Got cheap, no-name, unbranded LED bulbs off of eBay. Years later, not one of them had broken.

But Philips LED bulbs? Those things don't last a year. In fact, none of the high-rated, "high quality," top-ten-list, LED light bulbs have ever outlasted an incandescent in my experience.

If you want your LEDs to last, buy the no-name bulbs, guys. The Phoebus Cartel is still out there.

I realized in a reddit argument a while back that one huge difference between Trump supporters and the rest of us is: Trump supporters expect less from Trump. Hold him to a lower standard than they hold themselves or non-supporters to.

In the argument, I had a supporter tell me that "raking the leaves" was advocating wildfire management -- including controlled burns. And the person followed it up with remarks along the lines of, "you should have been smart enough to know that's what he was saying."

Which was crazy to me because:

• they were measuring my intelligence by my ability to come up with numerous unique rephrasings and potential meanings to Trump's words
• they were scoring higher than Trump by their own intelligence metric
  • Trump could only come up with "raking the leaves" and the commenter came up with "as a country, we should be putting more resources into wildfire management", a much more coherent and intelligent phrasing
• in expecting me to be able to read multiple meanings into "raking the leaves", this person was ALSO expecting me to score higher on this measure of intelligence than Trump. And calling me stupid for not outscoring Trump.

Basically told me that if I wasn't smarter than Trump, I was stupid.

I pointed this out to them and never got a response.

Anyways, different standards. According to Trump supporters:

• if you're no smarter than Trump, you are an idiot;
• if you're no kinder than Trump, you are sadistic and malicious;
• if you are no more effective than Trump, you are useless,
• But Trump is the smartest, kindest, most valuable person there is.

Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah... and also Jane Elliott's famous experiment)

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide "leadership" (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than... $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.

So the workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then uses his money to discriminate against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs -- stoked into a frenzy by the business owner's well-funded propaganda -- tear down brown-eyed people's homes and food supplies, leaving them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit... or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, "uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!"

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers --fooled into attacking their own team -- and try to apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them... but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: "it's easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled."

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

"Divide and conquer."

You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own "The Daily Mail" and the "The New York Post" to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.

This isn't really an answer to the question, but I just saw a Mastodon post about an online store that's opening this October called Artisans.coop

It seems to be a cooperatively owned Etsy alternative, (and I can only assume it's a response to whatever shenanigans went on between Etsy and Silicon Valley Bank.)

Look: a lot of companies would suffer from an office real estate crash.

• the businesses that own the office real estate
• car manufacturers
• tire manufacturers
• petroleum companies
• coffee franchises
• fast food franchises lining freeways on the way to work

And most importantly, funds invested in all of the above.

People who own businesses also own stocks in other people's businesses. Meaning they all fall and rise together. Trying to keep the "work commute" and "office rental" industries alive is just an attempt on the part of those who hold capital to keep their portfolios growing.

In secret, they are probably also trying to hedge their bets, diversify and make themselves immune to the coming collapse. They'll try to position themselves and their capital in such a way so that the working class is the only group hurt when it happens.

But in public? They are not going to devalue their assets by standing by, complacent, as an office apocalypse approaches.

I'm cis. The flag does not belong to me. It does not describe me. You can ignore my complaints...

But nevertheless, my neurodivergent brain is very bothered by the fact that there are only four panels, with the backgrounds going, "blue, pink, white, pink..."

Why is there no fifth panel?

"Stupid" or "smart" or "IQ". Take your pick.

Intellectual capacity is a social darwinist fantasy.

That includes insults that go along the lines of, "Trump supporters can't read."

[Aside: I dislike Trump supporters, mind you. But if they couldn't read (especially reading Breitbart, or the Epoch Times, or the text part to Russia-funded propaganda memes) that would actually be an improvement right now. Lower cognition would be an improvement if it were real.]

Anyways my reasons are as follows: I've tutored quite a few people, and never found one actually incapable of learning a particular concept.

I have, on the other hand, found a large number who were underconfident about their ability, citing their "low" intelligence specifically. And unlike their intellectual capacity, this belief in IQ was actually limiting. And harmful.

I have also encountered people (outside of my tutoring) who thought their "intelligence" was a source of superiority over the masses.

They were not superior people. Their vocabulary -- which people often use as a misguided proxy for intelligence -- was offputting because they often used words they had clearly never heard used in context. Indicating these words were added to their lexicon unorganically, pulled from a dictionary or thesaurus rather than an adventure novel, highlighting a strange set of priorities that always made these people suspicious to me.

Every time someone calls me smart, I tend to suspect they're trying to scam me.

Every time someone calls me stupid, I shrug because they clearly haven't met all of the people who call me smart.

But in all cases, they are invoking the idea that some people are just capable of more, and others are just capable of less. It's social darwinism, like I said.

And I find it disgusting.

If you want my respect, never appeal to social darwinism in my presence.

In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith into bargaining.

Woah. That's exciting. Union busting can automatically create a union. That's... ironic. And beautiful.

I'm really glad someone out there is costing these companies money.

So many times it's AT&T and Verizon selling you an "insurance plan" for your phone that still requires you to pay $99-$300 if you actuality need your phone replaced. That's objectively worse than no "insurance".

Maybe I'd feel differently about it if I had that pro-capitalist "your loss is my gain" mindset... and also owned shares in AT&T. But being a human capable of empathy and humanity, AT&T and Verizon just disgust me.

But now I live in Nevada. I will be voting for Biden because

• the CHIPS Act is going to put chip manufacturing at the mercy of union labor
  • and with the solidarity whipped up by places like Antiwork? It's going to be a bloodbath.
• his bans on slave labor solar panel imports will do the same thing. Union laborers won't need to compete with slave owners.
• he halted ICE worksite immigration raids, which were basically used to terrorize migrant workers and keep them complacent (hence lowering their wages, and by extension, lowering the market price of labor)
• he "played the long game" and helped win rail workers those sick days they were fighting for.
• he kept student loan payments paused for the first 33 months of his term and tried to get a decent chunk forgiven
• he appointed trust-busting advocate Lina Kahn to the FTC, where she is now a chairwoman
• he appointed pro-labor lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo to the NLRB, where she recently set an anti-union-busting precedent that, according to Harold Meyerson at Prospect.org, "makes union organizing possible again"

He's silently, steadily, baby-stepping us in the right direction. And that's worth a vote of support, not just a vote for a lesser evil.

Lemmy is already like, 80% anti-capitalist.

I would say they're preaching to the choir here, but this is far more obnoxious than preaching.

The entire industry is built on catering to the vast swaths of women who get ignored by doctors and need somewhere to turn.

I highly suspect doctors are taught in medical school, "women are over emotional and prone to exaggeration."

Hell, "hysteria" was considered a valid diagnosis until the 1950s.

I'm with you on this one. I kinda always thought Marx's and Engel's point was:

Capitalism is the stepping stone from feudalism to something far better.

I don't think they had in mind that the next step after capitalism would be going back to despotism. Like you said, these people lost the plot.

I voted for Harris, but I feel like it's pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.

One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I'm not saying "is" here. I'm saying "should be".

We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there's value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.

And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu's whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.

For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It's not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!

Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that's not something we can do everywhere. We can't repeatedly choose the "least miserable option" and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It's just not possible.

Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, "on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is."

Some people's hill is their ballot.

Is this meme pretending Lemmy isn't infested with leftist [transphobic slur]?

Behold: the centrist!

Oh no, if I think someone's name is Joe and it turns out being Jeff, I feel atrocious.

She's a character from a comedy movie I saw as a kid! Kung Pow: Enter the Fist

When I went to community college, I'd arrive early to one theater class, and sitting there already (from a previous class, I believe) were two girls/women who somehow managed to fill 75% of their conversation, every time, with "Eragon was such a bad movie adaptation."

Which taught me that the movie was so bad they it genuinely hurt fans of the novel.

Yeah, but Fain is the first democratically elected UAW leader (prior leadership was chosen by delegations and was fraught with racketeering and embezzlement) and it shows.

Evangelizing.

If I want to share a cool link with someone who has an account but is not yet active, I have to:

1. ascertain their instance if they are on the site
2. visit their instance on a browser
3. search their instance for the post I want to share

On centralized platforms I can hit the "share" button the moment I find something interesting. When I do, I will receive a single link that will work for all users of the service.

Granted (because the platform then harasses the user who follows the link, trying to annoy them into getting an account and/or logging in so that it can more accurately harvest their data) it's not a ton better centralized.

But it does make it extra difficult to evangelize this way. I convinced a friend to get an account, and yet when I shared a link with him (without taking the above steps), he sent back a screenshot of the banner telling him he wasn't logged in.

I'd like an easier way to pull the uninitiated into a conversation occurring on this network of sites.