Literally money. More specifically, the financial need under a capitalist system for businesses to constantly grow and increase profits, and to focus on shareholder profits over making a good product. Most businesses on any sort of large scale today aren't in it to do a good job at making whatever it is they make, they're in it to make money. Their actual 'business' is just an incidental stop on the way to making more money.

You see this literally everywhere. Remember Odwalla? They made these great, super-thick bottled smoothy-like juices. Easily the healthiest thing you could find to drink in most of the places they were sold. Then Coca-Cola bought them out, changed the name to Naked Juice, and watered them all down. What we have now, as a result, is a pale imitation of what we once had.

Why? Because Odwalla was profitable, so it was profitable for Coca-cola to buy up a competitor for shelf space. But once they were bought up, there's no incentive to deliver the same quality of product. They have no remaining competition, so they can release a shittier version and we'll basically just suck it up because it's still healthier than soda.

Our reward for worshiping currency is for everything ever made out of love of a craft or an art to be exploited and turned into a shittier version of itself.

The solution, to my reckoning, is to start making things you love because you love to make them and to refuse to sell out when they come knocking.

Apes together still giving Reddit traffic.

It's like writing anti-walmart propaganda on a thousand one dollar bills and then spending them all at Walmart.

Okay, so as a cab driver I have a lot of opportunities to get frustrated with how selfish and myopic people are. But you know what happens when I do that? I make myself miserable.

I, personally, find that my mental state is much, much better the more I'm willing to accept people not doing things 'the right way'. Yes, I could get annoyed for the hypothetical people who might encounter an obstacle to their mobility here (who have not and may not ever arrive), but what will that actually do for me or for anyone else?

Unless I'm actually moving the obstacle my disapproval is completely useless. It may even cause me to do something stupid and inconsiderate myself as I become distracted by my annoyance.

But if I just let it go, smile, and move on, the utter insignificance of the action can just fade into the background and not make itself part of my focus on how to reflect on humanity or my day.

So as a taxi driver with asthma and horrific allergies, I've found dog owners are not typically terribly understanding when I tell them we're going to have another cab come pick them up. I've had several people insist that their animal is a service dog as if this somehow changes my own health condition.

I've often found that my own access to public spaces is limited by the use of service animals and straight up pets in public places. I don't even try to go to breweries anymore. I wouldn't bother trying to get on a plane. Even hotels are basically a no go for me unless i want to get sick more often than not.

I don't pretend to have a solution to this, but access to public spaces for animals and for some allergy sufferers is mutually exclusive. It makes it a lot more complicated than 'service animals should be everywhere' or 'allergy sufferers should have access to public spaces'. The two are kind of in conflict. It sucks.

Nobody pays any mind to air quality and it's made my life a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Anyway, i feel for her, but i think the service animal stuff is way over simplified and people forget that other people with disabilities also pay a cost.

What's it going to take to actually do something about these ultra-rich leeches literally destroying our planet and everything good on it to inflate a number in a bank somewhere? How do we actually build up the initiative to stop it?

All our other problems seem largely centered around our inability to appropriately respond to extreme greed. Not only in actually actively stopping it, but in even identifying it or being able to properly censure it in the first place. The moment you start talking about the rich being the cause of our problems, there's a section of society that starts tuning you out. I definitely feel like as things get worse people are starting to catch on, but even once we're there, where do we go?

If we actually get to the point of agreeing that excessive wealth is inherently misanthropic and should be a crime in and of itself, how do we make it a crime while so much power sits in the hands of those who'd be on the losing end of that decision?

I hope the WGA and SAG can spark a change in people's consciousness around labor. I'd honestly love to see a lot more interviews and independent podcasts coming from the picket lines. If there's anyone who can convince Americans to fight for the value of their labor, it's the people write and play the parts in the stories they love.

Right! This is why I say it has more to do with being stubborn than being smart. If you're determined to find a solution and you're half decent at research and following instructions, you can figure a lot out, but people treat it like you invented the thing with some magical knowledge that they could never possess.

I was on meds when I was a kid and I was not the dog. I was a shaky, confused, mentally unstable, paranoid wreck. The urgency on everything was cranked up to 11 and I still had no autonomy. It was baaaaad.

It's not that people think content from Reddit is stealing, it's that we don't want our feeds polluted with bots autoposting bullshit.

Why would we want a whole copy of Reddit? Reddit is a toxic pit.

Talk about an inaccurate headline. The conclusion here isn't that AI art can't be copyrighted, it's that AI cannot be a copyright holder. But it's AI, so we can't actually expect anyone to pull their head out of their ass and give it enough thought to write an article that isn't garbage.

Instead we have yet another thread about this case in which no one actually has any idea what the ruling was. Very informative.

I honestly wouldn't give those people the dignity of calling them leftists. They're too concerned about cosplaying as activists and dunking on people to actually give a shit about advancing the rights of real people or trying to protect anything good.

So far this is the only bot on Lemmy that actually adds to the experience. Well done!

Expecting someone to check in every couple of hours is unreasonable, and if he's being pushy about it that's controlling behavior.

There is nothing wrong with you not being constantly tethered to your phone, and you have every right to live by your own standards.

You deserve to have the space to be comfortable.

Actually, he looks like a John Travolta impersonator fucked a Street Shark, then fed their child on a diet of lemons and romantic stories about 1920s snake oil salesmen.

I honestly think most of the people that simultaneously take both of these positions are working for the Kremlin. There are probably a lot more bad actors who are being paid to muddy the waters than any of us would guess.

It's perfectly possible to create a law enforcement arm of government that's actually concerned with protecting vulnerable citizens, but that's not what the institution of policing actually focuses on.

To suggest that we can't have law enforcement without propping up a toxic system of professional predators is exactly the presumption they want you to make in order to preserve their jobs. We don't need to capitulate to a lawless fraternity to enforce our laws, we can replace it with something that isn't built on principles of oppression.

That said, their main job at the moment is to protect hoarders of wealth from the social consequences of wealth hoarding. Personally, I don't see that as necessary.

I like to picture the Aldi brother as like this humanitarian filled to the brim with compassion who just wants to bring people good affordable food and dignity at work and the Trader Joe's brother as basically Snidely Whiplash in like a Northface vest with cargo shorts twirling his mustache about his evil grocery schemes.

Jeffery Amherst used biological warfare in the form of smallpox blankets on natives.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffery_Amherst,_1st_Baron_Amherst

You know what makes a population really unlikely to want to surrender? An invading military that's perpetrating war crimes all over their country and has a propensity for conscripting civilians from occupied regions.

I definitely noticed that it's pretty seamlessly replaced Reddit for me at this point. It's been a decent source of stuff to read and there's enough of it now that I don't feel like I'm just seeing the same thing repeatedly.

I like reading articles and discussions, so it's nice to be able to have that without propping up some big toxic company.

Why do so many Europeans seem to think the whole country is Texas?