A feature that makes it easier for their users to migrate to a competitor? Blockchain Capital invests $15M in BlueSky. Insert that Anakin / Padme meme:
Anakin: Now that we’ve invested, let’s make that federation feature priority 0
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
Anakin:
Padme: As in highest priority, right?
tract
rap
various
Playing Red Dead Redemption makes me think that at one point they weren’t that expensive if you lived in a very rural area.
It was probably similar to cars today, where some people had expensive, fancy horses that they spent lots of money on, and other people had old clunkers that they got cheap and then rode until they died.
I get the impression that when people today talk about hoses being expensive, a lot of that expense is due to them living in a city. My guess is that if you already live on a working farm, adding one horse is not going to massively increase your expenses.
The purpose of an apostrophe is to warn people that there’s an S coming.
Fuck the poor, fuck the old, fuck the environment, fuck soldiers and veterans, fuck the sick, fuck food safety…
Agreed. Also, “Your body, my choice” is possibly meant as a threat, possibly meant as a taunt. But, what it definitely is: a statement of power. Asshole men are saying this because they think the landscape has shifted so much that they can now get away with it – and they’re probably right.
American police are already some of the biggest right-wing assholes. Who do you think they’re going to side with in a confrontation where a man says this to a woman? Even if legally a woman were 100% justified in responding with violence, in the real world where men have the power, and men are feeling even more powerful since Trump’s victory, being legally right isn’t enough.
He was very popular for a long time. He’s been PM under 3 US presidents so far: Obama (only for a few months), Trump (part 1), Biden, and will probably be in for part of Trump’s second term.
Like all leaders, people get tired of them. That’s especially true when there’s a global inflation crisis, and every local leader gets blamed as if it’s their fault.
I think he’s been… fine. There have been some minor scandals, but just the typical stuff where the government helps out politically connected companies. Other than that it’s extremely minor stuff like sticking his tongue out in a playful way in parliament, dressing in Indian traditional costumes on a visit to India, taking a vacation at a place owned by a rich friend. Some of the legislation he passed has been good, like legalizing marijuana, implementing a carbon tax, and a major infrastructure bill. Some has been stupid like the “online news” act that tried to get Facebook and Google to pay the major Canadian for-profit news companies for linking to their stuff… rather than addressing the actual issue of their monopolies.
I don’t think the Liberal party is particularly inspiring. OTOH, they’re so much better than the conservatives. But, because Trudeau reneged on his promise to get rid of First Past The Post elections, they’re going to be his downfall in the next election where the left-wing vote is going to split between the NDP and the Liberals, handing the Conservatives a big majority.
My mom is so stupid she’s a fucking hazard.
If there’s a club for that, I’m in it too.
I literally don’t understand how my mom gets through day-to-day life. It’s just a matter of time before her bank accounts are drained by a scammer because no matter how many times I try to explain it to her, she believes everything she sees online as long as it reinforces something she already believes. If it challenges her beliefs she ignores it.
She got an email that said she owed money to an internet service provider she doesn’t use, and hasn’t ever used. Obvious scam, right? She knows she doesn’t use them, but the email seemed “Truthy” so she was really worried that she owed them money. There’s no way to convince her that it’s a scam because even facts like “that’s not your ISP, you don’t and have never used that ISP” can’t penetrate.
She trusts memes more than family members who have degrees in something and are willing to patiently explain it to her. She spends a lot of money buying snake oil, or overpaying for things she can get essentially for free (i.e. buying bottled water because she’s afraid of fluorine in municipal water). This has made me realize what a huge amount of the world’s economy isn’t people buying things they need, or even things they want because it makes their lives better, it’s people buying things they don’t need because they’re afraid of something that isn’t real.
Anyhow, yeah, Trump won the idiot vote, and he’s going to make changes to the US that will increase the number of idiots. Things are going great.
Online? Yes.
In person to friends while chest bumping and hooting? Yes.
In person to a woman they don’t know in all seriousness, and not just to antagonize? I sure hope not.
