Many other countries use them too, although the US does use a lot. It does concern me that China might be wanting to use this to accelerate war, seize Taiwan etc before there are alternate sources available.

Didn’t China halt all exports of rare earth minerals to the whole world?

The minerals aren’t actually rare, they’re just in low concentrations and difficult to extract. It’s just a matter of time before thet set up mining and precessing somewhere else. It won’t be in the US though. It’ll be somewhere with super cheap labor and no regulations or environmental protections. Which is why it was in China in the first place.

Additionally, Lemmy would be a hostile place if you happened to be a conservative-leaning Linux user. I know quite a few, but they aren’t on Reddit either.

Do you have a source for that? The Wikipedia page about it doesn’t mention it and mentions other sources, which I guess could be tied to the heritage foundation but even clicking through links I couldn’t find any connection.

I’m not saying there isn’t plenty to criticize about the concept and where they place particular individuals. That’s just the first time I’ve heard this claim, and I’m curious about it.

On the political compass subreddit they called them watermelons - green on the outside (libertarian left), red on the inside (authoritarian left). I realize they’re not really left at all, but the authoritarianism is baked in.

There’s no possible way this could go badly.

You must start training early to gain this skill.

Not to mention “most people” wouldn’t fit in here or feel welcome. Remember Donald Trump won the popular vote and even those who didn’t vote didn’t feel strongly enough about either side to pick one or the other. It’s not just the US, far right candidates keep gaining popularity in parts of Europe. And I think a lot of people aren’t interested in Star Trek or trans rights. The niche communities have very low levels of activity too. The fediverse just isn’t for everyone.

They say if you eat enough of them, you gain the ability to walk on them barefoot.

You don’t honk at Canada Geese, you just keep driving and they move at the last second.

I thought there was supposed to be a boner somewhere in the reflection.

Me too. It’s been over a year since I did it so I don’t recall bthe name of the extension but it had two steps - first, overwriting everything with a gibberish comment, then delete. From what I understand even that isn’t very complete but it makes it more difficult for Reddit or other parties to simply restore your stuff.

Yep. The end of RIF and I went cold Turkey. I had already prepared by deleting/overwriting all of my content so leaving was easy. My three accounts combined had truckloads of karma, glad I am not chasing after that bullshit anymore.

Just a little reminder that governments have killed more people than any other entity and it isn’t even close. You could try to point at religion - and that history is also fucked - but even if you exclude “holy wars” waged by religious government leaders, religious killing still doesn’t add up to what has been done by governments where religion wasn’t really a factor. The proletariat must not be disarmed. You might trust your current government, but give it a generation (or even an election) and things could be very different.

Yes, but taxes on land you live on has not always been a thing.

And then keep paying rent to the govt in the form of property taxes every year. Owning land isn’t really a thing anymore.

I’m sure they’ll plan some forest fires to get rid of the undesirables from time to time.

I hate those fucking cameras in the thumbnail. They went up all over my area last year, hundreds of them and at every major intersection. You can’t avoid them, there are essentially no routes to skirt around them all. The surveillance state is tracking everyone’s movement and financial transactions, and it started before the orange man came into power. The people need to push back and the effort needs to broader than Ds or Rs making the push. If we want to stop a bipartisan surveillance state we need to mobilize We the People.

Yeah I’ve only ever had one handgun with a safety and I never carried it.

I don’t find Lemmy very palatable. I’m still here because I like to hear different perspectives. Lemmy as a whole seems to hate different perspectives, it’s like many go out of their way to keep it closer to a hive mind. 80% of the world’s people would not fit in here. I don’t either, but I don’t give a shit.