::: spoiler I mean this is basically inevitable. We know that capitalism doesn't actually seek the lowest price as its evangelists usually preach, but the highest - and so there is no way that streaming will not balloon over time to a price comparable to the cable TV plans of the past. 🏴☠️ yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me 🏴☠️ :::
uralsolo [he/him]
0 Post – 73 Comments
Joined 12 months ago
I think this is a fundamental property of social media. It's a basic catch-22 - you need new users to attract new users. Sometimes a seismic shift will occur like the migration from MySpace or Digg, but neither of those websites were as big as any of the big social media sites are now, so the gravity well wasn't nearly as strong.
People will just normalize the new anti-user features and get used to them.
Came to Hexbear because the CTH subreddit was kill and I really hate trying to follow a super active Discord, then TC69 lead the purge of the rightists and it became so good that basically no other website scratches my social media itch anymore. Reddit's still useful since there's so much archived content on places like /r/linux but that's the only reason I go there anymore, Lemmy as a whole seems pretty cool though.
As a Hexbear user, I personally get paychecks from both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping for every comment. It's a pretty sweet gig ngl.
Land enclosure. Screwed everything up for everyone stg
Microtransactions in video games. Remember when everyone got pissed over horse armor?
Trading Card Games. The whole trading card thing is about psychologically manipulating you into buying shit you don't need, shoulda been stamped out as soon as cigarette companies started doing it, but if you think about it the ideal capitalist institution sells you literally nothing and selling people heavy paper with little pictures on it is damn close to that ideal.
Software. Should be free, isn't. Blame Bill Gates.
Advertising. We all know about propaganda (even though we might disagree on what is and isn't propaganda at times) and we all know it's bad, but we literally let rich people propagandize us every single day in every single orifice.
How many countries has China invaded or bombed from afar in the last forty years? How do China's loan conditions compare to those of the World Bank and IMF? The notion that they're "colonizing" anyone is completely daffy - they have long-running border disputes with some of their neighbors and a long-running leadership dispute with what remains of the previous government of China, those are completely different types of conflict.
As for Russia and Israel, the difference is that the people in the Donbas who seceded from Ukraine back in 2014 weren't placed there to displace Ukrainians as a Russian colonial project. They're the same people who lived in Donbas going back to the USSR's dissolution, and they had a series of legitimate grievances when the rest of Ukraine elected a government that was actively hostile to them.
shouldn't have stopped at Harper's Ferry
We can get a computer to tag the birds, answer questions about them, and generate new pictures of them.
Sometimes
DF is also free and there's fan made installers to run it on Linux, the Steam version just has an enhanced UI and other features.
I can't pin it down to just one, but holy shit school shootings and the way we've responded to them completely broke whatever part of me thought that our society was still capable of doing things. They keep upping the ante with how horrifying they are too - the high water mark currently is Uvalde, and I think that the next one that shocks the nation will involve the cops (or a "good guy with a gun") gunning down multiple kids or parents while trying to "help" and our collective response will still be to do nothing.
I make a .zip and rename it to .tar.gz and laugh
Motorcycle. If I'm going to be forced to drive to and from work, I might as well enjoy it.
The ending of the communism vision quest might be my favorite moment in any game ever.
::: spoiler Seriously you should play it for yourself if you haven't. That brief moment when all of the meloncholy of DE goes away, and a few people in a room manage to do something impossible together for a few seconds just by believing they can do it is such a beautiful way to end that subplot and injects so much hope into the Elysium universe that it's unreal.
You CAN save the city. You CAN stop the expansion of The Pale. You CAN bring about The Return. All you have to do is get fucking organized! :::
I'm in a job that's good enough that I may be able to buy or build a small house of my own in the near future - but first I have to wait for everyone who is currently selling their houses to panic for no reason in particular, plummeting prices, kicking people out of homes they've lived in for a decade or more, and causing all kinds of mayhem. And then when I get a place of my own I'll be subject to this absurdity directly every five to ten years like clockwork!
The Ultima series, especially U4, 5, and 6. To this day they are some of the best stories told in gaming history, but their appeal is limited by the fact that they came out in the DOS era - remake them with Baldur's Gate 3 levels of production value and some QOL updates but otherwise don't change a thing and they would contend for the best RPGs of all time.
The creator of Missile Command allegedly had this very same revelation while creating it, and suffered nightmares about nuclear annihilation. I like how the game just gets harder and harder, meaning that no matter how good you are at it, once the bombs start dropping then eventually every city will be destroyed anyway.
I'm not actually an investment genius, I'm just gambling like the rest of them.
Defining moment of a generation, in the way that 9/11 was for the one before it. I don't even think we'll really understand the impact for another couple decades - and just like with other major events the ruling class will learn the wrong lesson entirely from it, probably something like "we should never lock down for any disease ever".
You may have resources available to you that you're not even aware of.
How's your credit? My credit card is basically my emergency fund - it's not the best plan but it's way better than getting surprised and having to take an emergency loan. If you're currently spending about as much as you make, you can build your credit by putting things on the card and paying it back from your bank account and slowly extend that limit or eventually open up a second account - just don't fall into the trap of spending more than you make, or you'll wake up one day exactly where you are now but with debt.
Are you using social services? Only something like a third of people who qualify for food stamps in America actually use them, depending on the state/country you're in you could be a couple government forms away from getting a few hundred for groceries every month, and if you put in the effort to use it that's as good as money in your account. There's also stuff like food banks - the one I volunteer at doesn't do anything to verify the identities or qualifications of whoever comes by, you'll just get handed a box or a couple bags with cereal and canned goods and shit.
