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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • We are in uncharted territory here. There is no crystal ball for what comes next.

    That being said, this is not sustainable. Society is a contract. The contract goes away when parties to that contract begin to disagree on what that contract says, and that is inevitable when people are fed garbage without results. Most empires have collapsed under their own weight. I suspect this will happen to the US as well, which has always been the purpose of all this disinformation: not to consolidate power into a dictator, but instead to sow division, and rip apart the social contract. The fact that Americans are so polarized is proof of that division. You ask if people will ever wake up. Clearly half the the US has.

    The only question is how that collapse will happen, and how peacefully it might be.











  • The point, in one sentence:

    If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.

    Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.

    Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.


  • I broadly agree with your sentiment, in particular computing equipment that I purchase and ongoing trends in tech (like smart TVs) that are abusive to consumers.

    However, I find this argument not terribly persuasive in this particular case. The content of a website isn’t an extension of your property. It is not even public property. Visiting a site is voluntary. You clearly didn’t pay for accessing the site, nor was it subsidized through a social program. So exactly how should content (regardless of how trashy it is) be funded? Statements like “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) suggest you are espousing libertarian views, but at the same time, you are not expressing willingness to pay for a service privately?

    I dunno, it just comes across as demanding a handout. Meanwhile, not visiting websites that don’t meet your vision for how funding content should be done seems like a perfectly simple and reasonable approach to have for this problem.








  • Here in Canada, I find the prices pretty neck and neck. Small items tend to be a bit cheaper at the stores, since there is very little overhead for them to carry small items compared to Amazon’s picking and delivery logistics. Big items tend to be a bit cheaper on Amazon. For tech specifically, Best Buy price matches items, so it’s not that bad… Memory express and CC sometimes have lower prices than Amazon too (see PCPartPicker).

    The main reason to use Amazon is you can easily find some really obscure stuff. Then again, you can buy direct from manufacturer, like Vevor, for often cheaper.