Also Sweden’s population is about the size of Los Angeles county. Every time I see Scandinavia held up as something to aspire to folks should remember how small and historically homogenous these countries are.
Comparing the US to the EU as a whole is a much more accurate way to look at things, with us states being akin to eu member countries.
I’ve come to realize most of the privacy hawk arguments are based on imagined risks, and the average privacy enthusiast is an ideologically driven idealist. What is the end goal beyond pumping one’s ego?
Especially internet privacy hawks are the worst. It just doesn’t really matter at all. Unless you are all cash, off the grid, no phone or bank account etc, you will leave a huge trail. Instagram figuring out I like basketball is the least of my worries.
I hate to be the akshully guy but the big problem isn’t economics but usage. We can’t store electricity at any kind of meaningful scale so generation needs to be balanced to meet demand. Unused excess power needs to go somewhere, hence the negative prices (the market way of saying, “please somebody take this electricity it’s doing more harm than good on the grid”).
The weird thing is rebellious shock-jock type folks like this would have rebelled against conservatives a generation ago, but these days “the system” is perceived as the left. Something to keep in mind when trying to make sense of the world.
People here trying to make this about masking bad business decisions etc don’t live in Oakland. I live here, it’s really bad right now.
I was joking with a friend that a lot of Oakland feels like a bad 80s dystopia film…like you know those scenes with hobos warming themselves around a burning oil drum, stripped and burned out cars everywhere, piles of trash, drug addicts and prostitutes wandering around, etc? That’s literally real life in a large part of east Oakland. Like I’ve swear to god seen a half dozen girls at one intersection twerking in the middle of the street on the yellow lines, and one block over is a 5 block long encampment (16th and international/ 12th st).
Like this shit is on Google street view! It’s not hard to find. Follow this road all the way down to Fruitvale ave, it’s like a solid mile of a 3rd world refugee camp.
It’s noble to work on addressing systemic inequities that lead to poverty and seeing crime as an option. At the same time, nobody who is an active criminal today is going to stop if you offer them a job at fedex.
Everyone from the Oakland NAACP to small business owners to individual victims (the majority of which are BIPOC) are calling on Oakland to get things under control. Enforcement is needed today, investment is needed for tomorrow. It’s not an either/or situation.
It’s also worth highlighting that not everyone who grows up disadvantaged turns to crime. In fact, the huge majority do not. These white guilt arguments are so pejorative and self centered.
In Oakland there are lots of organized burglary and robbery gangs. It would almost be better if it was just crackheads as that feels easier to solve for in a sense, but here it’s definitely people with the sober intention to victimize others.
I live in Oakland, the sharp rise in crime over the past 2 years is very real. Doesn’t excuse their lawsuit but huge numbers of businesses are being regularly broken into resulting in many closures.
I even went to the trouble of putting mine in a mini snes style case. Still have it ready to go…in the garage 😅
Haha yes! People assume data brokers “know” a lot about a person, but really it’s fuzzy signals. It is far from a crystal ball or a perfect record of every website you’ve ever visited, etc…
I’ve kind of come full circle on all this to where I no longer care. The slippery slope arguments are largely hypothetical imo…Google knows some stuff about me and attempts to show me ads, the vast majority of which I block, so what?
I pay taxes, have a social security number, my bank and credit card companies know my purchase history, the credit bureaus know my mortgage payment and lender, etc…
The myth of an off the grid life is exactly that, a myth. And what does it achieve for you other than some vague sense of idealistic pride?
Google provides tremendous utility to the world essentially for free; its search engine, maps, mail client apps, browser, etc. are tools billions of people use every day. How do they maintain a global network of data centers and localize their products to hundreds of languages…none of that is free. If big companies want to give them money in an attempt at to get me to pay attention to them then so be it, let them finance it. Imagine if only those who could afford to pay could use these tools.
I still use the original sport band from 2015 on a 7th gen watch, and it fit the 4/5 gen before that. Unless the gold band was non removable from the watch I don’t see the issue.
Also the fact that this was never publicly available means these were gifts to celebs for PR, ain’t nobody losing any money on this.
+1
Tbh I felt Reddit was getting less interesting and more of a habit, Apollo was the last straw. Lemmy is small and a much less active, but more random. Prob good to reduce the mindless scrolling.
Sure, and an earache can be nothing or a symptom of a brain tumor. That’s the problem with a bunch of people self diagnosing based on WebMD or memes.
Show this comic to 100 people and almost all will think they’re in the blue zone.
This is like those ADHD memes which just list every one of life’s inconveniences or challenges as some kind of “symptom.”
Everyone has these feelings, it’s not a curse, it’s just life.
Does it save to the cloud so I can play on both?
I think we all underestimate how much smaller the internet was back then. Flickr, the premier photo sharing site back in the day, was acquired by yahoo for $25MM. Kevin rose of digg was famously on the cover of business week touting a $60MM valuation. In todays big business tech era those are small numbers even factoring for inflation.
Basically back then users were counted in millions and if the let’s say 5-10K power users and a 100k randos moved on that could kill a service. Today Reddit is too big to fail. It would take tens of millions of users in a mass exodus to make a dent.
Look at Twitter right now, which is about the fastest case of enshittification of the modern era. The weird trolls filled the power vacuum that proper power users left and it’s still plugging along. If something like this eventually happens to Reddit it’ll be more like Facebook, a very slow decline but even in its shell state boasting hundreds of millions of users.
I’ve never modded but have been on Reddit 15yrs 11mo as of the Apollo shutdown. At this point I’m in the 16yr club. It’s wild how badly they are acting toward mods.
Frankly I’m not a mod lover or hater, with the exception of AskHistory. It was so clear how the mods there truly made the community. Haters will say they had a heavy hand, but it kept the quality remarkably high.
I’m middle age so I’ve seen a full decade of forum shitposting and flamwars before Reddit even existed. The fact that Reddit can’t see the value of the community that build “their platform” is beyond tonedeaf, it’s just straight up arrogant.
I’m sure Reddit will stay far bigger than lemmy for a long time, but that’s fine. Maybe better. The old forums were microscopic by modern social media standards but in hindsight the conversations with active users were more real and not just some random username that might as well have been anon.
A or C
I feel reasonably confident that there are just as many languages spoken in just Los Angeles county, if there are any parallels to NYC:
https://untappedcities.com/2019/12/06/fun-maps-nyc-is-most-linguistically-diverse-urban-area-in-the-world/