You can’t have this both ways.

When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…

“That’s weather not climate!”

When there’s a wildfire somewhere…

“That’s global warming!”

We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.

If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.

The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.

Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.

They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.

Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.

Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.

On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.

The main subs or sublemmies or whatever they’re called on here have enough users that it’s a perfect alternative to Reddit.

Little niche subreddits, like my favorite gaybros and askgaybros, just a few dozen users and I’m going back to Reddit for that.

Are they supporting it so that they can gimp it?

We support the right to repair! Starting now all keycaps will be replaceable. Anything on the motherboard is off limits though or the display or the battery or the ports or the camera.

Is there anything more disgusting than carpeted areas around a tub or toilet?

Like what the fuck were they thinking?

All of the other 70s and '80s trends - like the really dark wood paneling, ugly orange colors, that’s just aesthetics. Maybe we’ll go back to liking wood paneling at some point.

Carpet in a bathroom is not aesthetics or fashion It is fucking disgusting and unsanitary.

I thought after 2008 that we had finally gotten over our large car addiction.

They’re so addicted to SUVs now that Ford doesn’t even make a car other than the Mustang. Their entire lineup is SUVs.

If they weren’t paid there would just be way more sponsorship deals and ad reads.

YouTube has some competitors…

Twitch - Not for general purpose video uploads and sort of stingy with how much you can upload. Twitch only saves highlights and YouTube saves everything you’ve ever uploaded.

Tiktok - Chinese spyware. Every video is vertical. Every video has stupid songs playing in the background and that TikTok logo. Not really for long form videos or anything serious.

Vimeo - You pay them to upload your video.

I’m glad they stopped recommending things to me with my history off. I just want to see my subscriptions I don’t want to see what the algorithm thinks I want to see.

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Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.

About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.

The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.

Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.

If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we’re in a depression.

The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.

When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.

Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.

The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?

What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.

Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.

Here are the subs I used to go to…

• Askgaybros - Doesn’t exist on the fediverse
• Gaybros - exists but barely gets one post per day
• Politics - I’m banned because of my username, but plenty of subscribers. Interestingly I can’t figure out how to contact a moderator to get unbanned. The information page doesn’t list who the moderators are. I had a similarly “offensive” name on Reddit for a decade and never got banned from r/politics
• askreddit - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
• Android - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
• Linux - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
• Economics - maybe a post or two a day

When I go back to Reddit, on desktop, all of those are operating as they normally do, with no perceptible change on the amount of posts.

There’s two problems…

1. There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)

2. Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn’t matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don’t give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.

We can’t incentivize people to change their behavior because no one is going to deliberately lower their quality of life.

What politician is going to win on a platform of…

Let’s make air travel so expensive that normal people can no longer regularly fly!

Vote for me I’m going to double your electricity bill!

You know that big SUV you love that is entirely impractical but you just like it because of how big it is… If you vote for me I’ll make gas $7 a gallon so that you can’t afford to have a giant SUV anymore.

You know how you like to eat your Taco Bell nachos in your car with a plastic spork… If you vote for me I’ll replace the plastic spork with a cornstarch spork that starts to melt when you use it.

The only thing that is going to save us is technology. Like air travel being fueled by biofuels, electricity costs kept somewhat normal by building new nuclear generation, giant SUVs being powered by batteries charged by nuclear/renewable energy, actually recycling the plastic spork.

Now that you’re pretty wealthy has your family decided to become your best buddy now?

I’d be willing to bet that 80% of the people that have a very intense emotional reaction to the small town song live in the suburbs less than 20 to 30 minutes away from whatever city they work in.

Actual small towns like that have less than a couple thousand people suck ass. There’s nothing to do there and no jobs and that’s why people leave.

Why would you not be super excited for this?

This literally extends coverage to the entire world. Movies will have to come up with a another excuse then - oh I have no signal.

When you’re hiking that trail in the middle of nowhere and you slip and break your leg you can just point your phone to the sky and get help.

Google Podcasts syncs to the browser, has playback speed control, and automatic silence skipping.