One of these things is not like the others.

I needed that. <3

You know what seems like a really good idea when we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions? A bunch of new satellite networks. We could get, like, one of the least trustworthy people on Earth to launch thousands of the things and then get everyone else to launch their own because he can’t be trusted. Literally just blot out the sun with them. No biggie.

There is a world of difference between being excluded from spaces where you’re marginalized (such as society on the whole) and creating spaces where you aren’t marginalized. Does that make sense?

Cool, another paywall.

I miss the old Internet.

I mean, there is. DMCA essentially protects content hosts from copyright claims. When they get a DMCA notice, they remove the material and inform the user whose material is removed. If they want to contest it, they can submit a counter notice denying the claim and basically saying “take me to court then”, with their contact info so a suit can be filed. At this point, if nothing is filed in a two week period, the host is free to consider the initial takedown notice void.

Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.

Honestly? Good.

I don’t really see this as a free speech issue. TikTok isn’t being banned because of the kind of speech that’s on there, it’s being banned because it’s a predatory app created as a means of soft power by a hostile foreign nation. Does that mean we should also shut down Twitter? Yeah. Probably.

This isn’t some newspaper with dissenting opinions, is a foreign intelligence operation that simultaneously interferes with the normal operation of our democracy, puts our citizens in danger, massively inflates narcissism, and collects our user data to hand to a country that literally is actively spying on us.

Frankly, I’d be okay with tossing any similar social media with obfuscated engagement algorithms anyway. Make YouTube and Facebook bring all that shit above board while we’re at it. All this is is corporate regulation, and I fully support it. Fuck TikTok.

It’s good to hear that soon the NHS will be capable of launching cyber attacks again.

It astounds me that people legitimately assume that the other animals on this planet don’t feel pain. It seems incredibly obvious to me that they would, or that we should at least be assuming they would.

Yeah, buddy. I lost a bitcoin on an old hard drive too. That’s like, where most bitcoin are. So what?

That’s like saying that you thought about investing in Apple in 1995 but forgot to actually call a broker. Nobody cares that someone gave you a free bitcoin when they first came out.

How would the industry even under-staff further in the first place? They seem to try to run on skeleton crews wherever they can as is.

The economy literally is a mess. It’s not ‘vibes’, it’s the resources available to the average working American versus the costs they’re facing.

The reason there’s a disconnect is that the economic measures are all designed by and geared toward the owning class. Wages are still stagnating, rent is still skyrocketing, and food still costs an arm and a leg. Energy bills are still ridiculous and increasingly hot summers means more air conditioning. Chasing after quarterly profits means a constant diminishment of value for consumers. We can’t even get 24 hour egg mcmuffins anymore.

Maybe boomer retirees are confusing the math more than it would be otherwise? But what’s broken here isn’t people’s perception of an economy that’s good actually, it’s the measures of an economy that involves extreme (and growing) wealth inequality.

I quit eating meat for a year once and it was pretty shit for my mental health. I do try to avoid the worst of factory farming as much as I can, though. Organic eggs (in my state regulations on organic eggs include a number of anti-cruelty measures), minimal chicken to reduce the death to meat quantity ratio, things like that. But also, I personally don’t feel as though the suffering inflicted on insect populations or rodent populations, or the damages of large scale farming, or the cruelty involved in transporting bees for pollenation are particularly okay either. I’m not really sure there’s such a thing as effective veganism in modern society unless you’re growing your own food at home, and I don’t have the energy, financial security, or access to land for that.

Nearly every product we consume leads to suffering and destruction. I don’t think being short of the point where you’re willing to radically change your lifestyle means I should deny that, though, even if all my spoons tend to be spent on shit like dragging myself out of bed and ensuring air quality that triggers my asthma and allergies as little as possible.

Humans are a mess. There’s a substantial cost in physical and psychological resources and energy to dwindling the impact of that mess, but there’s very little cost to at least acknowledging it and advocating for growing as a species.

Whether this is good or terrible honestly kind of depends on how they define social media. Is discord social media? Are forums? Is Reddit?

Arguably nobody really benefits from exposing children to feeds full of toxic and angry adults, but that doesn’t mean no communities should allow children. Like, there’s nothing wrong with kids dipping their toes into the Internet and learning and growing from it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing to just hand them the keys to the worst elements.

Also like, I prefer adult communities over all age communities by a long shot.

This is extremely dependent on which games you’re playing and how you’re playing them. Public servers or matchmaking seem to generally be pretty bad for making connections, because they tend not to require as much social interaction and when they do it’s of the throw-away variety. Raiding and PVP in MMOs, when it’s difficult enough, tends to lead to greater connection-building because you want to actually be able to rely on your teammates. For me, though, the greatest games for building community tend to be sandbox games on private RP servers.

The roleplaying community for any given game tends to be substantially smaller than the community at large. It’s a fairly small pool where you see the same people over and over again. There are new faces too, but you’ll usually recognize folks if you’ve been around for a few years. If I check out a new DayZ server or a new Conan server, I will invariably run into people I’ve met time and time again. These communities have a shared history spanning years and dozens of servers, and they tend to bubble out into hundreds of small discord servers for in-game groups and general friend groups that form. Roleplay is all about communication, so you don’t really have that same distance that you do when the game is just about playing out a game loop over and over again. To play the game is to make friends, whether your characters are allied or are enemies.

