Thanks, but I’m too disabled even for that now, because everyone requires some amount of office time – even if it’s absolutely unnecessary.

Even my doctors are now requiring yearly in-person visits, though they never did before, and even though I’m 100% medically homebound. I’m currently trying to square a circle to get my heart meds refilled. Back in 2021 it was no problem, but now they’re saying insurance post-Covid requires a yearly in-person visit regardless of circumstance, because people were abusing it, so no tolerance.

I don’t expect it to change. I’ve had a chronic pain condition for a long time but can’t get pain meds either (per insurance) because people have abused that. So I just take enough OTC Tylenol to ruin my liver and cry.

Insurance rules fuck people with chronic conditions, all the time.

I knew a Karla, but she was from Romania. Fantastic person. I miss her.

I taught myself programming in the 80s, then worked myself from waitress and line cook to programmer, UXD, and design lead to the point of being in the running for an Apple design award in the 2010s.

But I cared more than anything about making things FOR people. Making like easier. Making people happy. Making software that was a joy to use.

Then I got sick with something that’s neither curable nor easily manageable.

Now I’m destitute and have to choose between medicine and food, and I’m staring down homelessness. (eta I was homeless from age 16-18, and I won’t do that again now, with autoimmune dysautonomia and in my mid-50s, even if the alternative is final.)

Fuck these idiots who bought their way into nerd status (like Musk) or had one hot idea that took off and didn’t have to do anything after (this fucking guy). Hundreds or thousands of designers and programmers made these companies, and were tossed out like trash so a couple of people can be rock stars, making more per hour than most of us will see in a lifetime.

Slay the dragons.

Much more is relative.

For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up.

Yes, thank you for that. That’s much more for many people. If you actually do that, it will be awesome.

Might I ask you for even more, though? You’re already starting to do it, but will you speak out to people IRL like you’re doing with me? Challenge their views like you’re doing here? It really helps people to think critically.

If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.

My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.

If I’d had to bet whether this was The Onion before clicking this link, someone would be breaking my knees next week.

This timeline is absurd.

As a designer, programmer, and music engraver/editor, I’ve always paid for all media I’ve consumed because I’ve strongly believed creators deserve to be paid.

But after the Napster, Ticketmaster, Netflix, and dozens of other egregious examples of corporate sadism, I’m proud to sail the high seas now.

I’m just saying we need different, more modern strategies. What we’ve been doing doesn’t work.

We can do better. I don’t know the answer, but we can’t keep doing the same things.

So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why.

Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.

That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.

It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.

It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.

Bit late. I appreciate her efforts to resist, and we all need to do that, but it honestly is too late now. The time to resist this was last year. Now we’re in disaster recovery, which requires a whole different kind of resistance, and it feels like even people like her don’t quite understand where we are now.

Because of all the people who haven’t fucking listened to the warnings, we’ve entered actual fascism, and regular resistance won’t work anymore. Thinking it will only makes more of us believe small actions or Strong Words will save us. This isn’t 1930 Germany like we were warning last year, it’s 1939 Germany now, and der führer is beginning to build the camps.

Are you going to keep ignoring us when you’re ruffling the ashes of your compatriots from your hair? I honestly believe you will.

If the US was actually a meritocracy, I’d be rich. I built my career in comp sci and UXD from nothing. I left school in 9th grade, then taught myself programming in multiple languages – BASIC then Perl, Java, C, and on to C++, C#, ObjC, JavaScript, and markup languages, – and UXD including related important fields (psychology, sociology, philosophy), and worked my way from a delivery driver to cook, to assistant mgr in retail and restaurant to manager (to make ends meet whilst learning) to programmer, to assistant lead, to PM assistant, to project manager, to designer, to lead designer at a company where I had more than 10 million users and was submitted for an Apple design award for my design.

Then I got sick with a genetic disease for which there’s no treatment or cure. Now I can no longer work and as a result, I had to leave the career I loved and had worked so hard for – and lose the health insurance that came with that. Now I am destitute, my savings are gone, and I have nothing but social security and Medicare, and Medicare is horribly broken. I can’t afford housing, and have to choose between medicine and food.

This is in the US, obviously. I have plenty more to contribute – my mind still works fine – but I can’t contribute in this system because I can’t reliably work.

I am fucked. I can’t afford to live anymore and, regardless of what I could contribute in a system that might allow me to, I am stuck doing nothing and slowly dying because this system is designed to fuck me as hard as possible.

