. One is that he was joking, and this we know is what he intended, because he made himself clear when he was off the show.

  The other is that he was trolling. He was throwing things out there and he was joking, but not really. You now see this style from a lot of right wing people. Trump just did it in his correspondents dinner speech where he said he was going to run again in 2028.

  It’s because other people come in with their own biased perspectives and they can make some sort of reasonable interpretation that they get the wrong idea and never correct it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Stephen Colbert had The Colbert Report did the right ever realize he was doing a parody of them?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  People who are smart in one way are usually not smart in every way.