Honestly I’m shocked at the number of people that stayed on twitter. Like… just why? It’s zero effort to leave and minimal effort to find another platform.

I realize many people choose not to care who owns the companies that make their stuff. And to be fair, sometimes it’s actually worse to throw away the product than keep using it despite the associated image. I still daily drive my Tesla model 3 that I bought in 2019. Throwing away a car creates a shitload of waste, versus just continuing to drive it. I’d never buy another tesla, which solves that issue.

But unlike throwing out a car or even throwing out something with actual value like youtube, ditching Twitter as far as I see has no downside.

Whenever I see “Culture War” in a title I know it’s going to involve a shit take from selfish regressive pricks.

People are so incredibly fucking selfish.

To echo the OP’s reply below, there are a lot of different reasons combining right now to make them popular.

One of the factors that has improved the most over the last 5 years is how much more access people have to safe and cheap optons. Buying a cheaper e-bike even just 5-6 years ago had you gambling on components and hoping your battery and charger were certified and sourced reputably. And, while you could order online, the experience wasn’t always great.

Nowadays it seems like almost everything has certified chargers and batteries, and the overall build quality of cheap bikes and scooters (bikes especially) has improved as well.

Combine that with being able to order a bike or scooter online, ship it to your door in just a week or two, and get going with minimal assembly and adjustment. Boom, that’s an attractive option, even before you hit incentives. E-bikes and scooters are so insanely cheap to own and operate compared to a car (even a super cheap car) so it just makes a ton of sense that people would choose them.

It’s weird here too because states set sales taxes. I live in Oregon, and we don’t have a standard sales tax here. That means what you see is what you pay at the register for most things, and it’s so freaking nice.

About the only thing I regularly see is the bottle tax (0.10/can added at the register). That’s refundable too, at least theoretically, so it’s not that bad.

Hmmm, I’ve never noticed what you mentioned on my recent phones. That said you should test a newer android yourself before making a purchase!

More of my personal experience… I have a Pixel 7 XL and a work Iphone which (edit) is an Iphone 12. Generally they are the same in terms of having no scroll lag or input lag at all. But, there is some lag on both when they are overheated, especially on the Iphone if I put it on a higher power charger (I trickle charge both when I can).

From a design perspective the biggest difference I notice is that my Pixel feels significantly smoother because of the 120hz display, and just the larger display in general. While I said neither of them have much lag, the Iphone feels noticeably less speedy. That said, I’m sure if you compared my Pixel to a high end Iphone results would be flipped. My work isn’t shelling out for whatever pro max stuff they sell (and neither would I!).

Beyond that, I can’t offer guidance. In my personal experience the Iphone UI is so frustrating that I can’t judge which one performs “better” or not, because only the Android feels comfortable to me. Between that and the lack of labels in some places (like the pull-down settings menu) it is impossible for me to daily drive the apple.

What’s really happening here is that advertisers can use the Reddit Ads Manager to create normal user posts and then pay to make them appear prominently on the site and in the app as promoted posts, aka adverts.

Look it’s not exactly revolutionary or new, google search has been littered with promoted ad results for years. But I still hate it. Fuck off, reddit. No respect intended. Icky. So glad I stopped using it.

Unlike sane people, regressive leaders do not need or care about reality in order to get people removed from the ballot. It absolutely does not matter that progressives have not invited insurrections. They’ll be removed anyway if that precedent is set simply because they are an alternative option, and the voting population is sufficiently decieved or deluded to support it.

Yeah, I agree that there aren’t many budget cargo-in-front options yet (none that I could find in 5 sec of googling).

Putin might as well just say the quiet part out loud at this point. Classic sociopath dictator, gotta pretend blood isn’t on his hands.

Rest in peace Navalny. You and your people deserve better than this.

Republicans say the repeal will lead to Michigan becoming less attractive to businesses and will lead to forced union membership. House Republican leader Matt Hall said in statement following Whitmer’s signing that “businesses will find more competitive states for their manufacturing plants and research and development facilities.”

Translation: Regressives want businesses to be able to abuse employees, and they’re afraid that not being able to abuse employees quite as easily will put up some reasonable guardrails on maximizing profits.

I agree that pi-hole is an option here, but yeah, the reality is that most daily users don’t even know what it is. At least, not yet.

Adblock Plus and it’s betters became ubiquitous in large part because they were so incredibly easy to install. As easy as gramma accidentally installing yet another yahoo toolbar on accident. Like, too easy.

Pi-Hole isn’t hard to install, and there are some fantastic guides to help users get it running with essentially zero prior knowledge. But in my opinion, I think until it gets closer to “push-button” easiness, pi-hole and systems like it will really be limited to the <5% of users motivated enough to go through the steps, who aren’t mortified of logging into their router’s admin page. I want us to get there faster, and we’re a hell of a lot closer than 10 or even 5 years ago. But we’re not quite there yet.

Edit-typo

It’s desperately needed, and in some senses it doesn’t go far enough.

Regressives held our state government hostage via superminority rule and actively forced us to compromise on their inhuman policies to make any progress for three straight years. Without this, only a rewrite to our state constitution’s quorum rule would prevent eternal hell regressives holding our state hostage via minority rule.

