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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Two bad reasons:

    • If the system doesn’t get it’s money back, you can use that as justification to cut funding because it’s “not profitable”. Never mind that most city services aren’t…
    • Police can use “lack of payment” as an excuse to kick poor people out of the system whenever they want. Transit systems tend to allow this under the belief that people who can pay the fare will refuse to ride with people who can’t, but anyone that snobbish won’t be on transit in the first place.

    One less-bad reason:

    • Systems can use fare payments to get data on routes: how often they’re used, at what times of day, etc. Metrics are important to justify your position in the city budget. Of course, there are other ways to do that which aren’t as harmful to poor riders.

  • Absolutely. When I was on Reddit, all the subreddits I joined were very niche: cities, fandoms, parody subs, and the like. The main reason I found them was because I could think of something and go “it’s Reddit, there’s a subreddit for anything”.

    That’s pretty powerful when you’re trying to build a community, since you can skip the “we exist” and “look here to find us” parts of the pitch and spend time and effort on the community itself instead.

    Lemmy/KBin just doesn’t have that appeal yet. Pretty much all the subs here, while by no means bad, are very “general-interest”, and the interface to find them is clunky, especially if they aren’t on your home server.


  • The Florida Dems just never stand for anything. They pick compromise candidates under the assumption that a compromise candidate will automatically equal votes, and then they don’t actually promote them because having a platform means the Republicans will call you a socialist.

    2022 was a textbook example. The guy running against DeSantis was Charlie Christ, a former Republican governor that nobody liked because he was in charge during the Recession and did nothing to fix it. They got him to switch parties and made a big deal out of him being a moderate who switched parties, and then were shocked by the fact that moderate doesn’t automatically equal popular.


  • The media definitely won’t help, but both of them are pretty weak contenders either way.

    RFK Jr. is a strident antivaxxer, which is a nonstarter for many people, especially those that vote in Democratic primaries. A good chunk of his press is arguably off the back of the Kennedy name, rather than the merits of his policies.

    Williamson is (or at least was) a self-help guru, which could cause people to see her as untrustworthy. And unlike RFK, she doesn’t have a political career or established name to draw on, just vaguely progressive “vibes”.

    I don’t think a more established figure like Sanders would be doing well in the polls right now, either. We’re a year out from the actual primaries, people’s thoughts on them are vague, and they’re more likely to just go with the default of Biden if asked. But RFK and Williamson don’t have particularly strong cases beyond being non-Biden choices.




  • I remember when I was looking for a new laptop, I made a replaceable battery a requirement, since my previous laptop’s battery (which wasn’t replaceable) lost its charge very fast.

    Out of the hundreds of laptops available today, I could only find two or three laptop models total with a replaceable battery. And none of them were in physical stores, so a less tech-minded person would never find them.

    Interestingly, the replaceable battery also seems to be higher quality than the permanent battery was.