Bush Sr. and Jr. are breathing a sign of relief!

You would do well to either sign up for an instance relating to your interests

Is that essential, though? As long as everybody is federated, it shouldn’t matter, except maybe it will take longer to see some posts.

Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It’s almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.

Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.

Mastodon:

Pick a Mastodon instance.

Open it in your web browser, follow the prompts to sign up.

Search for people you want to follow, and add them. Maybe search for subject matter that interests you, and follow people who post about that.

PixelFed:

Pick a PixelFed instance.

Open it in your web browser, follow the prompts to sign up.

Search for people you want to follow, and add them. Maybe search for subject matter that interests you, and follow people who post about that.

Clearly having too much money doesn’t buy happiness

I don’t think that has been demonstrated. Are the super-rich, on balance, the same happiness compared to the merely middle-class?

It’s also important to account for inflation and other cost of living increases when considering household income.

Yes, I probably should have stated that these were non-adjusted values. This particular 20/20 story was probably in the mid-90s or so, so $30K bought more than it does now.

I remember back in the 90s John Stossel did a piece on money and happiness, and he complained that surveys show that happiness stops increasing somewhere around 60-80K per year income, so clearly money does not buy happiness.

Median household income at the time was about $30K per year.

Of course, how this would actually work:

Workers: “What do we get?”

AR: “Well, half of you are fired, the other half keep working just as hard.”

<later>

AR: “What’s with the guillotine?”

Workers: “We’re acting in our rational self-interest.”

AR: “I see.”

AR: <to the fired workers> “They’re the reason you can’t get a job. If they didn’t form a UNION to keep you OUT, you’d be doing just fine! And I can’t fire THEM, thanks to the UNION.”

AR: <to the employed workers> “Well, I’d love to give you more time off, but I can’t, because those MOOCHERS over there are freeloading on the system, and I gotta pay outrageous taxes for their welfare because THEY DON’T WORK.”

Media: “Let’s talk to two experts in the labor field.”

Expert 1: “Oh, the problem is definitely abusive, bloated unions and exclusive contracts.”

Expert 2: “Oh, the problem is definitely freeloading welfare queens.”

Workers: <try to push each other into the guillotine>

AR: Flies away in her golden private jet, “MUHAHAHAHAHA!”

I can only hear this in Professor Farnsworth’s voice.

They are referencing an old Australian sketch comedy piece about an oil tanker.

kbin is a different code base than Lemmy and doesn’t support the same API. At least not yet. But they use the same ActivityPub protocols and so can communicate with each other, and with other Fediverse applications.

The good news is that you can subscribe to communities on kbin servers via Lemmy. And once they’re in a Lemmy instance you can use Lemmy apps.