Land of the free.

He was just announced dead. Rest in piss.

Apparently before saying “Cutting essential personnel is the worst way to ensure air travel safety”.

This is obviously a joke, but it’s a good time for a reminder that the state of California is the 4th largest economy in the world with over $4 trillion in GDP. Thinking of the US as a set of 50 equally important (economically and socially) chunks is not a good strategy. Unless we go with the mlm3w “Western whites can’t do anything so just sit back” approach, we will have to focus our work on parts that matter the most materially.

Commiefornia is a long shot, considering that they just voted to preserve state slavery, but it’s a much more realistic threat to global capitalism than a socialist US.

We have currently had 12 consecutive months of record breaking global temperatures, with an average of 1.63°C above the pre-industrial levels. Good times.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Technically they operate with the same model of taking a profit from others’ activity.

People use them regardless, for many different types of content, they’re primary platforms. Patreon is a secondary one, pretty much nobody would just go to Patreon and pay for a random subscription to discover someone’s content. But with the primary ones if a certain person was banned from there, subscribers would still keep using them for all the other ones.

Anyway, I’m not really disagreeing, and it’s speculation either way. For all we know, States might straight up illegalize commie content online, moving all of it, including payments, underground.

The idea that corporations will allow free speech because it’s in their financial interest to do so just doesn’t conform with what we observe happening in reality.

There is a fundamental difference between a business selling a product and one that simply takes a part of profits from others’ activity. Creators don’t have to take money through Patreon, they can choose any other platform, and for the subscribers it doesn’t make a real difference. Quite the opposite, if a different service was to take a lower fee (and put more money in the pocket of creators), or be more explicitly in line with their content, then people would be even more eager to support them there instead.

And how long before those corporations drop them?

Do you mean Patreon and Substack? That’s almost definitely not happening. These platforms exist because they, to a good extent, allow for freedom of expression. Technologically they’re nothing to write home about (and Patreon video player is actual dogshit) and could easily be replicated and replaced. So it would be huge for them to lose chunks of creators’ revenues if those were to leave over political differences.

Holy fucking copium. The entire thing is “we’re only interested in our national and strategic interests, but that’s actually good for both parties”.

The year began with the relationship at a historic low point. A year ago this week, a Chinese spy balloon traveled across the United States

Lmao

Unironically “but the other choice is worse!”. The democrats have been doing literally the same shit that republicans did (police funding, title 42, Roe v Wade, willow project, rail strike blocking, sinophobia, etc). And even the little good they’ve done, like the student loan freeze and forgiveness, infrastructure bill, build back better/inflation reduction act, are not really their campaign focus. So we’re just doing the 2020 election 2: electric boogaloo.