“Middle of nowhere” is the accepted term for that region

“Don’t you guys have phones?”

Biggest physical room I’ve witnessed a misread happen in

Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of “Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?”

Took a while to digest because there’s a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:

“We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn’t have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves.”

Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can’t justify letting people live unless they’re necessary to society in some way - which might’ve made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn’t really necessary at all.

New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn’t actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you’re out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making “life” easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn’t how things should be at all!

Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we’d have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.

Just lack of numbers. Reddit’s at it’s best when I can use it to discuss some incredibly niche topic. That early 2000s RTS that nobody remembers? Got a few dozen redditors still posting memes. New indie game drops? There’s enough redditors on it that we can talk about it.

But lemmy seems really bad for trying to enjoy any community that isn’t a big political or meme centerpiece. Any particular game or IP that isn’t a lowest common denominator? It’ll get maybe 3 posts a month.

No more interesting discussions of gameplay mechanics or inspirations or character analyses, no burning out an entire workday browsing the top all-time and giggling like an idiot, it’s just dead here.

The same massive numbers that made reddit insufferable for some are what make niche communities inhabitable at all.