Shareholders own the company. Their private ownership is only “public” in that they can sell off their share, to anyone.

It’s a joint-stock company. Of course that’s capitalism. Jesus fucking Christ.

Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.

The grapes of wrath aren’t usually so literal.

Is that Alan Davies?

Windows 95 legitimately had better UI than that “Material” bullshit, via relief shading conveyed through four fucking colors. The hierarchy of elements is instantly visible. Buttons even popped in and out when clicked. There’s just no excuse for how minimalism fetishists have taken over user experience.

Dismissive dickwad behavior is good, actually - if you’re dismissing Nazis. Or anyone else who deserves a blunt rejection. It is fine and valid to deny people civility, when their rhetoric is inherently abusive. Respect and patience have limits.

Swearing at people absofuckinglutely has its place in online discourse. If not for the assholes themselves - then for the people they’re trying to fool.

Anyway.

Discworld has a few parallel threads. Release order starts with The Colour Of Magic, which is fun and short, but not exactly top-notch material. See explanatory flowchart. Those first few novels have a real Season One vibe.

The traditional introduction seems to be whichever book catches your eye. Or whichever you happened to find first, if you’d heard good things about the series. That’s how I wound up reading Ringworld by Larry Niven, because cultivating your interests in the 90s was a much fuzzier experience.

Apropos of little - how long ago did Sean Hannity say he’d get waterboarded?

And those are the only two options.

Jevon’s paradox says this might not help. If shipping gets faster, cheaper, and cleaner, because ships get free power on top of their engines - are we likely to do less of it?

Good old ethical Microsoft.

Honestly I miss reddit circa 2015. Obviously before The Idiot and half the world lurching toward fascism - but also back when “fuck off, Nazi” was treated better than being a goddamn Nazi.

The proliferation of “civility” is poisonous to online discourse. It is always the wrong metric. Trolls love being polite monsters. r/Politics even went a step further and demanded all opinions be taken in good faith. Do those idiots know what trolling is? Do they not understand bad faith… as a concept? It only works because people mistake it for good faith. Demanding everyone do that is a gift to trolls.

Moderation requires common-sense identification of who’s being an asshole. It’s never about no-no words. If a script could handle the job, we would let it.

Lemmy has far too many communities with rules going ‘never be rude to anyone ever!!!’ and then zero enforcement when someone calls you a cunt for gently correcting their grammar. That is the worst of both worlds. Anyone sincerely trying is going to hold back from just dealing with assholes appropriately, like an adult, but those people are then left with no recourse against pointlessly toxic shitheads. I don’t want a screaming match. I want words to matter.

Also if you enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett has a similar deep snark. Discworld’s a whole mess of books but you can kinda jump in anywhere. I recommend Guards! Guards! or Going Postal. He did Good Omens with baby Neal Gaiman, and they’d write chapters separately, then throw out every joke they’d bought thought of.

It is a right bitch that the reason to leave is 100% the bastards in charge. The community was fine. (Okay, giant asterisks all over that, but you know what I mean. The community was not the cause for masses walking away with a sea of middle fingers lit by burning bridges.)

I’m not here because it’s better. I’m here because fuck Spez. And fuck enshittification. Fifteen years and these greedy incompetents made it impossible to come back without feeling like betrayal. The only reason I’m not deleting anything is that I don’t do that shit. Nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.

Elmo did us the favor of turning his stolen harassment engine into an all-stick-no-carrot experience in a fucking hurry.

Googling around suggests it’s a global setting. Having recently used an Xfce version that didn’t want to super+arrow, maximize-vertical is an okay tool, but outside of super-duper-widescreen, it’s not what I’d ever want by default.

Possibly demonstrating ductility? Classier than chewing on the damn thing.

Microsoft marketing hasn’t gotten any better about song choices. A few years ago their ads had soft bleep-bloop tunes and “go baby, go baby, yeah we’re right behind you.”

The song is “Cherry Lips,” by Garbage. It’s the twink anthem.

And it’s still not as tone-deaf as whichever Bill Hicks target picked out “hey ho let’s go” from the god-damned “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

Mom’s gonna fix it all soon.

What’s the behavior when you double-click the title bar?

There’s only so many corners.

If the schools were built for 80-degree highs, two months out of the school year… probably not.

Oil companies buy votes.

Climate activists can’t.