Is there anything more disgusting than carpeted areas around a tub or toilet?

Like what the fuck were they thinking?

All of the other 70s and '80s trends - like the really dark wood paneling, ugly orange colors, that's just aesthetics. Maybe we'll go back to liking wood paneling at some point.

Carpet in a bathroom is not aesthetics or fashion It is fucking disgusting and unsanitary.

I have a picture with Joel McHale.

If Joel McHale turned out to run an international child sex trafficking ring would my picture with him indicate that I was part of the ring?

I HATE Elon, but this whole...

"See see see! There is a picture of them both at the NYC 9/11 Firefighters Fundraiser event in 2009!!! must also be a Satan worshipping child rapist/murderer."

Thing is fucking stupid.

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.

Why would anyone blame Obamacare and not their employer for not offering health insurance?

How about blaming our horrible system of employer sponsored health insurance?

If you're part-time and making $15 an hour don't you qualify for an Obamacare subsidy? That would limit the cost to 10% of your income.

The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.

We didn't get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc...

But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It's a camera, it's camcorder, it's a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald's ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can't do.

You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.

The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.

Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.

They'll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.

Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations... Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.

Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.

On the one hand I don't like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it's damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.

Google+ didn't work because they didn't push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.

Yes - I'm being serious they didn't push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn't inadvertently leak your info.

If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we'd still have Google+ today.

Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we'd still have Google Talk. I don't recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don't have to use.

I'd be willing to bet that 80% of the people that have a very intense emotional reaction to the small town song live in the suburbs less than 20 to 30 minutes away from whatever city they work in.

Actual small towns like that have less than a couple thousand people suck ass. There's nothing to do there and no jobs and that's why people leave.

There's two problems...

1. There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)

2. Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn't matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don't give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.

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.

Now that you're pretty wealthy has your family decided to become your best buddy now?

The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.

Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.

Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.

Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.

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.

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?

So do they think that CPAP machines are just suicide devices?

Are they supporting it so that they can gimp it?

We support the right to repair! Starting now all keycaps will be replaceable. Anything on the motherboard is off limits though or the display or the battery or the ports or the camera.

You're either with us or against us. - Dubya

There is no "center" position on human rights. Unless you want to give people half rights?

My mom would use the same password for everything or she would mix it up a little tiny bit.

Her passwords were like.

Rainbow2002! rainbow2003 RAINBOW!!!

It was a different word from rainbow, but that's just an example.

I got her using two factor with Google with a really good password and she's using the built-in Google password manager. Now all of her passwords are 20+ random strings instead of a single word with different numbers at the end.

I think that's a much better system than what she was using before.

You're delusional.

The fediverse stuff is just a bullet point on a sales sheet, Facebook doesn't give a shit about federating with Lemmy or Mastodon or whatever.

The reason they don't give a shit is they already have a user base that is multiple times larger than Lemmy and Mastodon combined. Also normal people don't even know what those things are. My mom doesn't know what Mastodon is, she does know what Twitter and threads is.