I’m here to make your life on Lemmy a fucking nightmare

Good luck.

That’s a fair point, but they could have been up front about it, or at least adjusted their advertising some. They basically told consumers “We’ll get you the best deal, and if we don’t find one, it doesn’t exist”, which is a spurious claim anyway, but it surely misled people. They could have just said “We’ll see if we have any coupon codes available” or something less committal. There still would have been a lot of value for regular consumers… if you weren’t using a coupon code, 5% off is better than nothing and if they weren’t being dicks about the referral links, nobody likely would have cared in the slightest.

If they’d just been a little less greedy, and only inserted their affiliate link for purchases where none was originally present, and actually provided the service they advertised rather than ‘partnering’ with merchants to provide worse coupons, they’d probably never have gotten caught and if they had, nobody would have cared. Could have skimmed a significant but lesser amount forever. But no, they had to go full on villain, and here we are.

Even if there weren’t a million examples of prior art, the fact that patents on game mechanics are even allowed is just awful for the industry as a whole, and we as players should absolutely rail against this. Every game borrows from other games’ ideas and mechanics - I’d bet money that there hasn’t been a single fully “original” game in 20+ years. If companies are allowed to patent every little mechanic (even ones they didn’t come up with), the industry as a whole will just become impossible to operate in.

Essentially nobody is complaining about the quality of care available here. The problem is that only the rich can really afford it. Most people will avoid going to the doctor if at all possible, just because they can’t absorb the cost even if they’re just told to take an Aspirin and sleep it off. Long-term care for anything serious is just impossible to recover from financially for most people - it literally bankrupts entire families. With how hard it is to move up a prosperity bracket, that’s a devastating blow that is often felt for generations.

I think your view might be slightly skewed because you have free care available, and can go to the US or Mexico for better options if you can afford it. Here, if we can’t afford it, we have nothing, or we assume tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

Many, if not most, of us are jealous of other countries, though. Really, this is only a hard truth for the MAGA crowd, and even that is (I think) largely the fault of the nationalist propaganda that’s been shoveled at us since we were kids.

As an American, I agree with you, though - the US is in no way a ‘strong democracy’, or much of a democracy at all. It may once have been, but it certainly hasn’t been the case for a long time.

Every time I hear conspiracy theories about reptilians secretly pulling the strings, I wish so fucking bad that it was true. I’d take that in a heartbeat.

I used to play a cleric in Everquest. We used to play the ‘purple bar game’.

If you drop to 0 hp, you fall unconscious, but you’re higher than, if I recall correctly, -20, you don’t die. Instead, you bleed for a few hp per second until you reach that threshold (or, more frequently, something hits you). When this happens, your HP bar turns purple.

We used to make it a game to try and time heals so they didn’t land until the tank was unconscious. It resulted in many, many deaths.

If I were the victim of genocide, I wouldn’t be a voter at all, because I’d be dead. However, that’s kind of irrelevant - are you the victim of genocide? I’m assuming not, if you’re voting in the US election. Even if you’re Palestinian, your people are the victim of genocide, but unless you’re in Palestine, you aren’t.

That said, if you are Palestinian, I feel for you, I honestly do, and it would explain your view somewhat.

I think we can both agree that there’s only two outcomes that’re possible in this election: Trump wins, or Harris wins. (If you don’t agree, I’d be happy to hear your third outcome.) If you truly believe there’s no difference between the two of them, you need to do some research on the topic, because there are a lot of differences, even if they don’t pertain to this issue specifically.

If, between the two of them, you hope Harris wins, a 3rd party vote is voting against your interests. If you hope Trump wins between the two of them, a 3rd party vote is still voting against your interests, because you’re effectively taking a vote away from your preferred candidate among the two who could possibly win.

Edit to respond to your edit:

The outcome is the Democrats stop committing Genocide or they don’t get votes. “But Trump” isn’t even an argument.

Unless you’re out there protesting, or writing letters, or making phone calls, or in some way letting them know that their policy is costing them your vote, it’s a useless gesture. Posting on Lemmy isn’t going to change any politician’s minds. It’s not even going to change anyone’s mind here, in all likelihood. If you actually want to make a difference, you need to make your voice heard by the people whose minds you’re actually trying to change.

I don’t think it’s a waste of time. Even if I can’t convince him specifically, there are other people reading these posts. If someone came to this thread who was less sure, and I can change their mind, that’s good enough for me.

Well, I’m not a single-issue voter.

I’m not rewarding them for anything, but I accept that it’s possible to oppose one policy a politician has, even a very important one, and at the same time support a lot of other policies they have, while also vehemently opposing almost all policies that their opponent supports, and make my choice based on that information.

Based on this post, you seem to be a single-issue voter, though, so I’m trying to understand what you’re hoping the outcome is. You acknowledge that a vote that supports Trump, even indirectly, is not helping the people of Gaza, so why would you vote against your own self-interests? What’s your goal?

If your goal is to show opposition to what’s happening in Gaza, there’s much more effective ways to do that. Get out there and protest - the protests at the DNC are getting a lot of news coverage, that’s where your activism could actually make a difference. Not here.

A normally blue voter voting 3rd party is indirectly helping Trump win the election. Do you think Trump’s Israel policy is going to be better than Harris’s?

So, what course of action are you proposing? Vote Trump? Vote 3rd party? Don’t vote?

What’s your intended / expected outcome?