If he truly killed himself, I am guessing he was blacklisted from his profession which is a very common retaliation against whistle blowers.

Neolibs sell us out to big oil just as much as neocons do. The root problem is capitalism. You cannot fight against climate change without fighting against capitalism

at some point people will have to start owning their consumption patterns.

Next time you are buying groceries, don’t buy anything that has any plastic in the packaging and then get back to us on how avoiding plastic is merely a matter of choice.

Nearly all clothing is full of plastic these days as well. Plastic from china is just as bad for the environment as plastic from any other country.

Didn’t workers make that exact argument when their good manufacturing jobs were being sent to poorer nations? Seems hypocritical that the government allows globalism to hurt the working class as long as it benefits the rich, but suddenly globalism is bad when it hurts the profit margins of our billionaires.

True, but if you are a politician and you pay a ghost writer then political groups can bulk purchase your book as a way of laundering bribe money

Good point. They even have the same amount of number of syllables.

Also, Butterfly sounds too much like Butt-fly

I can relate to that, but fart sounds are also seen as childish and immature by lots of people so the site will never be a serious Twitter alternative unless they pick a bird name

Not the same. Twitter and tweets were uniquely brilliant in a way that “toot” will never be. Farts are unpleasant. Bird sounds are very pleasant. Also, Every hear the phrase “a little bird told me”? Or notice how in very old disney movies (which are based on old German fairytales), that the birds talk (tweet) to the heroines as benevolent messengers? Twitter was honestly the perfect name for the company. Mastodon is a terrible name, but better than X

Mastodon is also just a terrible name for a Twitter alternative where nearly everyone thinks of the format as being tweets (a sound a bird makes). If they had to pick a animal name, then they should have picked a two syllable bird name like Magpie, Pigeon, Bluejay, Robin, Raven, or even a 3 syllable bird like StellarJay, Cockatoo, etc.

Maybe, just maybe, the Americans who support Palestinians aren’t the same Americans who are support our genocidal military industrial complex.

70% of Americans want an immediate ceasefire. 75% Americans are opposed to any increases in military spending (56% want a decrease: https://afsc.org/news/most-us-adults-support-pentagon-spending-cuts). So please understand that the US government is a plutocracy that doesn’t represent the will of the American people anymore than Putin represents the majority of Russians.

Israel is also bribing our politicians. Our two-party political system is so corrupt it makes me sick to my stomach even thinking about it.

Climate change is threatening to potentially be an extinction level event and yet Americans keep buying bigger and bigger tank sized vehicles… If we can’t even be bothered to save ourselves by addressing climate change now then I think there is virtually zero chance that we will ever colonize space or other planets.

I solve that by sometimes saying “upvoted” so it is clear that I am not downvoting them even if we disagree

If capitalists valued the public good instead of profit min-maxing then they wouldn’t be capitalists. They’d be some kind of socialist, probably market socialist (co-ops owned by workers or the public.)

Since you are arguing from a perspective of what benefits society, I can only assume you must be a socialist. One of the foundational principals of capitalism is that capitalists have every moral and legal right to extract as much value from society as they can and the market will regulate itself. As long as we have a capitalist system this will always be the default position of the general public and our politicians.

Slim profit margins my ass. Walmarts gross profit for the twelve months ending July 31, 2024 was $163.786B,

Walmart has 10.5k locations. 163B divided by 10.5K is about $15.6M per location.

Jesus, in what world is $15M profits per store location considered a “slim margin”?

I think this will be potentially be a good thing (at first) as you won’t have people wasting their life away just endlessly walking around the store updating the price of every individual item for 40 hours a week.

Things will get messy when they start price gouging based on current inventory, weather, holidays or emergency situations.

Things will get deeply dystopian if they start scanning customers as they enter and change the price based on their skin color, gender, clothing, or estimated net worth.

If John Oliver’s segment on Amazon was correct, then Amazon is much worse than Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t force their employees to pee in bottles and work them ragged until they had severe burnout or became physically disabled.

Disagree with your second point. Punitive measures are better served as a temporary stopgap. So a better approach would be: the government should either nationalize twitter or force twitter to be open to federalization (like lemmy) and then build their own publically owned instance.

Musk himself keeps calling it Twitter. He did it multiple times in his interview with Trump.

I lowkey love that Musk refuses to change it back because it highlights the fact that the richest man in the world is a huge idiot and that capitalism is not a meritocracy.