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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Centrism is just being able to acknowledge that both parties have flaws. If you can’t find any issues with the party you support, that means that you got your political views from someone else instead of developing them yourself.

    People on a left-leaning site don’t wanna hear it, but US Democrats aren’t perfect. Their policy on immigration is not sustainable. A de facto open border policy for refugees and people who cross illegally while people with college degrees can’t even get a work visa is absurd. As a nation we are not obligated to help others when many of our own citizens are struggling. Biden’s student debt relief plan would have caused tuition prices to increase at an even faster rate than before and guaranteed further debt relief executive orders would be required in the future. Plus it set an insane precedent that the president could authorize billions in spending without any congressional oversight. Democrats were frightengly authoritarian during COVID with stuff like vaccine mandates and online censorship. Things were labelled as “misinformation” and later accepted to be the truth… repeatedly, and people simply didn’t care. One day you could get banned from every social media site for saying COVID may have come from a lab, and the next day it was perfectly plausible. That stuff would have been unthinkable prior to 2020 and it’s just apparently normal today.

    And then there is the stuff where they’re just hypocritical or simply providing lip service. Biden could remove marijuana’s schedule 1 classification today with an executive order, but he won’t. Instead his administion argued in court that marijuana users cannot be trusted owning firearms and the ATF is right to prohibit them from buying guns. Speaking of guns, Biden also signed an executive order declaring pistol braces to be stocks after years of the ATF saying they weren’t stocks, making millions of gun owners into felons, many who didn’t even know about the reclassification. A piece of plastic that was legal one day is now 10 years in federal prison. Democrats are guilty of putting corporate interests before individual interests, much like republicans. Democrats love to talk about how much they care about the environment and climate change, but would sooner pass a law saying people can’t set their AC below 80 degrees than dare invest money into nuclear power or stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

    You don’t have to agree with everything I said here. But if you can’t find anything to criticize about your preferred party, or at least acknowledge that these are valid criticisms even if you disagree with them, you are part of the problem.

    “Centrists” gets tons of hate online that’s unwarranted IMO. “Centrism” is just a label people like to put on independent voters because mocking them by acting like their political position can be summed up as “Democrats have some good points, but the Nazis do too” is an easy way to dismiss them, when the reality is that most centrists are voters who get no representation since we have a broken-ass two-party system. Admitting that the two-party system is bad doesn’t benefit you if you support one of those two parties. So here we are.






  • Software subscriptions are what really bums me out. Back in the day you could just buy your software and have it forever. Now Microsoft Office is a subscription, Adobe Photoshop is a subscription, and so much more. Nothing pisses me off more than when I install a basic app on my phone and find out it’s actually a subscription app.

    Literally the only major software I can think of right now that isn’t subscription based or insanely expensive is Apple’s Final Cut Pro at $300.



  • Yeah I love Youtube Premium on the family plan. People on the internet act like there’s no benefit to it as long as Adblock and Youtube Vanced exist. Meanwhile I have an iPhone, smart TVs, and my whole family does too. My nieces and nephews don’t have to get bombarded with ads, and that’s well worth it to me. But the way they silently jacked the price up $5 per month was a total dick move that I’m not happy about. If they keep pulling this shit, it’s only a matter of time before I find another solution.


  • I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.

    I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.

    Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.

    With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it’s unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.