What you see on TikTok are the most entertaining videos. I have no idea if they have to cut out 2% of the videos because they’re not entertaining, or 50% or 98%.
Viola?
It definitely looks like you are.
Someone in their late 40s is not a girl.
I’d really like to have 100 randomly chosen Trump voters in a room and interview them to find out how knowledgeable they are about Trump, about his policies, about his first term, about the criminal cases, etc.
My guess is that at least 90% of them are brainwashed. I’m sure there are some that are completely aware of his record and are either single issue voters who are voting only on abortion. Some may be multi-millionaires who are voting just for lower taxes and don’t care about anything else. But, anybody who voted for him because of inflation / the economy has no idea what they’re talking about. Inflation was a worldwide problem and Trump’s policies made / will make it worse. Anybody who voted for him because he’s going to “fix immigration” has no idea what they’re doing because his policies are incoherent and will never work. Anybody who voted for him because of Gaza is an absolute moron because he’s just going to encourage the genocide.
It’s amazing the stories that Americans tell themselves about the American Revolution. They pretend that the “founding fathers” were heroic idealists standing up for honorable values against an evil despotic regime. The truth is much more complicated.
A major goal of the 7 Years War was about controlling the colonies in the Americas. Had the French won those wars, the modern people of North America would probably speak French. Look at how many US places still have French names, and especially are named after the French king: Louisiana, Louisville, St. Louis, Mobile, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Detroit, Lafayette, Arkansas, Illinois, Calumet, Decatur, Boise, Montpelier, etc. But, the French lost the war, so the English took over all that territory. Fighting that war was incredibly expensive, but it was worth it for the English because they now controlled a whole new continent with all its resources. To pay for that war, they levied taxes. The English colonists in the US, who were largely the beneficiaries of that part of the war, decided they didn’t want to pay those taxes, so they rebelled. They got the benefit of a continent won for them by English armies, but without having to pay the bill for that fight. Now, again, it’s complicated. The English armies were integrated with the colonial armies. George Washington was initially an officer in the British army (and was part of starting the French and Indian wars, which became the 7-years-war). The US colonists were part of the force that fought against the French and their native allies.
Anyhow, it was complicated. But, the end result was that after a war that took place both in Europe and in the Americas, the British crown had a huge debt. I have no idea what proportion of that debt was due to the part of the war fought in Europe vs. the part of the war fought in the Americas, but overall there was a big debt and the English crown tried to tax whoever they could to pay for it.
Was the English king a tyrant? Sure. Did the Americans have fair representation in the English parliament? Probably not. But, their main reason for rebelling was the same one that is nearly always the cause of rebellions: the rebels are in an area that’s wealthy for some reason, and they don’t want to have to share that wealth with the rest of the country / empire. In fact, it was suspected that the colonists chose not to send representatives to the colonial assembly partially because they knew that if they did that it would undermine their “without representation” argument, and the real issue was that they simply didn’t want to pay taxes.
As for the English system being tyrannical, the reality is that it has been a very slow, gradual change from an absolute monarchy to a ceremonial one. The English crown is significantly less wealthy than Elon Musk, and arguably has a lot less influence on British politics than Musk does on American politics.
By the letter of the laws, the British system is still more classist and controlled by money than the American system. But, is that true if you look at the actual real way that power is used? It doesn’t seem like it to me.
We both know the government is never going to split them up
The American government isn’t going to. But, I do hold out hope for the EU. The EU already doesn’t like the US tech giants, and they’re much more driven by lobbying by European-based businesses, almost none of them on good terms with the US tech giants.
We’ve already seen what effect the GDPR had on the web, and it affects Americans even if the law doesn’t apply in the US. We’ve seen how Apple has had to design all its devices to use USB-C because of new EU rules. I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that the EU might require Mastodon-type rules for social networks, that you can leave to an instance that communicates with your old one, and that your followers and followees change when you move. Facebook would hate it, but Google (whose social network efforts all failed) wouldn’t really be affected, so they might push for it just to spite Facebook. Some of the other big American tech companies might actually like it. Like, Netflix might like to be able to graft a social network onto their video watching platform so that people could watch and talk about videos together.
