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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think I may not be presenting my position well, and thus am coming off as a right wing partisan hack of the sort that wants to defund the EPA. That’s not my position.

    A lot of people (mostly conservatives and big businesses) that complain about ‘red tape’ as a way of attacking various regulations. For example, people will say it’s impossible to build a power plant because of environmental red tape.
    A lot of that regulation is positive though. For example, even if the land is cheap, you can’t build a power plant next to a nature preserve because the pollution will kill all the birds. And I like that regulation. The power people will of course complain as will the mines that were going to sell the plant coal. In cases like this, IMHO, they can all fuck off.

    At the same time though, the ‘red tape’ that many businesses complain about does sometimes actually exist. That is, to do business you have to get endless streams of licenses, approvals, permits, etc for things where the bureaucracy and licensing process adds little or no value to either the industry or the population at large.
    From what I’ve read, this sort of thing exists a lot in Germany. I’ve talked to a few people who were starting a business in Europe and they specifically avoided a few countries for that reason.




  • The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.


  • A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what’s missing is defederation policy.

    Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you’re on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I’m on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there’s a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.

    Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that’s due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That’s their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).

    //edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will ‘live’ on your instance, and thus be under your instance’s rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don’t today intend to create any communities, it’s good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.


  • First- understand that everyone goes through this, everybody has an answer for you, but the answer that worked for them may not work for you. There’s no right or wrong answer. A lot of people say ‘the way to get over someone is to get under someone’ personally I’ve never subscribed to that sort of thinking. It leads to unhealthy rebound relationships IMHO.

    The only thing that will really fix this is time. So there is no magic bullet. There are things you can do to help though or pass the time faster. The biggest one is find ways to not ruminate. Focus your attention on other things, ideally useful things. Take some time to improve yourself in fun ways. Hit the gym is an obvious one, but I generally recommend take up a hobby or learn an instrument or take a class. Basically learn some fun new skill and focus your attention on that. It serves as a distraction from your grief, but also a source of engagement and a little happiness.
    It WILL get better.


  • I’d be interested. I have experience moderating Reddit communities (I’m /u/SirEDCaLot over there too).

    I’m Eastern time. But I can’t commit to any specific amount of availability for two reasons. 1. My real life is pretty hectic and many days I literally have no time at all to participate let alone moderate, and 2. Lemmy/Reddit for me is a hobby, not a job, and I have no desire to change that. So my availability is ‘when I have time and feel like doing it’. Sometimes that will mean I disappear for days, sometimes that means I’m on for multiple hours per day.

    What I will say though- is that whatever I do have time to do, I will do well. I believe in treating users with respect, even when they break seemingly simple rules. I’ve found that if you don’t assume bad faith and treat people with respect, even when they appear to be idiots, more often than not they return the gesture.
    I also believe that moderators are more like janitors than gods. So I’m not interested in ‘power’.






  • This is 100% it. That and a lot of managers think they are somehow more effective if they can physically see their employees.
    Commercial real estate is in for a significant correction. All those workers who went home? They’re not coming back. A great many would rather quit than go back to the daily commute.

    Workers now know remote jobs work. It’s now a significant perk when job-hunting- a company can get better candidates for less money by offering remote work. And for many workers it’s become financially essential. You can work for Big Tech and make $130k, but that means moving to a very high cost of living area where $130k gets you a tiny apartment and a middle class lifestyle. So why not work remotely for a startup and make $90k, but live in a lower cost of living area where $90k gets you a MUCH nicer lifestyle and way less traffic?

    It’s also telling how the return to office policies are implemented. They want people in office X days a week- doesn’t matter which days, doesn’t matter if your team is there also. Just make sure you badge in 12-15x/month. That’s not a ‘team building’ thing. That’s a ‘please don’t make me tell our shareholders I wasted $100 million on a worthless building’ thing.

    Of course landlords are loathe to reduce rents because unlike apartments, commercial leases are long term- 10-25+ years. If they do cheap leases now, the worry is they’ll be locked into those rates. And they themselves bought the buildings expecting full rate leases (so their own payments are structured as such). And of course mayors see their business districts and tons of support businesses (coffee shops, drycleaners, transportation, etc) dying due to lack of commuter foot traffic and that’s no fun.

    But a correction is both necessary and inevitable. The downtown business district metropolis, where everyone commutes in from miles around to sit at desks, is dying and it’s not going to come back. There ARE businesses where remote work isn’t practical. But the vast majority of desk jobs can be made remote or pushed to cheaper satellite offices without a problem.
    If cities accept and embrace that- turn much of that commercial space into apartments, recognize and embrace that rents will come down, property values will come down, but the PEOPLE of the city will benefit with lower cost of living and greater diversity, it will be a good thing. Some cities are doing this.
    Cities that don’t do this will have their once bustling downtowns turned into ghost towns.