Is it possible to upgrade your employment situation? Search for jobs even if you already have one - you're not on the hook until you sign the piece of paper, and you don't owe your current workplace a two weeks' notice either so tell them your availability is "immediate". A lot of technical jobs especially are willing to train and just want someone with a clean background who will show up on time, and depending on your already-existing education/certifications you might be able to do contract work using a site like field nation to get gigs.
Clickbait Remover for Youtube makes that site a lot more pleasant. It'll replace all thumbnails with a screenshot from early in the video, and un-capitalize all titles to make them consistent.
The maintenance manual for your vehicle.
As far as fictional societies to live in goes it's hard to beat an optimistic sci fi setting lmao.
Although I might choose the Ascian civilization from FF14, as long as it's before the Final Days. Eternal life and post scarcity powered by magic, and the way most people self actualize is by literally creating life like gods. If it's early enough I would travel to other planets myself and possibly avert the apocalypse altogether.
As a kid I had to choose between FFXI and Star Wars Galaxies - and then Planetside came out!
I had a lot of good times in those games but switching between them month to month because I could only afford one at a time gave me a pretty healthy aversion to subscriptions before I got out of middle school. The only subscription service I've ever had was YouTube Red when it first came out because I was interested in a couple of the shows, but they all sucked so now I'm back down to just one subscription (FF14) unless you count car payments and my cell phone plan.
edit: oh wait I've also subbed to Disco+ for battlebots, but that was only because whoever was uploading them to 1337x stopped doing it which was a shame.
Maybe astroturfing, but most likely just people trying to be morally superior to one another.
From the fact that they can sell them at a higher price.
I don't think a guide is really needed to install Linux
I had a guide and it was still a big learning curve. Linus had a guide and he still bricked his machine trying to install Steam. Imagine your parents or grandparents being told without context to mount an ISO to a USB and set up their BIOS - for 90% of people there is no way in hell they're installing Linux without a guide unless they can double click an exe and have an install wizard do it for them.
This is the focus of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, so it's not like NASA isn't working on that problem too for what it's worth.
TrueAnon did a pretty good episode on this. Insurance was pretty straightforward before financialization kicked in on it - in the future get ready for pay-as-you-go insurance contracts where the rates change on a daily basis.
Russia is not an altruistic actor here
Always worth bearing in mind. The reason Crimea got taken over in 2014 and Donbas didn't is pretty clearly because of its relatively higher strategic importance - it took a lot of provocation from NATO and Azov for Putin to change his mind about that calculation, I'll never forget how bloodthirsty the media was especially in the month leading up to the invasion.
BRICS+ is announcing payback time for a few millenia
ehhhh I don't think this is remotely true. Literally every single country in BRICS is still trying to maintain good relations with the US, the main thing China wants to do is create an alternative to the US-centric global trade network and the main benefit this brings to other countries is that they can't be sanctioned as easily. "Payback time" won't happen unless a majority of the world signs on and they all agree to sanction the US and Europe (which would be hilarious but is never gonna happen).
I tend to agree, but more because I think that Linux needs a killer feature to convince people to switch and privacy aint it for most people.
I've fucked a lot with language generation. I've never been able to generate anything that isn't uncanny in some way, but with the right prep you can get a language model to spit out a lot of text that almost seems like it's from an actual work of art.
D&D 3.5 got me into both kinds of gaming. I remember me and some of my friends wanting to play it, and I remember tracing characters from the dot hack manga for our character sheets and playing the starter set. Later on I found out my friend had an old computer in his house (I think it was an Apple II?) and one of the Gold Box D&D games, and that ended up being the first computer game I spent a ton of time playing. Before then I had played SNES and Genesis a bit but they weren't really a focus for me at that point, but then when I got Morrowind I was fully bought in to video games too.
I mean they could, but they won't.
I'm gonna get in big trouble with work I'm not supposed to make copies of those.
I think with the principles Lemmy was made under the fracturing of the community into blocs is basically inevitable. You'll have the original/developer/"tankie" bloc at lemmy.ml, the more mainstream/liberal bloc at lemmy.world, and all the smaller instances orbiting around and between them some connected to both and some connected to neither.
To do something like you suggest would require a single, centralized instance that lists all the others and tags them to allow users to pick which ones to subscribe to - and if the Lemmy devs did that then we'd be right back to the problems inherent to 
.
Haven't paid for a TV show or a movie in a long time - but I also very rarely watch those.
For stuff I do all the time I do end up paying for the convenience of steam/gog/etc.
75F basically all the time, cooling only no heating. I also always turn it off at night and open all the windows/vice versa in the morning to save energy. I'm not a dad but this is totally a dad thing that I started doing when I turned 30.
This is in the southwestern US.
I live here and it's all propaganda. From my lefty perspective there are no shortage of things to criticize about California, but most of the criticism in the mainstream comes from the right and more or less 90% of it is made up.
Example: last year San Francisco elected a DA who said that they wanted to reform the justice department, used Black Lives Matter rhetoric, etc, and the conservative media sphere drummed up a propaganda campaign against them and against San Francisco generally that convinced everyone that a spike in crime had occurred even though there was no actual evidence that crime had gone up (and even if it had the new DA hadn't been in nearly long enough to be the cause of it). This resulted in that DA getting recalled and replaced and everyone outside the state thinking that San Francisco is Mad Max, even though statistically things are basically exactly the way they've been for the past couple of decades.
The real problems are what other people said, things are expensive and the cities have a lot of inefficient sprawl which makes the cost of living worse and starves the city governments of funds for social services. We've been staring down the barrel of a water crisis for like two decades and the state government is seemingly incapable of taking any action on it, we spend way too much money on cops, the government is completely captured by the local industries, the only thing we seem capable of doing to homeless people is systematically brutalizing them - but none of those problems are unique to California.