To be fair, NYC has always had a balanced budget. It’s literally required by law.

Though there’s definitely been an increase of social services which is good.

Though I think it’s a misrepresentation to say that money came from taxing rich people more. The bulk of it, if I’m not much mistaken, has been from some creative accounting with the NYC pension system.

The sauna you’re in is 100°C? 212°F? I think you might be dead bro.

Putting words in my mouth man. I still find genocide abhorrent. What I learned was to not make it my entire personality.

You’re allowed to enjoy your life. Advocacy is important. Standing up for what you believe in is important. But when you let arguing with randos on the Internet become who you are, you’re not making a difference, you’re just being an ass. And, in my experience with lemmy.ml, that’s what it reminds me of. Being that guy who was trawling the Internet, looking for a debate.

And to be clear, when I was 15/16, the current Israeli situation wasn’t in the zeitgeist. I was obnoxious about a completely different set of issues, lol.

Maybe. Though I glanced through your post history, and I’m unconvinced that you’re old enough to vote. :)

Do y’all remember when you were like, 14 or 15, and you had your first big political opinion. That moment where you realized that there was something going on that was bad or didn’t make a lot of sense, and appealed to your sense of injustice. And then, for the next few years it was all you talked about with people because, like, how is it possible that they didn’t get it, you know? And you were just so informed on the issue that it couldn’t even be possible that there was any nuance, because you were so clearly and obviously right?

I feel like that’s what lemmy.ml is every time it comes into my feed.

Just a little squat. More than tall enough for an rj45 to plug in though. I think they look a little tight because it doesn’t have the same amount of bezel as a lot of boxes will have around the ports.

Yeah, those are both definitely normal Ethernet jacks. Neither takes a phone cable. You should just need a normal Ethernet line.

Hey man, you should be happy and live your best life. Do things that make you happy with people you love.

Hahahaha, now if you do it, you’re just doing what I told you to do like a little lapdog. Stupid sheep.

Holy crap, the only reason I was still using reddit at all was because of this!

I thought about making the community myself, but decided I didn’t have the time to maintain it.

Thanks for doing this!! I’ll definitely be a contributed. :)

Man, it looks like sheer laziness that they can fit “Kentucky” into its state, but “Alabama” gets a pointer line. You’re telling me that you can’t do the exact same thing you did with “Georgia” there?

While preventable child deaths are obviously terrible, I feel like this could be overextended.

Like, how many child deaths has McDonald’s caused vs guns. I’m too lazy to do the math like the other guy, but I’d presume it’s comparable. (Although I suppose by the time it catches up to them they’re no longer children.)

Idk, you see things like, “leading cause of death in children” and it makes the number seem huge, but it’s less than 100 kids a year. And it looks like around 400/yr die from drowning in swimming pools. So if we really care about the children, we should bad swimming pools? They kill 4x the number of kids than guns.

I’m not saying guns are great. But using child deaths as part of the argument just feels like a great excuse to ban literally anything you just don’t like.

Could be reverse causality? Rich and industrializing countries have the money and resources to send out explorers and start colonies.

If you’re not on the rise already, you’re probably not throwing away ships on suicide missions.

Yeah, that’s what I told my doctor when he said I didn’t have unicorn pox. He was like, “that’s not a real thing, and if it was I’d have heard of it,” and I told him he was just an arrogant jerk. He doesn’t know all the diseases, just cause he’s a doctor.

That seems like an impressively blanket statement when there’s literally dozens of sugar substitutes that are all wildly chemically different. Insane that all of them would kill your mouth and gut microbiome even when they often work in fundamentally different ways.

Even in your made up scenario it doesn’t prove the negative. Maybe your mind reading didn’t work because Apple has a mind wiping device that made them forget. Maybe the crystal ball didn’t work because Apple made an even more powerful “crystal ball blocking” device. You can’t prove that’s not what’s really happening.

So no, you in fact can’t prove a negative.

How many fascists have you killed? Genuine question. Cause if the answer is zero, you have stopped short of killing fascists. Saying you would is no different than the person who says they would care about politics but doesn’t.

I don’t mean that as an attack. I simply am pointing out that everyone draws the line differently. A Ted Kaczynski would say a person who really cares about these issues would already be sending mail bombs.

I disagree with that (as do you I imagine, as I don’t think you’ve started mail bombing people, as that would’ve been in the news), but he was just as sure of his line as you are. Why do you not go that far?

To be very clear. Don’t mail bomb people. Don’t take this as a challenge. I’m just genuinely curious how that falls against the line you are drawing.

Also, back to the original topic, you said earlier that you can’t go to events solo due to your social anxiety, which is understandably difficult, but could you not bring your partner along? Why can’t you have that security blanket as you go out to meet new people? Having a partner makes making new friends a thousand times easier!

I do think there’s an element of privilege here. Just because you have the luxury of time and space to be involved in politics and spend a lot of emotional energy in that area doesn’t mean that everyone else has that luxury. For the single mother of three, working two jobs to provide for her kids, she probably doesn’t have the bandwidth to be super “educated” politically.

But what would you have that PTA soccer mom do? The bar is always arbitrary. I could choose to set it higher or lower than you. Why is your spot for the bar what it is? I could claim anyone who isn’t vegan, or uses toilet paper, or doesn’t drive an EV, or isn’t growing their own food, or isn’t chaining themselves to government buildings in protest isn’t doing their part and is actively “contributing to the destruction of humanity.” You have defined your threshold of acceptable somewhere short of actively murdering fascists (I assume), so why is that? And what makes your choice of threshold the correct one?

I think we have a tendency to say, “what I’m doing is the correct standard,” in order to make us feel justified in our outlook and superior to the people around us. Is it that others are actually “contributing to the destruction of humanity” more than you, or is that something that you tell yourself to help maintain an emotional wall of protection?

And, literally all that aside, I think your assumption that there aren’t plenty of people around you who feel similarly to you is unfounded. You could make friends by getting involved in a political campaign. I did that a number of years ago, and met a lot of great people. Helped a lady get elected into the House of Representatives. Had a great time and met a lot of cool people along the way. And surely those people would meet your thresholds of “good enough,” no?

I couldn’t source the 48.5 billion for personnel number. I’m seeing a total budget increase for ICE to 30 billion. But still a large number for sure. But that’s total budget, not just personnel.

But look, I agree with the sentiment. I’d rather this money be spent on teachers too. I’m just not convinced that the numbers, as presented in the meme, are meaningful.

It does sound like you’ve let doom scrolling negatively impact your life.

I won’t argue things are bad, but the reality is that most people are generally decent.

Sure, there’s a lot of dicks out there, but they’re very much the minority. They are just overrepresented in the Lemmy echo chamber (and other online platforms too of course).

Obviously it’s hard to say if you’re being “too picky” as it were without knowing exactly what lines you’re drawing, but it sounds like you might be projecting your negative expectations onto people as opposed to people actually not living up to those expectations.

I don’t agree with the guy, but it is worth noting that there are around 21k ICE agents, vs 3.8 million teachers.

That extra funding would probably spread a little thin when you’re sharing it with over 100x the number of people.