Sorry, I phrased that in an unnecessarily inflammatory way. You’re not wrong, plain surfaces are easier to clean, especially when you’re cleaning up after other people and pets. I hope the folks you live with appreciate what you do for them!

If you really can’t tell if you’ve adequately cleaned a surface unless it’s pristine white, I feel sorry for anyone who has to live with you.

At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.

This offhand comment that was quoted in the article is really unsettling:

“Here, the tax dollars naturally goes to the citizens, not the immigrants,”

This isn’t a conservative vs liberal policy thing, this is more insidious. This person’s worldview subconsciously classes “citizens” and “immigrants” as mutually exclusive groups. There’s “us, who were here before and belong here”, and “them, who came here from somewhere else and shouldn’t receive the benefits of our government”. It seems like it wasn’t long ago that the dominant left-vs-right conversations I observed were mostly discussions about economic and foreign policy where both sides had reasonable points and compromise was possible, but this isn’t that. This ideological divide built on religion, xenophobia, nationalism, etc. can’t end well.

Isn’t that the whole point of the op-ed, though? They’re saying that Lemmy and Mastodon aren’t comparable to Reddit and Twitter and aren’t going to replace them, because the friction is too high and the differentiators don’t matter for the majority of people. The differentiators matter to us and we’re totally happy to be on a smaller network, but I think the op-ed is a fair reality check for the subset of people who came here thinking this would replace the big platforms.