I’m just curious for the new or existing people? Lemmy.ml has taken a hard turn to the right since the reddit exodus. There’s been a lot of pro-imperialist propaganda being posted on world news, and a lot less diversity of opinion. It feels more neoliberal and neo-con to me.

Does anyone want to share what their political leanings are?

I’ll start; I’m anti-imperialist pro-state regulated capitalism. I believe we should have usage based taxes (toll roads, carbon tax) and luxury taxes, and I disagree with wealth taxes for people with less than $250 million. The state should spend more money on consumer protection in all industries (environment, health, finance, etc.) I believe in multipolarity vs. US hegemony.

  • SneakyThunder
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    1 year ago

    In my country private companies provide their service much cheaper than government alternative. And, yes they use shared infrastructure.

    • OptimistPrime
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      1 year ago

      I can’t dispute that. I hear people claim that in my country too. But I just wonder how they can know that for a fact. Like okay, maybe they’ve seen a service provided by a private entity for X amount and a comparable service provided by the government for Y amount more. But how can we know what’s going on behind the scenes? Is the company being subsidized by the government? Is the government charging more for this service to offset and lower the price of some other service? Or is the government charging us more for the overhead of having thousands or millions of customers where on the other hand, it can charge a company to lease the infrastructure for less for the reduced overhead of only having that company as a “customer”? I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud. I just question where the motive comes into play for private companies. Their motive is to make money. Do they have us in their best interests? They can cut costs and have huge failures like what happened in Texas with their power grid. But then there can be huge government failure too providing these services like with what happened to the water system in Flint, MI. I’m not really educated on either of these so it’s possible I’m totally misrepresenting these. And I’m not claiming that there isn’t waste, abuse and corruption in government either. At the end of the day, public and private entities are run by people. But anyway, thanks for indulging my stream of consciousness.