I think it’s the distinction of whether or not it is voluntary. Buying things is a choice, taxes aren’t (outside of voting for certain political candidates who promise to use taxes in different ways).

A lot of people out there have short-sighted mindsets like “Why do I have to pay for schools when I don’t have any kids?” or “I have my own insurance, why do I have to pay into someone else’s public healthcare too?” People can’t be relied on to make the spending choices needed to support a healthy and stable society on their own, so taxes and public spending make it for them.

To add on to that, not all taxes fund things for the public good. In the US at least, and other countries with large military spending, one must accept that a lot of tax money goes to fund the military industrial complex. Taxes are also used to line the pockets of corporations via bailouts and overpriced government contracts.

Now I also believe there is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, but taxes are nevertheless different from a voluntary exchange of currency for goods and services that one directly benefits from.

Usually services in English will have English (US) and English (UK). Sorry to all the other English-speaking countries out there, though.

Which is apparently all the time, especially when people are looking for ice cream.

The people you’re messaging might, though.

The universe where her real name is Kasumi

Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh too.

Each has real-world analogs. Kanto is the literal Kanto region of Japan, Johto is Kansai, Hoenn is Kyushu, and Sinnoh is Hokkaido.

May constitute a war crime? Israel is a war crime.

Comment still agreeing with the mistaken criticism above, despite the apology, just to be argumentative.

But do you have a source for that claim?

Hm? Didn’t think so!

^/s

The Earl of Sandwich invents the sophisticated breaddystack only for the plebs to just refer to it by its inventor. Imagine inventing the morphodynamic semioscillating inverter only for the uneducated commons to call it a “Jimothy” or something.

Relevant greentext:

Receive.

I think my grasp of English is pretty good, but this is one of the most common words I misspell on a regular basis. I have no idea why I keep wanting to write “recieve” instead.

Not sure if this applied universally, but I remember for years and years the common knowledge was that plastic caps are unrecyclable for some reason, and there used to be separate bins to toss them at recycling centers. That’s no longer the case, so keeping the cap connected to the bottle is one way to demonstrate that they should be recycled together.

(By “recycled” I mean most likely shipped to Southeast Asia to then most likely just find their way into the ocean)

Because he’s the PeAcEmAkEr.

“We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying”

All these months later and fuckhead still thinks tariffs are a tax on other countries.

Texas is almost as long as California but quite a bit more thicc.

One additional factor, though, is that California’s major cities are mainly spread all along its lengthy coastline, while most of Texas’s major cities (Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Dallas, etc) are clustered in the interior, decently far but not that far from one another. So going between Austin/Houston/Dallas is not necessarily as daunting a trip as going from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

I think there’s so many Hozier songs that are better, but I agree, I don’t think it’s bad by any stretch. Maybe just a tad overplayed? Can see how people would hate it for that.

I’d be shocked if this wasn’t happening already.

The mob could kidnap someone in broad daylight just with masks and bulletproof vests (even more convenient for them) and half the public would be convinced it must be the victim’s fault.

Literally ICE has shown that the public will not intervene when masked, plainclothed thugs with no ID are just ambushing and grabbing people off the street, so anyone else could probably do it and get away with it, too.

Arguably, lemmy is going to be more private than reddit because your data are being queried, refined, quantified and categorised by reddit to be sold off to the highest bidder. If a different actor is just scraping activitypub they need to do all of that themselves.

I don’t think there’s any “arguably” that Lemmy is more private, it’s a completely open platform. Sure Reddit is a closed platform that can sell data to whoever, but Fediverse data is freely accessible to anyone who just has a bit of technical know-how to set up an instance, after which they can query, refine, quantify, and categorize it all they want. If there’s profit to be made with that data, someone will do it. I am assuming that our info is already being collected by both private interests and governments.

There was a small window where Reddit could be used to find good answers to things, but that ship sailed long ago.

As soon as the site started to become popular in the mid 2010’s, every “expert” was someone who maybe once took a related class in college, or think sharing their girlfriend’s uncle’s neighbor’s relevant story means they have the definitive answer.

“Hello Reddit, does anyone else catch themselves acting differently between family and friends?”

“As someone who once took a psychology class in college, your symptoms are 100% aligned with dissociative identity disorder, and you should seek help immediately.”