This, people love to think Rome fell because of moral degeneracy and corruption, but that was probably at its height under Commodus or Nero when the empire was very stable and secure. The later emperors were relatively modest and to an increasing degree impotent, so it mattered less if they were incompetent, though many of them were, and that didn’t help.

The reality is empires all eventually fall, they lose the military edge that won them the empire, either by degrading or the “barbarians” learning and catching up, and the forces that were kept in check by the military tear the empire apart.

Sucks to be Mexican. The world cups finally coming to your country after 40 years and the tickets are too expensive for the locals to afford.

Will probably be great in Mexico and Canada, they’ll probably fill the stadiums there with the people who don’t want to go to the US to see it.

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Hamas probably won’t go for this as it still requires them to demilitarize and they, along with a lot of Palestinians in gaza, view that as a path to slow ethnic cleansing like what’s happening in the west bank.

You’d think the “Hillary’s gonna take our guns” Republicans would understand not wanting to surrender your guns and security to a government in general, much less one that’s been trying to genocide you for decades.

Both

I know this is how the fediverse works, and how it has to work. But maybe we shouldn’t be advertising this tool right now when the right is trying to dox people and get them fired/deported for liking a kirk meme.

Idk, looks like a cigarette to me. /s

Yes, there are plenty of other investment opportunities, the fact that you chose the one that profits off of housing insecurity shows you don’t care enough about it to forgo a little bit of extra money.

Like other people have mentioned you would also have to be advocating against your own interest. Yes you can do that but your passion will at least be dulled by your innate desire for profit. You’d have more passion and will for the cause if you didn’t own investment properties, even more if you are renting and are a victim of housing commodification.

Another point is that you’d be adding to the demand of houses and thus raising the price. You could argue it’s a drop in the ocean, but that sort of attitude leads to a million drops in the ocean and rising sea levels. You would also probably be buying it on a mortgage that’s larger then the house was previously on so the floor for rent , the break even point, would be higher.

Eg. If you bought the property for $400,000 on a mortgage for say $2,000 a month from someone who only had a $200,000 mortgage on it for $1,000 a month you’ve now upped the rent floor $1,000.

You could make a lot of these same arguments for owning slaves. If you don’t buy them then someone else will, and they may be a worse master then you. Better that you buy them and treat them right, provide them good food and housing, while at the same time advocating for the abolition of slavery.

In both secenarios you may say you want what’s best for them, but that desire is in direct conflict with your desire for profit so either you become a bad investor or a bad slave master / landlord. Why bring yourself into that conflict instead of investing in something without those moral implications?

Mormons and skiers, also a decent amount getting born there too. There fertility rate may not be positive but it’s a lot better then the other states so they’re relatively gaining population.

I understand people making choices despite popularity, it seems a lot of people here are of that category, I’m concerned with the people who are choosing not to join a cause because of its lack of popularity, leading to the issues mentioned above. I think this second group is a larger percentage of the population then the first group. I think we can agree that these causes gaining popularity is good, even though they can have value without popularity. So getting that second group into the cause would be good.

I think what your advocating is to just evangelize the benefits and then people will come. But I think there are a lot of people that even if I could explain every benefit of Linux, they’d still stay on windows citing one of the above benefits of popularity, same with a lot of the causes listed above. If we are to say evangelizing is the best/only method then we leave a lot of those people for which education is not enough.

I was looking for people who were at that point of being educated about a cause, but weighed it it less then those benefits of popularity and continued on in the capitalist consumerist system. Then maybe something else pushed those scales to the other side and they chose to join the cause. What was that experience? Was it having a child? Was it an experience with death, spiritual experience, revelation, drug trip, etc. I guess that’s the question.

I wouldn’t say Palestine is a losing cause. All the ones I listed are minoritarian, some in the low single digit percentage of people, especially in the US. A majority of people in the US and a large majority of the world want a ceasefire. It’s not failing due to lack of popular support, its failimg because a small minority of very powerful people really want this genocide.

What makes you think a given person prefers the capitalist options?

The fact that they vast majority of people choose the capitalist option. You could chalk some of it up to lack of awareness, but even those that are aware still tend to go for the default capitalist option. Out of every normal person you’ve explained Linux to in real life, how many do you think made the switch? Yes individuals may choose them but the vast majority of normal people aren’t.

vegans are not bothered by restaurants not catering to them because they simply won’t go

Speak for yourself, I’m a vegetarian and often get annoyed by the lack of options, and that’s in a very liberal city. Not everyone has your same moral conviction, my girlfriend is a vegetarian too but will eat meat if it’s the only option on the menu. You can say she’s a fake vegetarian or doesn’t truly believe in the welfare of animals, but she still cares a hell of a lot more than your average person, so if she’s is still occasionally eating meat then your never going to get rid of animal products for the average person who doesn’t give two shits about animal welfare.

The fact is the more good vegan options there are the more people will be vegan, or at least partially vegan. Most people value taste and there food preferences more then animal welfare, environment etc. But if there’s an item on the menu that is tasty and they prefer and its vegan then they’ll choose it, and that’s a win. But most chefs aren’t putting there time into making a variety of tasty vegan food because the markets not there. Yes there are people with a higher moral conviction that value welfare over taste but that is a slim minority who won’t be able to stop all the abuse the industry causes.

Also you don’t always select where you go to dinner, a lot of times the friends or family your going to dinner with will select it. Some are kind and will check the menu for options but a lot of the time they can forget and just pick one. Am I supposed to not go to dinner after my cousins graduation because it’s at a steakhouse?

Can you elaborate on this one?

A platform like this benefits from having more and more diverse communities to keep people engaged. Lemmy, as it stands right now, only has a couple broad communities, mostly about these causes I mentioned: FOSS, socialism, etc. If your not interested in those communities at all you probably won’t find lemmy very valuable. Even if you are somewhat interested in those things you may still stay on reddit because it has the other communities your interested in along with those that are on lemmy. This is especially true for niche interests but even some broader interests like sports in general are completely absent from lemmy. This is self fulfilling to a certain extent, as less people talk about sports, less people post about sports, less people come here for sports etc. So for a person who wants a feed of say 50% socialist memes and 50% baseball they’re gonna go to reddit because they can get that, even if the socialist memes and discussion is better over here, now we’re missing out on that person’s discussion in the socialist meme communities and that’s a loss for everyone in that community.

You’re looking at this as a red vs. blue issue and identifying with blue when it’s really a people in power vs. normal people issue. This is the california democratic party taking power away from the people and giving it to the ruling party. Sure you may like that ruling party now, but if a new party takes power or the current one does something horrible then you’ll have less of an ability to remove them from power.

That assumes the democratic party wants gerrandering to end and they just won’t collude with the Republicans to carve up the country and entrench the two party system.

Eh, the democrats seem to be getting back on board with it too now. Most Americans at least have a vague concept of gerrymandering. They just choose to ignore it when it benefits their side.

I think the events op mentioned probably happened in the last couple hundred years too. It’s more that the U.S. has been more stable over the past 2 centuries compared to most other countries. There’s only been 3 mass wars in defense of the country, the revolution, the civil war and WWII. Compare that to say France which has had 3.5 revolutions and 3 giant continent spanning wars in that same time period.

WWII was the war to end all wars, so we couldn’t have a department of war anymore. Still “needed” and army , navy, marines and all the weapons for them though so we created the department of defense.

Is there a measure for the force exerted on the ground for something then? Such that a balloon would be 0