iie [they/them, he/him]

I go by “test” on live.hexbear.net, or “tset” or “tst” or some other variant when I’m not logged in.

We watch movies on the weekends and sometimes also hang out during the week, you should drop by.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2020

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  • I have a different answer than blakeus12

    the two factors are

    1. An ambient sense of how unreceptive the instance is toward us. If the distribution of responses we get is skewed too far toward “I don’t give a fuck what you have to say, I’m not reading that, fuck you you disgusting tankie,” that’s a reason to not federate. And I mean… I’ll be the first one to admit hexbears can be annoying and too eager to dunk on people, but on the flip side I also think our views are often misrepresented and demonized, and it’s frustrating when people won’t even bother to understand what we actually think or why.

    2. If any of our users feel harrassed or unsafe, even if the culprits are a small minority of the instance, we are liable to defederate. And this shouldn’t be taken personally! We all know lemmy still has limited mod tools. But we prioritize each other over federation, we’re a close-knit community who have been together for years.



  • I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.







  • Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

    From the abstract:

    Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

    further down:

    In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

    What is it, like, 70% of Americans want single payer healthcare?