CMahaff

@CMahaff@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has the USA turned into an oligarchy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well in 2015 Jimmy Carter said that the United States is "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. "

  That same year The Economist’s Democracy Index downgraded the United States to a “flawed democracy” and it has continued to trend downwards since then.

  If you’re looking for something more recent, Bernie Sanders is saying the same thing: “We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, have so much wealth and so much power”.

  So between the massive (and growing) income inequality in the country, and rulings like Citizen’s United it’s hard not to believe it’s not at least on the trajectory towards an oligarchy. Now throw in the blatantly corrupt picks of the Trump administration, where cabinet positions are favors to rich friends, or being given to billionaires with a direct interest in killing the government agency they are running - not to mention all the things he’s routinely done / will do to enrich himself / friends with tax payer dollars and it certainly seems like an oligarchy to me.

  And just on a personal vibes level, living here, it feels like legislation to help normal people or solve normal people’s problems is almost non-existent. And when it does happen, it also conveniently throws a ton of money at the rich at the same time (see recent tax cuts, pandemic relief funds, etc.). Even something like the Affordable Care Act, which did a ton of net good things for this country, enriched a whole lot of private healthcare companies along the way rather than creating an actual public option with negotiated prices to keep government costs down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux hits exactly 2% user share on the October 2024 Steam Survey⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I got the hardware survey on my Windows PC, but not on my Steamdeck. So I wonder if there is only 1 survey per user, and most people don’t use a steamdeck exclusively?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hades II - Sign Up for the HADES II Technical Test⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I loved the original Hades, but I played it after it left Early Access.

  It’s going to be really hard to resist jumping in early with Hades II.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Lemmy.World refederated with Beehaw.org?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding is that right now Lemmy is very poor at “catching up” on missed content in general. You can see it anytime there is prolonged downtime that the same post across multiple instances gets out of sync. So most likely in the event of re-federation, as Lemmy is written today, the old content would not be received - just new content. Hopefully things are improved in the future

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Lemmy.World refederated with Beehaw.org?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  So I asked about this once before, and my understanding is that since beehaw defederated:

  • Beehaw won’t accept anything new from lemmy.world
  • Beehaw won’t send anything new to lemmy.world

  So even though lemmy.world didn’t block beehaw, it is still effectively cut off in all meaningful ways.

  You could still see:

  • Beehaw and lemmy.world users interacting together in communities on instances that neither has blocked (because in this was the third instance is acting like a middleman between them)
  • Lemmy.world users can still post to the “phantom” beehaw communities and it will be visible to all lemmy.world subscribers, but no one else will see it since it can’t reach Beehaw, and this can’t be distributed to all the other instances.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy.world error page⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there is a way to customize this message right now (without building Lemmy altered from source that is).

  Relevant code: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/…/error-page.tsx

  Relevant translation file: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-translations/…/en.json