There’s toxicity, to be sure, and private servers introduce a whole new layer of drama with nepotism and staff abuse, but those problems actually have solutions other than turning off chat or hoping the developers do something. Most servers have some form of whitelisting process and will actively ban problem users, or may even have some form of mediation process. If you don’t like how a server is run, you can get together a group of friends, rent a VPS or a dedi, and host a new server yourselves. It happens over and over again. Arguably most new RP servers come about because somebody didn’t like something about some previous RP server they were playing on. This leads not just to new servers, but to people developing new skill sets. It gives people a reason to develop new social and leadership skills, to expand their artistic abilities, and to develop new technical prowess. I know quite a few people, myself included, who got back into making art or got into modding, hosting, or development because they wanted to make something different for the community; to show people how things could be.

For me, roleplay has been life-transforming. It’s helped me work my way through a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see up close as easily if I were only seeing it through the context of my own real life. It’s given me artistic drive that I didn’t have before. And perhaps most vitally, it’s gotten me invested in community and led to meaningful friendships in a time where I haven’t really been super enthusiastic about getting out of the house in my free time. In an era where people are increasingly atomized, I’ve found it to be a great way to meet people that I care about.

It honestly blows my World of Warcraft raiding and PVP days completely out of the water. If you’re looking for community in video games, I definitely recommend getting invested in some RP. Immerse yourself and get wrapped up in some stories. Join some groups; make some friends. It’s a lot more interesting than toxic public lobbies full of people who don’t care about one another or any sense of community.

I’m not vegan, but I find it absolutely wild that anyone thinks being kind of annoying sometimes comes anywhere near the level of moral or ethical bankruptcy involved in being complicit in the mass torture of animals for the sake of convenience. Like, okay, yeah, it’s not like we have the option of just deciding on behalf of powerful capitalists to just end factory farming. But deciding to at least try not to participate in it by changing your diet is at least something.

Don’t worry about being a “good vegan” if that means having to tiptoe around the fact that the rest of us fuel immense suffering both monetarily and through social normalization. You’re trying, and that’s great.

How, exactly? What are they going to be able to do to save them from all of their produce rotting in their fields as it goes unharvested? That’s not really something you can fix with a bit of a bail-out. Even if they just hand them buckets of cash, they’re going to have a food shortage to contend with.

It’s generally easier to destroy something than to create something, and it’s easier to consolidate power than to take it when you don’t have it. Also the left tends to be principled, while the right tends to be focused on gaining and keeping power. There are things conservatives would happily do that are strategically valuable that we typically just straight up wouldn’t even if it meant a win.

If you want to build up social services and fight for the rights and well-being of common people, you have to be able to make pretty broad coalitions while also figuring out how to actually make things better and convincing people that you know what you’re doing. If you want to win power without caring about anyone else, all you have to do is ally yourself with those who already have power and not speak up when they hurt others.

The flip side, fortunately, is that eventually all that self-serving power ends up being used to elevate smaller and smaller groups of people as it’s consolidated. As resources and influence collect at the top, more and more people suffer as they’re left behind. Eventually the number of people harmed has sometimes been enough that it naturally begins to form the kind of broad coalitions needed to overthrow the most obvious sources of corruption and suffering, but keeping those coalitions once the immediate danger is over is another matter entirely.

It certainly doesn’t help that authoritarians seem to have gotten better at disruption and disinformation. Polarizing society in the way that we see with bot farms run by Russian and Chinese intelligence in the past few years means most of their work can be done without much actual precision. Get everybody angry and get them to disagree on what’s going on in the world and they stand a lot less of a chance of coming together to oppose entrenched power structures.

There’s still a clock on the whole thing, because they’re making the situation more dangerous for themselves by increasing instability, and eventually it’ll probably bite them in the ass. But, will it happen by the time the current crop of powerful authoritarians are dead? Eh… Maybe? Who knows?

Unfortunately we also have a clock running as a species, and if we don’t figure out how to get around these atomizing disinformation systems and start to dismantle all this consolidated authoritarian power (both in governments and economically), we may not have an opportunity to wait until we reach a critical mass of suffering.

Also, like, it would really suck to have to live through the process of getting there anyway.

The best we can hope for, as far as I can tell, is some alternate means of wide-spread awareness. Some kind of movement in art or music might be helpful, if it can be extricated from the existing economic and social power structures. Basically, something like what the counter-culture was trying to do in the 60s, or what punks were doing coming up a little closer on the turn of the century.

The power of those coalitions was pretty temporary, though, and both seem to have been co-opted by people who, once again, just wanted to consolidate power for their own ends. The extent of their impact is debatable, but I have a feeling we need something substantially bigger than either of those movements.

You just need more monitors. Then you can let YouTube do its thing without really paying much attention to it and get on with your life on the other 2 or 3 screens.

I would be stunned if the DoJ knows the difference between Chrome and Chromium.