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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I don’t want to “study” or empathize with magats.

    I want to belittle and (electorally) destroy them into irrelevance.

    I grew up in a magat household. They’re magats because they’re fucking morons. I solved the mystery for you - no additional study is required.

    I got in a debate once with my mom about the age of the Earth (of course she’s a young Earth creationist). I brought up the speed of light - we see things that are farther than 6000 light years, so the Earth has to be more than 6000 years old. Her rebuttal: “What if the sky is like an Etch-a-Sketch that God is holding up for us to see?” How do you reason with someone that believes something like that? Do you really think I if brought up stellar parallax or spectroscopy or stellar evolution that would change her mind?

    My grandma, I bought her an iPad 10 years ago so she could get on Facebook and watch YouTube and stuff. Big mistake! Now I have to hear stuff about how Hillary Clinton has been arrested and convicted by a military tribunal and is wearing an ankle bracelet and will be put in prison after the 2018 election. Adrenochrome. Comet Ping Pong. Democrats want to chop off elementary school age boys penises. Bamboo ballets. Mike Lindell. Ballots dumps. Obama controls everything. Porn in schools. Democrats are trying to make us eat bugs.

    Prior to the iPad I had probably heard her mention politics like less than a handful of times in my entire life.

    She wouldn’t get the COVID vaccine… Even though she’s 83 obese, arthritic, congestive heart failure, diabetic, and has had two previous heart attacks. Then she got COVID and almost died, was in the hospital for more than month, now on oxygen at home… STILL WON’T GET VACCINATED.

    These are not people that reason or think about anything. The only way to get them on our side would be a propaganda network to compete with Sinclair, Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Hannity, Neck, Levin, Shapiro, PragerU, Crowder, Savage, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Project Veritas, The Blaze, WND, Candace, Jordan Peterson, The Washington Times, etc… And then pump that down their YouTube and Facebook feeds. Unfortunately I don’t know any left wing billionaires that want to create competing institutions to these things.

    Not to mention the right wing message of simple solutions, zero thinking, and your prejudices are actually a good thing is hard to compete with.




  • 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.




  • 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.


  • MrFagtron9000@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlFirefox is the only way.
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    1 year ago

    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.


  • 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.




  • I had to log into my 84-year-old grandmother’s YouTube account and unsubscribe from a bunch of stuff, “Not interested” on a bunch of stuff, subscribed to more mainstream news sources… But it only works for a couple months.

    The problem is the algorithm that values viewing time over anything else.

    Watch a news clip from a real news source and then it recommends Fox News. Watch Fox News and then it recommends PragerU. Watch PragerU and then it recommends The Daily Wire. Watch that and then it recommends Steven Crowder. A couple years ago it would go even stupider than Crowder, she’d start getting those videos where it’s computer voice talking over stock footage about Hillary Clinton being arrested for being a demonic pedophile. Luckily most of those channels are banned at this point or at least the algorithm doesn’t recommend them.

    I’ve thought about putting her into restricted mode, but I think that would be too obvious that I’m manipulating the strings in the background.

    Then I thought she’s 84, she’s going to be dead in a few years, she doesn’t vote, does it really matter that she’s concerned about trans people trying to cut off little boy’s penises or thinks that Obama is wearing ankle monitor because he was arrested by the Trump administration or that aliens are visiting the Earth because she heard it on Joe Rogan?


  • This is such a fucking stupid argument to make.

    The reason airlines make x% of CO2 emissions is because people want to fly, they’re an airline, and there is no emissions free way to power a plane.

    The reason the plastic company makes x billions of plastic sporks every year is because I want a spoon to eat my Taco Bell Nachos in my car. They’re not making all the plastic pollution because they just hate the Earth.

    They’re not cartoon villains like in Captain Planet that pollute just to make pollution.