• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • No, just defending someone that I know for a fact is a genuinely decent human being. He doesn’t give a shit about burnishing his reputation through the philanthropy he does. He does it because he hates seeing billionaire mansions on mountaintops as much as anyone who isn’t a fuck, because he wants everyone to have natural places to enjoy in the future. If you can’t see the difference between someone like Sweeney and someone like Musk, DeVoss, etc., that’s on you. He’s not trying to make the world worse for everyone.

    Do I have issues with the concentration of wealth and growing inequality in the US? Yes. If you gave me a list of billionaires, where I had to rank them in terms of their benefit to the world vs. negative impact to the world, would I put him high in benefit and low in negative impact? Yes. He’s not spouting antisemitic nonsense, or trying to influence politics, or ruin education, or poison the minds of the American public. He’s just running his business, treating his employees well, and preserving land. So if you want to call me a bootlicker for points, fine. Given the world we live in, I’d rather have our billionaires be like Sweeney instead of Musk or DeVoss.


  • You sound like someone who doesn’t know much about philanthropy and falls prey to confirmation bias as much as anyone. The fact that you put money laundering ahead of tax-write offs is telling. He’s not a mexican drug cartel buying US real estate.

    Like I said, he’s a stealth philanthropist to the degree that it does next to nothing to burnish his reputation. The only reason I know about it is because I’m in land conservation. He doesn’t seek out any press attention at all, and the limited number of news articles about his donations are a testament to that. I am not saying that Epic business practices don’t have issues that are common between his competitors, but I am saying that he himself is not a slimeball. His personality is about as far as you can get from a psychopathic self-enriching tech bro. Basically he hit the jackpot with Unreal, then fortnite.


  • Tim Sweeney is awesome. He’s one of the biggest conservation donors in my state and is personally responsible for permanently saving over 50,000 acres of land from development, protecting crucial habitat in a rapidly developing state, allowing public trail and nature preserves to get created. He lives in a normal house and drives a normal car and hikes the land he preserves when he’s not working. He’s a billionaire that lives a modest life, doesn’t mess with politics, and a true philanthropist. He doesn’t give to get press. The few articles out there about his philanthropy are because reporters stumble across it when reporting on whatever new nature preserve is opening in their area.

    He might have some business practices that are problematic but are endemic to the industry.




  • How? Ranked choice voting and well-designed non-partisan redistricting are necessary reforms that too few people know about. We need a duo of liberal and conservative billionaires that make this their pet issue, a handful of country music stars, pop stars, and hip-hop/rap/RnB artists behind it and we’d get it in a heartbeat. Fuck, Elon Musk could distract people from the media nightmare that is his mouth and become a big advocate of it and we’d have Chads burning down the internet for these reforms the next day.



  • Good take–hate on Americans while ignoring the Americans correctly explaining to you how the American electoral system is broken. Spend more time telling Americans that want viable third parties that they need to also support ranked-choice voting, and less time casting shade. If there’s any truth in your words, its simply that people need to know that having viable third parties REQUIRES ranked choice voting. I’m terrified that the US “No Labels” party will hand the election to Trump, because under the current system, ANY third party is an election spoiler.


  • I’m technically capable but all I know about is manually torrenting from public trackers without even using VPN because I got old and out of time and also like living dangerously and don’t mind getting occasionally smacked with bandwidth punishment for arrrrrrring. Usually I just use arrrr streaming. Is there a good guide to learn about the stuff you mentioned ?





  • Even I, who think the Palestinian leadership is full of shit and has been full of shit since before 1948, and think that using meat shields to protect military assets is the war crime, and that the civilian deaths that are occurring in the destruction of said tunnels are the foreseeable consequences of the aforementioned war crime, WILDLY AND ADAMANTLY DISAGREE WITH YOU. What my government did in Gitmo, The fact that there was a prison at all at Gitmo, is a shitstain on American honor. What these individuals in the IDF are doing, or are allowing fucking nut bag whacko settlers to do, is a shit stain on the reputation of Israel.



  • Look it up when you have a second, it’s fascinating, and it is only going to be more of an issue as the range of the Lone Star tick spreads. In the South (US) even budget grocery stores in bumfrick nowhere are starting to carry a fair selection of vegan cheese and some other vegan products, because of the allergy. A few years ago you might be able to get some rubbery soy imitation processed American Cheese, while now you can get much better stuff at a Food Lion. And it’s not because there’s suddenly vegans everywhere in rural America - it’s because people got the alpha gal allergy.


  • Does it produce alpha gal as part of the milk? Even alpha gal levels that are too low to cause anaphylaxis are thought to cause an inflammatory response that dramatically increases the risk of stroke from the creation of unstable arterial plaque. [EDIT: hey downvoter that has targeted my account, did you know that I could start my own instance and determine what user you are, so I can report you? Think about that before you continue to downvote everything I ever posted or commented on lemmy, okay? This isn’t reddit, and you aren’t fully anonymous.]


  • Meanwhile in alpha gal allergy land (allergy to mammal, the only known sugar allergy and the only known “slow onset” allergy, now the third most common food allergy in the USA thanks to Lone Star ticks and climate change), I’m happy that non-dairy cheese has come lightyears in the past decade, but wish I could easily find chicken and turkey sausage that doesn’t use beef casing. Miyoko Brand cashew cheese is amazing but SO expensive.

    Vegans should see alpha gal allergy folks as their allies, I think. Margaret Atwood, in her MaddAdam trilogy, imagined that alpha gal allergy was spread by ecoterrorists looking to reduce global meat consumption. While that is fiction, I sometimes think everyone should get the allergy. Basically ALL mammal consumption would cease. You’d still have sheep, alpacas, etc. for fiber production, but it would be a global food revolution unparalleled in human history, exceeding even the agricultural revolution from producing fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen.