[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 9 points 1 year ago

Can you define direct action for me? What do you think it is?

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 5 points 1 year ago

I FUCKING LOVE PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING

It's also a really wonderful way to get pedestrian safety improvements installed. CDOT really does not love prioritizing pedestrians right now. But alders can order specific infrastructure from them using menu funding. Because pedestrian-friendly infrastructure is liked more by people, wards with participatory budgeting usually have higher amounts of pedestrian infra and safe streets. :D

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 11 points 1 year ago

I live in Chicago lmao. I take the red line regularly. I go allllllllllllllll around the city and have never once had a problem here. The only reason why you hear about crime or shootings as much as you do in the news is 1) because it's already been sensationalized, and that sets the pattern, and 2) the entire Chicagoland area (including the suburbs, which get news stories blown up too) has a population of about 11.5 million people. Statistically for even a murder rate as low as Chicago's is (and it's not even in the top 20 most violent cities in the country), shit's just going to happen.

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 7 points 1 year ago

CPD's annual budget is $1.94 billion. There is absolutely not a 'lack of police' in the city.

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[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 18 points 1 year ago

Enterprise starts at 20k a year before traffic

My Mastodon server has just under 1.5k MAUs and has raised $4k so far this year. We've only been open for six months. This is not hard money to raise.

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Hi confused about this. Also confused about my gender but that’s not related.

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Idk if this is useful at all, but when starting my Mastodon server I set up an account at Open Collective with a fiscal sponsorship by the Open Collective Foundation. This gave us 501(c)(3) status, made all of our finances public and clear, and also got us free GSuite. Highly recommend it.

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 18 points 1 year ago

Evergreen meme:

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 6 points 1 year ago

It’s the deciding which ones are worthless that gets dangerous

Not making a decision is in and of itself a decision. Saying 'Nazis deserve a voice because everyone deserves a voice' removes the voice of minorities because Nazis murder and oppress minorities. There is a decision that has to be made somewhere. Saying 'everyone deserves a voice and Nazis deserve a platform!' is limiting the voice of minorities.

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 15 points 1 year ago

Idk, gonna be a very hot take, but I like my beliefs challenged and believe that everyone deserves a voice

Nazis had a voice once, and folks listened to them. And we ended up with the Holocaust.

Might be controversial but I don't believe that people who want to murder minorities deserve a voice. I feel like that's a pretty reasonable bar to set lol.

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 6 points 1 year ago

Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That's 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it's written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it'll be even cheaper to host on donations.

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There is never a good time to strike. There's never a convenient strike. The purpose of a strike is to use the inconvenience of the strike to show how essential you are and force your company to pay you more.

Honestly I really don't care about the fact that it would've been 'political suicide', maybe if dems had tried being pro-worker earlier their unpopularity wouldn't be an issue. Blocking a strike is always a shitty thing to do, there is never a valid justification for it, workers should always have the right to strike. And interfering with that was and is shitty and it's bullshit to defend it.

Also workers aren't idiots. If it wasn't going to hurt the rail companies, they wouldn't have done it. Frankly I cannot understand why anyone would be defending Dems for doing this after hearing the absolutely greuling conditions these workers were put under.

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 13 points 1 year ago

This is so weird to me lol, maybe I'm just odd but it's so weird seeing McCarthyism still rearing it's ugly head after what... 5 decades? I am by no means an ML (can't stand them as an anarchist) but this is wildly blowing out of proportion what @dessalines@lemmy.ml has said and done.

I mean like why link a 'Socialist FAQ' that's literally just a ton of links to education on socialism and the different schools of thought it has? Not all communists are tankies (not even most) lol. Just generally shows a lack of familiarity with actual leftists / anticapitalists.

[-] epicspongee@midwest.social 7 points 1 year ago

I mean you're more than free to start contributing to Lemmy and / or offer to be on the core team. You can fork it and start your own version of it not owned by them. The nice thing about having a communist (or at least an anticapitalist) developing it instead of a capitalist is that you have the freedom to do that. You cannot do that with Twitter, or with Reddit, or with Facebook, or with Instagram.

Capitalists will not voluntarily do that because it is unprofitable to them. Companies that do end up floundering or dead.

Idk to me there's a very real difference between the two and I'd rather have a tankie developing a platform than someone like Elon Musk making it go to shit.

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epicspongee

joined 1 year ago