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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’ve got to say that the file explorer tabs are a great addition/comeback, and a vastly improved experience over the 90s incarnation where drag and drop was often hamstrung by system responsiveness (and could you even drag and drop to inactive tabs to activate them and bring them to the front back then? Don’t recall.) Using them in KDE Plasma at home , when i got a new win11laptop for work I was thrilled with many of the interface improvements. The telemetry and “widgets” are trash, though, as are the permanent ads in the windows context menu.





  • No, just defending someone that I know for a fact is a genuinely decent human being. He doesn’t give a shit about burnishing his reputation through the philanthropy he does. He does it because he hates seeing billionaire mansions on mountaintops as much as anyone who isn’t a fuck, because he wants everyone to have natural places to enjoy in the future. If you can’t see the difference between someone like Sweeney and someone like Musk, DeVoss, etc., that’s on you. He’s not trying to make the world worse for everyone.

    Do I have issues with the concentration of wealth and growing inequality in the US? Yes. If you gave me a list of billionaires, where I had to rank them in terms of their benefit to the world vs. negative impact to the world, would I put him high in benefit and low in negative impact? Yes. He’s not spouting antisemitic nonsense, or trying to influence politics, or ruin education, or poison the minds of the American public. He’s just running his business, treating his employees well, and preserving land. So if you want to call me a bootlicker for points, fine. Given the world we live in, I’d rather have our billionaires be like Sweeney instead of Musk or DeVoss.


  • You sound like someone who doesn’t know much about philanthropy and falls prey to confirmation bias as much as anyone. The fact that you put money laundering ahead of tax-write offs is telling. He’s not a mexican drug cartel buying US real estate.

    Like I said, he’s a stealth philanthropist to the degree that it does next to nothing to burnish his reputation. The only reason I know about it is because I’m in land conservation. He doesn’t seek out any press attention at all, and the limited number of news articles about his donations are a testament to that. I am not saying that Epic business practices don’t have issues that are common between his competitors, but I am saying that he himself is not a slimeball. His personality is about as far as you can get from a psychopathic self-enriching tech bro. Basically he hit the jackpot with Unreal, then fortnite.


  • Tim Sweeney is awesome. He’s one of the biggest conservation donors in my state and is personally responsible for permanently saving over 50,000 acres of land from development, protecting crucial habitat in a rapidly developing state, allowing public trail and nature preserves to get created. He lives in a normal house and drives a normal car and hikes the land he preserves when he’s not working. He’s a billionaire that lives a modest life, doesn’t mess with politics, and a true philanthropist. He doesn’t give to get press. The few articles out there about his philanthropy are because reporters stumble across it when reporting on whatever new nature preserve is opening in their area.

    He might have some business practices that are problematic but are endemic to the industry.




  • I spent a year living in Israel during the Second Intifada, studying the conflict and talking to everyone I could, Jew, Arab, etc. I do a pretty good impression of a constipated Ariel Sharon giving a speech, “Anaaacchnu tzrichim [labored grunting] bitachon b’Israel v’hakol olam!”

    You have a well-informed and factual view of the situation. Must be because you are an Israeli ex-pat and (let me guess) are secular. It’s disheartening to see propaganda-fueled idiots who have zero idea what they are talking about arguing with you–who wants reform in Israel–all because they have a black-and-white view of right and wrong, see Islam as “the underdog” that is therefore allowed to commit atrocities, and had hiphop artists telling them to “free Palestine” since 1995.


  • How? Ranked choice voting and well-designed non-partisan redistricting are necessary reforms that too few people know about. We need a duo of liberal and conservative billionaires that make this their pet issue, a handful of country music stars, pop stars, and hip-hop/rap/RnB artists behind it and we’d get it in a heartbeat. Fuck, Elon Musk could distract people from the media nightmare that is his mouth and become a big advocate of it and we’d have Chads burning down the internet for these reforms the next day.



  • Good take–hate on Americans while ignoring the Americans correctly explaining to you how the American electoral system is broken. Spend more time telling Americans that want viable third parties that they need to also support ranked-choice voting, and less time casting shade. If there’s any truth in your words, its simply that people need to know that having viable third parties REQUIRES ranked choice voting. I’m terrified that the US “No Labels” party will hand the election to Trump, because under the current system, ANY third party is an election spoiler.


  • It’s a huge part of the culture of generational poverty as well. I used to work in Legal Aid and some of the schemes that folks used to milk the system to illegally (yet understandably) avoid the trap you’re talking about were absolutely brilliant. One couple used domestic protection orders to have a legal paper trail that the male couldn’t legally live with his partner (to avoid “household” income counting as your income). There was zero domestic abuse going on, but the women would lie, get her protection order, and have something to hand to the social service workers. Male partner would sneak in and out to avoid being too obvious that it was a sham. Absolutely brilliant, made it a shame that such smart fraudsters never had a life that gave them a vision and hope for something greater.