Exactly.

Also far, far more often than not, when someone talks about "corrupt banking systems" they're about two steps away from quoting The Protocols.

It's all Libertarian/anarcho-captialist pablum, pushed by people who think society was a bad idea

"Question every narrative, but don't question these things. Don't show bias, but here are your biases." These chuds don't even hear themselves. They just want to see Arya(n) ramble on about great replacement theory or trans women in bathrooms. They don't think their bile is hate speech because they think they're on the side of "facts" and everyone else is an idiot who refuses to see reality. It's giving strong "I'm not a bigot, "<" minority ">" really is like that. It's science" vibes.

People have been using country TLDs as cute URLs for years, and somehow it almost always ends up as a problem, or it furthers harms against the countries who own the TLDs (.io for example). Sure .tv or .io or .af sound fun, (anyone remember del.icio.us?) but it's just not worth it.

Horrific painful death from liver failure when the books lead people to eat the wrong mushrooms

Destruction of ecosystems by people unfamiliar with how to responsibly forage

Flooding of wrong and plagiarized information, drowning out experts and actual real, correct information

There's literally no positive side of this. At all.

Whenever I see replies like this I read either

"I have no ability to think through, or no interest in considering, the ramifications or evaluating risks before evangelizing a piece of tech"

or

"I'm too selfish to consider anyone else but myself"

As for Brendan’s political affiliations, most users couldn’t care less. He might as well be a furry but if the product is good, it is good. Stop acting like you’re sure all the things you use throughout the day aren’t made by people with doubtful leanings.

1. People do care about Eich's beliefs, or this discussion wouldn't even be happening.

2. There's nothing wrong with being a furry, and trying to compare it as though it's equivalent or worse than being a shitbag bigot is bullshit.

3. If you know that the people who run a company are bigots and you continue to use their products and services, you are giving your explicit approval to who they are and what they do. "if the product is good, it is good" absolutely fucking not. Goods and services don't exist in a vacuum.

"Our product is so bad, WE won't even use it."

Firstly, there's no technological reason for this. It's all rent-seeking bullshit. But the thing is, there's no version of Office that this point that works without a subscription, which also assumes you're probably always online, so it's honestly moot anyway.

It's so tiresome. Big tech really doesn't want people to run, own, or operate their own systems independently.

Yeah, cable was and is really awful. The amount of ads makes it literally unwatchable. And the shitty thing is that when cable TV was first introduced, the whole idea was that there wouldn't be ads like broadcast because you were paying for it. And then they moved the goalposts. Something that Hulu in particular was very guilty of. In the beginning, only the free-tier had ads. And there was one paid tier with no ads. Then that started showing ads, and they created a higher paid tier with no ads.

To me, one of the best things about streaming was timeshifting. You didn't have to wait for Sunday at 9:00pm to watch a show, and maybe miss it, or have to DVR it, and maybe the recording didn't work. Or whatever. You didn't have to schedule your time around TV. You could watch what you wanted, when you wanted. And now that's gone too, with weekly releases of shows, or half a season now, and the other half a month later, and so on. They're bringing back scheduled TV and it's fucking bullshit.

Another promise was that we'd be able to basically have access to every tv show or film, and that evaporated very quickly when all the studios decided they wanted to gatekeep everything so they could charge even more for it, and then now we have them disappearing so many things that have been out there just because they don't want to pay royalties to anyone involved.

So much culture is being lost because of greedy fucking execs who want to use the things you enjoy as an extortion tool. Going back to cable isn't the answer. It's a failed model and needs to die. But we need a massive overhaul of the streaming scene to figure this out. Because right now, it's so much worse that what came before.

Any job that can be WFH should be WFH.

Any job that can't be WFH that requires sitting at a desk all day should give each person an individual office. The open office plan has been an absolute nightmare, and only benefits micromanagers. It's a productivity disaster, and makes for a miserable experience, and only exists for the sake of surveillance. However, I doubt there are many jobs that can't be WFH that require such a situation.

The real issue here is an intentional mis-framing, imo. Why must people get back to a traditional office setting? The only people who want this are employers who think that Butts In Seats = Productivity, and the only way to ensure it is to intensely surveil your employees. I also don't give two shits if some real estate company goes bankrupt because business tenants stop renting their properties. Boo fucking hoo.

I've been working for a remote-first company now for over a year, and I won't ever got back to working in an office. There is literally nothing about what I do that needs me to be physically present in any specific place. The problem isn't "productivity" or "collaboration", the problem is entirely based around a work culture that is fundamentally punitive, puritanical, and antithetical to life balance.

We have destroyed our public spaces, removed places for people to gather, made it illegal for youth to be unaccompanied in many public places, created helicopter parents and insufferable busybodies that call the police if a child so much as wanders outside the home, and have made any kind of IRL socialization either impossible or extremely difficult.

We have influencers and brands flooding social media to show you how worthless you are and how you need to look better, act different, dress this way or that. It creates a sense of anxiety, self-loathing, and hopelessness.

Especially if you're young, you look around at the state of the world and wonder what fucking hope you have for any kind of future: loans for college that will be a boat anchor around your neck for basically the rest of your life, a climate catastrophe in progress, a fascist coup in progress, the absolute impossibility of home ownership, a job market that's being torn apart by grifters, and rising inflation and costs of living without any increase in salaries.

The major social platforms are all dominated by algorithmically generated "content" that feeds on rage-baiting. Outside of YouTube, none of the platforms allow for any kind of long-form posts, so you're limited in what you can say on a given topic, so you reduce it to the most distilled and condensed version. Something is mildly upsetting? Well, 280 characters isn't enough for nuance, so rage-posting it is. And the more inflammatory, the more engagement it gets, which gets it in front of even more eyeballs.

YouTube actively pushes users down the alt-right rabbit hole.

So you're already isolated, alone, separated from any kind of sense of community, and you try to find a replacement in social media. But it's not the same. You're already feeling hopeless about the world and the future. And this algorithm you've been swallowed by is fed by, and rewards, the worst impulses.

It's not a "kids these days are so addicted to their phones these days and it's making them depressed or violent" kind of issue. It's an interconnected web of shit that's feeding back and forth making everything worse. We've made a fucking awful world, and then the place where people are taking refuge is exacerbating all of it.

It's not an issue, it's an intentional and important feature.

Don't want to be defederated? Don't let chuds and bigots on your instance. It's pretty simple.