With the Biden administration going out and Trump going in, I think the FTC is going to go back to being a corporate cheerleader, but I still have some hope for the EU.
The only reason Facebook was at all successful is that they made it easy to migrate over from MySpace.
Before Facebook people weren’t locked into their social networks. In the early days of BBSes you were mostly on your local BBS, but you could sometimes communicate with another BBS if your BBS was part of FidoNet. When instant messengers like ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc. became popular, it was common to use a unified program that logged into all of them at once. But, already there was corporate consolidation. BBSes were often run by people out of their own homes, or at least by hobbyists. The early messengers were all commercial products.
Then there were the early social media websites: SixDegrees.com, Classmates.com, Friendster, (LinkedIn), MySpace, Orkut, and in 2004 Facebook. At first Facebook was closed to anybody who wasn’t a US university student. You even had to have an email address from a US university to register. But, when they wanted to grow, they made it easy to migrate from other sites, especially MySpace. They released a tool that allowed you to basically stay in touch with your MySpace friends from Facebook, but not the other way around. That slowly drained people away from MySpace until it eventually collapsed. These days, thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, if you tried to release a tool that allowed people to migrate away from Facebook, you’d be nuked from orbit.
Now, every social media site is a walled garden protected by a moat and an electric fence. Every one is owned by companies worth more than $1b. People can’t leave because the FOMO is too strong, but they don’t want to stay because the sites are pure shit. You see that especially with Twitter. It is absolute shit since Musk took over, but many people feel like they can’t leave. And, when people do leave, do they go to Mastodon, which isn’t owned by a corporation? Nope, they mostly go to Threads, owned by Meta, or Bluesky, owned by a lot of the same people behind Twitter.
Unless the governments of the world step in and either break up the tech giants, or require that they are interoperable, I don’t know how we back out of this shitty situation.
Sure, because everyone who stayed home was a democrat. Every Republican voted.
Voting booths are secret places where people can admit how they really feel without feeling judged. Trump won the popular vote because he appealed to a lot of people who didn’t wear MAGA hats, or walk around in garbage bags.
The sad thing is that this isn’t really a shock to the rest of the world. There’s a reason why, for decades, Americans going on backpacking trips have put Canadian flags on their gear.
The only saving grace here is that it might not be that most Americans are cruel, racist, sexist, classist, etc. It might just be that they’re incredibly dumb. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews of Trump supporters and the vast majority are idiots. They believe in crazy conspiracies. They say they love Trump’s policies then can’t name any of them. They can’t accept that he actually legitimately lost all his legal cases. They regurgitate things they’ve heard, but clearly haven’t even spent a second thinking about, because they go blank as soon as they’re asked to elaborate on anything.
And, if the problem is really that they’re morons, it may not be their fault. For some reason, the US obsession with free speech and free markets means that Internet companies can keep feeding people bullshit that makes them angry, which keeps them engaged, which keeps the ad dollars flowing. US TV networks can tell absurd lies under the guise of news, and they’re apparently immune from being sued for doing it. “Concerned parents” funded by lobbying groups can fuck up the education system so that kids never learn anything that might make them feel bad. The US is allowed to have a government funded state media network that delivers factual video, audio and written news and information around the world. But, most Americans have never heard of it because it’s not allowed to compete with the for-profit media in the country itself.
I dunno, maybe the world can save the US. The fact is, Europe does occasionally have strong influence in the US. Americans have to deal with cookie banners because of a GDPR law that doesn’t apply in the US. Maybe if the EU took on the US tech monopolies it would actually affect the way Americans are brainwashed. But, unfortunately, I have serious doubts about whether the US can dig itself out of the hole it’s in. Right now it looks like the hole is just getting deeper and deeper.
It’s worse than that.
https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476797192400901
Dorsey’s already out, the people running the project are from the TESCREAL gang.