pjwestin
@pjwestin@lemmy.world
- Comment on How would you decorate this room? 1 day ago:
Get an artist to paint an airplane crashing through the ceiling and make the propeller the fan.
- Comment on Is there any research on the possible market impact or fund volatility due to generational die offs? 1 week ago:
I mean, if the payout is so low that it’s not worth keeping in the market, then it’s not going to have much of an impact on the S&P 500. I’m sure many Millennials (focusing on them, since they’re most likely to lose parents) will use the money for a down-payment on a home, but 52% of them already own homes, and many Boomers will be leaving behind their own homes, so it’s safe to say substantially less than half of them will need to cash out their parents 401Ks for homes. Student loans will probably take up some of that money, but the average student loan debt is $32K, while the average boomer has about 200K in retirement savings, so even the student debt crisis isn’t going to take that much money out of the market.
The real thing to watch is medical costs. Boomers are living longer while medical costs are skyrocketing, so it does seem that a lot of the wealth the Boomers accumulated is going to medical industry instead of Millennials. I don’t know hoe that’s going to impact the market though.
- Comment on Is there any research on the possible market impact or fund volatility due to generational die offs? 1 week ago:
Generally speaking, their inheritors keep the funds in the market. If the Boomer has a significant amount in their 401K, a fiduciary is just going to tell the next of kin to keep it market, and most people fill out a Time of Death Beneficiary so the account just transfers over to their heirs. Unless they’re in heavy debt or need a down-payment on a house, most people will just keep the account.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 1 week ago:
Yes, it certainly developed over time from Regan-era conservatism. Conservative family values are inherently a rejection of modernity (Eco’s second property of fascism), and the party was already othering people of color and the queer community. The Bush era also did a lot of work priming conservatives for fascism with war propaganda, xenophobia, and equating dissent with treason. Trump brought the party into full-fledged fascism, but it had been stewing for a while before he arrived.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 1 week ago:
Thank you, this is a very good explanation of something I failed to mention.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 1 week ago:
Well, the essay is a pretty breezy read, it’s only 10 pages. It’s called Ur-Fascism, here’s the full text. If you’re looking for something lighter (and lighter is an extremely relative term here), Cody Johnston is a comedian and video essayist that delves into right-wing extremism on his show Some More News. These two videos are older, but they do a great job putting Trump and conservatives in context using Eco’s definition of fascism.
- Comment on How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals 1 week ago:
Because conservativism is no longer a set of political beliefs. In the modern conservative movement (basically starting in the 80s, liberals and conservatives were much different before that) conservatives had social beliefs, like preserving cultural norms, promoting religion, and maintaining the nuclear family, as well as fiscal beliefs, like limited government, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and a whole lot of other bullshit that basically boiled down to, “we don’t want to pay taxes.”
Now, conservativism is really only about establishing an in-group and othering their opponents. Oppositions to trans rights may seem like an attempt to preserve cultural norms, but it’s real goal is to create outrage and panic over trans, “groomers.” Objections go CRT and DEI serve a similar role in othering people of color. “Wokeness,” is just a meaningless catch-all for, “enemies.” Similarly, fiscal policy is meaningless, and can be picked up and discarded whenever convenient; corporations can be deregulated and given tax breaks in service of the free market, but subsidized or bailed out whenever needed.
This is because modern conservativism isn’t a political ideology, it’s a fascist movement. I mean that literally, and while the meaning fascism is notoriously hard to pin down, I use Umberto Eco’s 14 properties of fascism. And, to bring this back around to your original question, fascists hate liberals because hating a group is very important to a fascist movement. The modern conservative hate for liberals is especially clear in Eco’s 4th, 5th, and 7th properties of fascism (disagreement as treason, fear of differences, and obsession with plots, respectively).
So, tl;dr: the one-sided hate that conservatives have for liberals is because conservativism is no longer a coherent political ideology, it’s a fascist movement.
- Comment on The choice is yours 2 weeks ago:
Yup. That a newborn with teeth, which is impossible. My son’s teeth came in very early, but his first one was at about 4 or 5 months. They also all come in at different times, so they’re not all the same size like the teeth in the meme. I think it’s an AI image.
- Comment on assume the position 4 weeks ago:
If the moon was bright enough to make figure 2 makes sense, I’m pretty sure that would be apocalyptic as well.
- Comment on New Yawkers Be Like "But It's True Doh! You haven't LIVED Until you HAD DAT PIZZA..." 4 weeks ago:
New York doesn’t have the greatest pizza in the world, but it does have a much better average than most cities. Boston’s ^Regina’s^ winds up on the top of a lot of, “Best Pizza in the Country,” lists, and sure, Regina’s is better than any pizza I’ve had in NYC. But most the other pizza places in Boston are average to bad. If I walked into a random pizzeria in New York or a random pizzeria in Boston, odds are I’m getting a way better slice in New York.
- Comment on Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites 5 weeks ago:
🤡
- Comment on Twitter’s Clumsy Pivot to X.com Is a Gift to Phishers 5 weeks ago:
I think you’re giving him way too much credit. Ever since the PayPal days he had this idea for an, “everything app,” a digital-marketplace/wallet/messaging/social media/anything-else-you-could need-online-app called X. The concept and name are profoundly stupid, but he was so dedicated to his vision he got booted from PayPal because he wouldn’t give up on it. I think it’s much more like he legitimately believes he can make Twitter into this bloated super-app (and maybe make some changes for the right-wing that support him along the way) rather than slowly killing the app he payed $44 billion to aquire.