Now, we can at least revoke these turds after they fuck us over. But in the grand scheme of things, I worry that what this law doesn’t do is prevent this new cycle from repeating. It doesn’t take many of them ruling over a few tiny, horribly misinformed districts to screw us all over. In other words, it only takes a tiny number of regressive candidates each year to accomplish that goal.

Yeah, implementing policies like this has to be done really damn carefully to prevent unintended consequences from dragging the whole thing down. It’s also not a push-button solution to a problem; it requires persistent, long-term commitment and gradually change to get right. Tricky, especially when, at least here in the US, regressive politicians regularly get elected and scuttle policies that would eventually work if left alone.

Anyway, yeah, just focusing on a land-value tax alone won’t solve the problem of equitable housing. It’ll have to be worked in carefully with safeguards to prevent the 1% from abusing it, that prevent public green spaces from disappearing into the concrete jungle, that ensures we have space to build and improve public transit, infrastructure , etc.

For example, single family home zoning on large (7000+ sq ft) lots isn’t appropriate major cities. It’s reasonable to expect people to compromise away from that type of housing into smaller lots and mixed-use zoning, so that SFH’s can exist in small spaces but be surrounded by businesses and apartments. But, if a small single family home or an apartment wants to work in a small garden or share a public garden, I think those types of things should be protected and, at least if they’re public access, exempted from land use tax to a certain point.

We of course have to be careful not to allow loopholes that enable people to exploit that and keep inappropriate amounts of land to themselves without paying dearly for it. But we also need provisions for that kind of land use to exist without it being so expensive that only the wealthy have it, or that horrific things like HOAs are the only ones able to afford them.

It’s a mess. I’m glad though that they’re trying it out. Just putting the idea off because it’s hard will keep things worse forever.

Check!

Also, I forgot all the tomfuckery he pulled with starlink in Ukraine, cutting off access and the like.

It’s truly a testament to how much shit this guy has done that we forget so much of it.

Literally only the best strategies here! I mean lets recap:

• Threaten to buy company then double down and agree in writing as a bullying tactic: check
• Roll a nat 1 on your intimidation check: check
• Be forced to follow through when called out on being mentally an 8 yo by the feds: check
• Fire critical employees, like basically all of them: check
• Yoink verification away from public news orgs: check
• Let anyone pay to be “legit,” even if they’re parodying you: check
• Rename twitter to the stupidest thing imagined since head-on (apply directly to the forehead): check
• Gut content moderation policies but also stop enforcing regardless: check
• Post own hate content and racism to the platform: check
• “Accidentally” run ads next to hate content: check
• Be told your sign sucks and to take it down by city: check (lol)
• Become a living embodiment of “big yikes” energy while telling aforementioned advertisers to “go fuck yourselves” on live TV: check
• Hallucinate about making x into a libertarian wechat alternative: check
• Tank the value of the company while blaming literally anyone else for your failures: mission in progress, #1 priority

10/10 solid buy, gonna grab some long calls rn. The koch boys and rupert murderjock must be holding back a tsunami of jealousy by now 🤣

Fuck Amazon. I cancelled amazon prime years ago when the facts came out on how much damage they were doing to us and to our environment. I use it as little as possible now, and I’d certainly never consider using their steaming services. I’m forced by some 3rd-party companies to use AWS, since many sites exclusively host their content on them. But, that’s as far as I’ll go.

Pretty much every amazon employee is strangled by the fucking neck and kept on as little pay as will avoid federal lawsuits. I’m not going to be any more complict in this total monopoly if I can help it.

A van is certainly going to be cheaper to put solar on than a whole house LOL! That’s completely understandable. Yep, I’m sorry, I usually assume people are talking about homes because I don’t have a van, and so I misjudged youe capial involved as a lot more than I’d have. For van living I’d say it’s a must-have regardless of price, considering that you might not have grid hookups consistently!

When the options are sue or plan for the future…

You’ve omitted the critical, first-priotity option: get out. Unless that I what you meant by “plan for the future…”

Absolutely nobody who is sane of mind will look at texas, with its radical conservative “leadership” and sociopath 1% investors, and say “I want to stay here even though I could move.” And I’ll admit, I’m very quick to judge you for what you said: if you can afford whole-home solar, you can afford to move to a nice fucking house.

Now, I was in the same boat.

I left idaho (which by many measures is worse than texas) years ago, and have been trying to convince my family to do the same. They agree they need to leave that hateful shithole, but selling their home and uprooting from their tiny circle of non-psychopath idaho friends is still very hard. I’m going to end up digging deep financially to make it happen, but it’ll work out in the end.

Still, nobody deserves to end their life in such a hateful place. Leaving is an option once you can afford a home, no matter what anyone says. And at least if people leave, they won’t be actively forced to support a radical conservative hate state.

Free Geek here in Portland OR used to do this. Might still be doing it too, but I haven’t been back there since 2018 so I’m not 100% sure.

But yeah, the last I was there, you could walk in and just buy a refurbished laptop or desktop with Linux on it. They would even give guidance on what people needed if they weren’t tech-savvy.

It’s unbelievably disappointing to see such an efficient and potentially clean source of transit absolutely ruined. Ruthless capitalism for the win - but only if you’re warren buffet or a dead guy named vanderbilt.

Oh also, let me drop this here: last week tonight on presicion scheduled railroading https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY?si=gJXfGCO5ubAFjgny

Very similar theme to the above article, also I forgot how absolutely fucked original Thomas the tank engine could be lol