• Evilphd666 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    my-hero I’m moving to Tex@$$ because I can’t accept one of my genetic legacies is trans.

    melon-musk I also blew $44 Billion on turning a public hall into a fascist echo chamber.

    some-controversy One of our biggest celebrities Jin Xing is transgender.

    wojak-nooo

    • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      One of our biggest celebrities Jin Xing is transgender.

      Not a big fan of that line of arguing. The US has transgender celebrities and individual people of color have been massive stars for decades. Individual outliers do little to inhibit systemic oppression. You wouldn’t bring up the Jackson 5 to argue that the US was becoming less racist in the 70s.

    • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      Calling Twitter a “public hall” is quite the reach. It was a shitty Facebook-like corporate social media infested with CIA. It was never good

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    One of my legitimate concerns is that garish billionaire fuckups like my-hero are consciously used as useful idiots by capitalism to discourage people from realizing every billionaire is an existential threat and the system that created them should be torn apart. Warren Buffet, the “good billionaire” served the same purpose but in the opposite direction.

    On the other hand him being a public clown does serve to undermine the whole meritocracy narrative, which could cause people to start questioning the entire system. The problem with that is that the entire time he’s running around being a freak he’s obstructing development of things like rail infrastructure, which is maybe a more negative end result than the positive of having bad PR for the mega rich.

    Either way I hope he tries to trade a horse for sex again and the horse kicks his head clean off his shoulders.

          • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            Same thing happened with giving felons their right to vote back in Florida /shrug

            But I think that even if it gets screwed by the state government it’s still worthwhile for the potential radicalizing effect it might have on some people. California’s proposition system is like 50/50 good things and awful things promoted by corporate propaganda until people vote for them even though it’s against their own interests.

            • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              1 month ago

              The Colorado Constitution originally forbade slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” but Amendment A removed that exception.

              However, “the voters did not intend to abolish the DOC inmate work program by virtue of passing Amendment A,” wrote Judge Sueanna P. Johnson in the appellate panel’s Aug. 18 opinion.

              This shit is infuriating, judge just deciding that we didn’t actually mean to change the law when we changed the law. The amendment passed with 66% of the vote.

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Fuck Elon Stank; CAHSR isn’t being built by private capital though. The funding is government bonds and spending bills, and it’s being directed by the CA High Speed Rail Authority, which is a government body under the California State Transportation Agency.

    There’s a lot of reasons why CA HSR has been spinning its wheels, and Musk is not among them. The good news is that they’re making a lot more headway in terms of actually getting stuff built in the last couple of years. Reports of billion dollar bridges to nowhere are largely big carbon hit pieces that distort the reality of the situation. Source: fan of the project, so I follow it, and I live close enough to it that I see the progress.

    • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      While not directly responsible, Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop, promising features that it could never possibly achieve, and redirected attention away from an actual solution to a gadgetbahn technology that would never work. Here’s an article from the time and here’s a more recent article about it. Part of the criticism is also on the fawning media that worshiped the very ground Elon walked on at that time.

    • alcoholicorn
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      1 month ago

      Where do you see free market economics building good HSR?

        • alcoholicorn
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          1 month ago

          Flying is incredibly inconvenient and expensive for all but the longest routes. Beijing to shanghai costs $90 by high-speed train, and $300-$600 by plane.

          You can also look at Europe’s HSR, countries that have HSR love it.