- Comment on Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites 5 weeks ago:
No. Copyright laws originally allowed creators to profit of their work for 28 years, which is perfectly fair and reasonable. Corporate lobbying extended copyright to 70 years past the author’s death, which is obviously insane, since creators can’t profit off their work after they die. But just because corporations perverted the law in an attempt to retain IP indefinitely, it doesn’t mean that copyright law itself is bad, and wanting reasonable protection for an authors IP doesn’t make you a useful idiot.
- Comment on AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of execs in a survey 5 weeks ago:
At my last job my direct manager had to explain to upper management multiple times that X role and Y role could not be combined because it would require someone to physically be in multiple places simultaneously. I think about that a lot when I hear about these corporate plans to automate the workforce.
- Comment on AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of execs in a survey 5 weeks ago:
In my experience, 100% of executives don’t actually know what their workforce does day-to-day, so it doesn’t really surprise me that they think they can lay people off because they started using ChatGPT to write their emails.
- Comment on What are the best indie games you've ever played? 1 month ago:
Obligatory Undertale mention. I know it’s the cliché answer, and it’s fan base is…a lot, but it really is a great game.
Also, very happy to see FLT get a couple of mentions here. Hardly any of my IRL friends have even heard of it, but it’s probably the best Star Trek game ever made (even if it’s not actually a Star Trek game).
- Comment on Stuck 2 months ago:
- Comment on Men over 30, what contributes to weight gain besides slower metabolism when you get older? Is it really hard to stay in shape? 2 months ago:
Well, as I write this, it’s 1:45 AM, I’m dead tired, and was supposed to go to the gym tomorrow morning, but instead of sleeping I’m sitting up with a squirming 14 month old who keeps farting himself awake because, despite my best efforts to feed him a balanced diet, he eats nothing but bread and dairy. So, I’d say my biggest contributing factor to weight gain is, “insomnia-induced lethargy caused by baby farts.”
- Comment on YouTube stops recommending videos when signed out of Google 2 months ago:
I stopped letting YouTube save my watch history years ago because their suggestion algorithm became too intrusive: watch a quick cooking tutorial, get nothing be cooking channels, look up the proper way to use a toggle bolt, YouTube wants to teach me how to re-shingle a roof. It was out of control.
First, they took away my home screen, because they claimed they couldn’t reccomend videos with my watch history (even though they’d done it for years). Then they took away the shorts tab, because they said they couldn’t reccomend shorts without my watch history (even though they’d done it for months). So now I just have my subscriptions, a curated list of things I actually want to watch. They’ve punished me with the product I wanted this whole time.
- Comment on What happens when two people with hyphenated last names get married? Do they hyphenate all four names and in what order? 2 months ago:
I read an article about this a few years ago, and the answer is whatever they want. I remember one couple said they just decided they liked the wife’s grandmother’s middle maiden name, so they just picked that. She was confused but flattered.
- Comment on US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users 2 months ago:
…TikTok would eventually be dropped from app stores in the US if its owner doesn’t sell. It also would lose access to US-based web hosting services.
Oh no. Where would children act out jokes they stole from old tweets?
- Comment on Tipping culture npcs 2 months ago:
I’d say you also shouldn’t be made at the server at the $22 burger place, because they’re also working hard and probably covering more tables. I used to get mad about tipping for counter service because I assumed that they were making standard minimum wage, but then I found out one of my favorite cafes was paying $5 an hour (a dollar less than tipped minimum in my state). Point is, don’t get mad at anyone but the National Restaurant Association, they’re fighting to make sure you’re subsidizing your servers wage.
- Comment on Tipping culture npcs 2 months ago:
Yeah, I know. As is said, tipping is not good. We’ve created a system where the customer pays for servers salary by the job instead of the restaurant paying by the hour. I’m saying that running a $200 order is more work than running a $20 order, just like bagging $200 worth of groceries is more work than bagging $20 worth of groceries. A percentage tip does roughly reflect the amount of work being done, but acknowledging that isn’t an endorsement of tipping culture.
- Comment on Tipping culture npcs 2 months ago:
Yeah, I agree, but if you don’t like it, take it up with the National Restaurant Association. They spend millions every year lobbying against ending the tipped wage.
- Comment on Tipping culture npcs 2 months ago:
I’d say that varies more regionally than anything else. I live in a major northeastern city, and you could barely feed 1 person for $20, even at cheap chain restaurants. Drive 2 hours away and things get a lot more affordable, not only for food prices but also rent. In that respect, 20% actually scales with cost of living as well.
- Comment on Tipping culture npcs 2 months ago:
$20 is like, one entree, maybe a beverage at a cheap restaurant. $200 is probably closer to 3 entrees, 2 or 3 cocktails and an app at a moderately priced restaurant. You’re crazy if you think the amount of work for those two orders (putting them into the bar/kitchen, making sure they come out correct, running them, all while juggling your other tables) is equal. I also want tipping culture to end, but the price tag scales pretty well with the amount of work being done.
- Comment on Where are the good political songs? 3 months ago:
Since I haven’t seen him mentioned yet, Ted Leo is still making albums.
- Comment on Goodbye MatPat, thanks for everything 4 months ago:
You’re on the tail end of Millennial, and it definitely sounds like you were the target age for Blues Clues. I’m right in the middle of the Millennial years and I was 9 when that show came out, so I only know it as that thing my friend’s little brother watched. I have more feelings about MatPat leaving, even if I stopped watching years ago. Point is, I don’t think this meme is very accurate.