• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 16 days ago
Cake day: June 7th, 2025
  • hansolo@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•US question: Would you approve of your state seceding from the Union, declaring independence from the United States? I think California, Oregon, and Washington would, and probably Colorado too.
    182·
    1 day ago

    Ah, the possibly Chinese-originated propaganda pushing for the Republic of Cascadia.

    As a former resident, here’s a few reasons why not.

    First, there’s already a looooot of rednecks and racists in every single state you talked about. In large numbers in rural areas. Simply smothering them with the numbers doesn’t mean you simply can’t represent them unless you just want someone else’s dictatorship. They’re still going to end up electing people you don’t like, and the ratio won’t be all that far off from now.

    Second, Cascadia can’t sustain themselves with water, power, or food. Where are you getting wheat from? How about ethanol? How about EV production? It’s a guaranteed huge importer of lots of staples, severing infrastructure optimized over decades. So the first day you’re stuck trying to import from farther away at the same cost as no tariffs overland from 1000 miles away.

    Third, your top trading partners will totally abuse your desperation during the secessionist era. Putting you in a terrible place to start.

    Fourth, you’re now fully capitulating to the whims of the Broligarchs. WHY? Why do this? They can literally sink the whole country if 2 pull up stakes from Silicon valley.

    Finally, last I checked, there isn’t some secret sauce to either political party. No one is actually living in some utopia besieged by nasty conservatives from Iowa. There’s no grass is greener situation here other than in your imaginations.

  • hansolo@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Am I the only one who thinks social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?
    2·
    3 days ago

    I understand what you’re saying, but AOL had the opposite problem. The internet at that time was hard to use in general, so it was more about trying to provide enough of anything to get commercial viability for regular people. At one point, AOL was 30% of the entire internet. Seriously, it hosted almost a third of everything online. The alternatives were CompuServe or Prodigy or simply not being online at all. But you paid for it up front as an ISP. AOL didn’t provide anything for free up front.

    The Web 2.0 walled garden approach is about preventing you from wandering out onto the wide open spaces of the rest of the internet out there and not seeing the content curated to make the platform provider money. And making the 10% of daily internet content composed of idiotic FB comments and posts seem like it’s worth all your time when you can easily use one of 5 or 6 search engines to find alternative content. Making staying in the garden so cost effective and frictionless that even using a search engine seems “hard” to do.

  • hansolo@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Am I the only one who thinks social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?
    21·
    3 days ago

    Not the only one, but it’s the walled garden platform approach.

    The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

    While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn’t. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There’s a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

    Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It’s a niche, and it’s not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.

  • hansolo@lemmy.todaytoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Privacy centered wine tracker
    2·
    8 days ago

    If this was me, and I used to just keep a notebook of the wines I liked, there’s a couple ways to go about this.

    Edit: in the Fdroid store theres an app named Cavity (terrible name) or Wine cellar that might be what you want for your own wine tracking.

    Info on new wines is simply not going to come for free (or “free”) bundled in an app unless you make it yourself. But wines you try is a much easier thing to track. If you can just accept they need to be 2 different things, it an easier task.

    IMO, what you want is to create and self host a survey that let’s you easily and quickly enter year, location, attributes, photo of the label, notes, etc. Depending on how granular you get with flavors and tasting attributes, you could get in a groove and log a wine with dizzy thumbs and low light in a minute or two. Then you just decide where that data lives, and how to get it back into a spreadsheet or SQL db to search it.

    You could do most of this in a Google form/sheet, though you’ll simply get nagged and tracked later in more subtle ways.

    I’ll be real honest, I suggest you ask ChatGPT on options, and suggest things like you want to build a survey in HTML (it’ll do this for you) that lives on a device and is bookmarked for easy access, sends data to, let’s say a Dropbox file you access with an API, and you use another HTML page you save locally to search.

    For real, let us know how it goes, because I would all get some use from this.

  • hansolo@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's lemmy's governance system?
    5·
    8 days ago

    Formally, it’s the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Mon Mothma is the Alliance’s Chancellor, which is a sort of association of rebel cells spread across the galaxy. So she’s sort of elected by the leadership of each rebel cell.

    Then on the starship side, it basically seems like anyone with a ship gets promoted to general and promised back pay once the Republic is restored. It’s sort of a gamble, but it beats smuggling spice and contraband.

  • hansolo@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Do you ever use words from different countries?
    2·
    11 days ago

    Depends on the person. My spouse and I, along with 5 or 6 friends, use a variety of key words from a couple shared languages to talk about things when we don’t want other to understand. Mostly haggling or talking about sales stuff to discuss if we like something or think it’s too expensive when a human is hovering right there. So I can give body language of disappointment while saying “this is great.”

  • hansolo@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•[Deleted]
    12·
    11 days ago

    Rural poor checking in.

    I’ve lived in a camper, and then in the back of a convenience store my patents ran. Eventually upgraded to a doublewide. But I went to a rural school with like 40 kids that were all also poor. One kid and his family were miners living in a series of vans upon blocks by the mine. My best friend and his family lived in a half used rundown motel, the other half too broken down to bother living in. The richest kid was a rancher’s family that lived in a barndominium.

    So every family on TV was rich to me, but it was TV, so I figured it was all fantasy land anyway. Star Trek wasnt real, either. I had seen a “normal” school before 3rd grade, but by high school and college, people that thought Nickelodeon (which I didn’t see until college anyway) shows were relatable at all just seemed like space aliens to me. I was likely more the space alien to them.