This is not a meritocracy. If it was, I would not be in the position of choosing whether to eat or buy medicine.

e2: and we wouldn’t have a complete moron making billions by stealing the work of others (people like me) then just casting them aside like they’re nothing. Yes, I mean that absolute shitbag poser, you all know his name.

Sorry for all the edits, this pisses me off.

late e3, because changes keep being tossed around lately with an apparent near-total lack of even the scope of a single project they’re heading and executing, and that’s quite alarming in this context:

Social security and Medicare both try hard to spend as little money as possible, often under pressure from congress, and Medicare is worse. Medicare is so much worse than people think it is, I cringed every time I’d hear someone shout ‘Medicare for all!’ – especially when they’d go on to prove their notions of Medicare were vague. Congress has been beating the shit out of it whilst big money tends to its wounds for a long time. It’s nearly functionally useless by comparison to what all but the worst insurance companies and scammers do. It’s so bad, in fact, it’s just generally known that you must buy what’s called ‘gap’ insurance so they can slather their slime into the chasms left in Medicare’s wake.

Gap insurance is private insurance. Poor people living on Social Security cannot afford gap insurance (please read my last 4 words as though spoken with the complete inability to keep the disbelief from my voice. I’ve no idea how to annotate that.)

Been on a tear lately because people are currently worshipping a moronic, childish, nepo-baby who didn’t work for what he has, didn’t invent anything, clearly didn’t learn anything except how to use other people most effectively, perhaps designed that laughable abomination of a truck… it really does boggle my mind.

e: I also wrote a scifi novel that I can’t market because I’ve been too sick. Because I’m so desperate, I’m going to mention it here – I could use a couple of reviews. Based on current reviews, it’s not bad: Blue Are the Hills by Lilly Piper on Amazon, if you’re into dystopian fiction. I’ve tried to market myself as much as I can, but it’s hard. That’s why my Lemmy icon is my face – not because I’m a boomer, but because it’s my branding.

… another blows out at 20,000 ft?

Of everything I said, that’s the part you decided to focus on?

e: not that trump had said he’d glass the region to build hotels?

I just left a conversation with my 88 year old dad less gratified than a similar conversation with him 8 years ago. He’s recently fallen in love with a very conservative woman roughly 15 years his junior, and I’m feeling pretty bad about his leaning.

Many aspects of our conversation disturbed me. I’m feeling far worse about our societal situation than I did after our conversations 15 years ago. I don’t know what’s changed in that demographic, but it’s not good.

So this is weird: my ancestor in the US in the early 1600s tried to sell Bronks Farm (now the Bronx) to foreign investors and got his left ear cut off, hanged till nearly dead, then banished to New Jersey. That was apparently a punishment at the time.

You’re kidding, right? You think that aid is because of trump, when you’re responding in an article that says his stated motives are the opposite of that?

Much of that aid was already secured before he took office. Shit takes time – especially in a war zone. Wait a month or so and get back to me on whether aid from the US continues. The US has been giving aid to many places that will continue for a short while until the new policies filter through.

Listen to what the new moron-in-chief says, and notice that some policies take a bit of time to take effect. Like the US economy, for instance. Large systems don’t turn on a dime.

Check out [email protected].

It’s a fantastic Lemmy client for mobile, and the devs are quite active and responsive.

e: link format

Great fucking job, bothsiders. Now you get Genocide++.

I really hope you’re happy that your conscience is clean now the guy who’s main spokesman said Gaza’s ‘waterfront property could be very valuable’ and who himself declared it ‘could be better than Monaco’, clearly with an eye towards beachfront real estate, has the power to make that happen for his own gain.

This was entirely predictable, and we told you this would happen. Trump told you so himself. The dems weren’t perfect by any stretch, but Kamala absolutely wasn’t looking at the situation as to how she could personally profit through real estate development if the Palestinians were just wiped off the map as quickly as possible. Trump likely had the choicest property mapped out, with property developers already submitting proposals.

If you abstained because of both-sides re Israel, fuck you. You at best were played and at worst helped to play others, and now we ALL get to suffer.

Yes. Anyone not a white cishet Christian male is a DEI hire. There will be some exceptions for straight Christian women for a little while, but they’ll be targeted soon enough and put to pasture with the other breeding stock. Moo.

And they recently added user tagging like on RES for Reddit. It’s so useful. Been using it like mad lately to identify trolls and sealions.