• 3 Posts
  • 68 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If you are set on not voting in the presidential election, I would like to encourage you to still vote (if you didn’t already intend to) and just not vote on that question on the ballot, for two reaons:

    1. Local ballot measures and politicians are still quite relevant and your vote is still fairly impactful there relative to the federal election (depending on your state) and

    2. it sends a significantly stronger message to both parties that they are putting forward garbage candidates to vote and just abstain from the one question. Not voting is easy to mislabel as voter suppression by the opposition or any number of other misleading causes when voting, just not for Biden or trump is much more clear what you are mad about.





  • While what your saying is fundamentally true, it is worth noting that companies do notice declines in sales even very slight ones, and while there isn’t ethical consumption there is certainly still a wide range of how unethical companies are. Just cause none are great doesn’t mean they are all equally bad.

    It is also worth noting that mass voting with dollars is one of the most effective peaceful tools currently available in a capitalist system to drive change (for non essential/non monopolized goods). Things like fair trade chocolate and sustainable packaging types exist because consumer demand for them is real, and if enough consumers demand and change spending habits for fair wage practices and bare minimum corporate ethics standards it will start to happen too.

    Obviously this is all easier with more coordination among the consumers but even without it, we see companies change their practices due to consumer backlash that hits sales now. This is more effective than you may be giving it credit for, even if not as much as we would like





  • Actually it’s usually closer to 5%, but to avoid consumers getting mad most companies have internal variance limits of less. Still, 2% is pretty tight for manufacturing equipment. Despite the mass prevalence of corporate greed, it does end up being better for most companies overall to be on the slightly heavy end of net weight rather than lower end and most manufacturing guardrails and in line weight checks are calibrated with that in mind.

    This is entirely due to the risk of images like this going viral and causing blowback for the company. So, to keep products on average a little heavier, posting things like this is great


  • Legitimate question: what is the concern with declining birth rate? Im no expert but it seems like the world currently has way more people than it ever had before and even in specific developed nations those nations were arguably doing just fine 50 years ago when they had lower populations too. What is the risk here?



  • I think the general feeling of disenfranchisement comes from the DNC influence in primaries. Who they throw their weight behind in terms of advertising dollars and publicity makes a big difference in how the primaries go. Also very relevant is which states have their primaries when, as most times the primaries are called before every state has theirs. This is also hearsay and way harder to substantiate, but there are also some that cry foul that there isn’t actually much in place to monitor primaries like there are in standard elections and there is significantly higher potential for fudged numbers and misrepresented results.

    Of course I would still love to see more left candidates get the nomination despite that, but it is certainly still possible that I am in the minority in that desire.

    For 2024, though, it doesn’t much matter if Biden is who the left wants. When running against a literal fascist, there isn’t really as much room to voice complaints about the alternatives. I voted for Biden in 2020 and will again in 2024 even though he is much further right than my political leaning, and even for those of us on the left who are not happy with how Biden has been doing, there isn’t really room to show that with voting because the alternative is so much worse. In this scenario, votes for Biden can easily be misconstrued as support for Biden which is not really the case







  • The big assumption here is that whoever republicans put forward next will be better. I generally agree that we all need to vote to prevent fascism but I want to believe there is a line somewhere, cause now it feels like both parties are moving more and more right each election and sooner or later just being more left than the obvious fascist is not going to be good enough.

    Already, even if we both want the left to have a unified front, the far left are splintering from the increasingly centrist Dems and the seeming only legal democratic way to convince the party to stop putting forward such centrist options is for that segment to stop voting for them.

    I understand that doing that in this election has too high a risk of ending democracy altogether. I just wish I had more confidence that wouldn’t also be true in 2028 and 2032 etc.