I think it’s easier to understand net neutrality as something ISP’s can’t do rather than something they must do, since we’ve never seen them really act on it before. It just means they can’t speed up or slow down your internet based on what websites you’re visiting. Under net neutrality, there can never be a deal with Google to give people faster speeds using Google searches than Bing or DuckDuckGo searches.
No worries. You’re right that it’s absurd that we need to fight so much for our government to protect us from blatant corporate for-profit schemes. There was a time when even the US government at least did us the honor of pretending to not take bribes like this. The Intuit tax return money machine is such an obviously fixable problem. All my 20-something friends in the US know that this problem only exists because of lobbying. It’s disgusting to watch elected representatives become so comfortable with their positions that they feel safe enacting policies that hurt their constituents like this.
For context, the reason I’m hating on Intuit and H&R Block and encouraging people to use FreeTaxUSA is because the first two are the main culprits behind the extensive lobbying that has led to the US government continuing to require people to file their own taxes rather than modernizing and making this process free and easy. My “gushing” is in pursuit of changing the broken system you’re pointing out.
I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I’ve used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I’m also a bit of an urban design nerd and there’s a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.
Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.
My brain is powered by memes. Memory? More like memery.
From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it’s actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they’re circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we’re going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren’t available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that’s going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.
All it’s going to take is one scandal for these bullshit bills to cause overwhelming outrage that’ll lead to lost elections. These old fucks are so out of touch with modern tech. It’s a joke that they’re in charge of regulating things like encryption. I can’t wait until a generation of people that grew up with the internet ages into these legislative positions.
Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy’s small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn’t even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don’t know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society’s views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.
Sure, it was there before Trump. It technically can be traced all the way back to Reagan and the Religious Right movement. We saw it pop up its ugly head from time to time. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party movement, and so on. But Trump gave it new life. He redefined the movement into something so much newer and more sinister. To some degree they unshackled themselves from any illusion of actual well-intentioned religion. But most importantly for this conversation, 2016 was the year that they started actually using the internet as a recruitment tool. The alt right went mainstream. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and it’s the year that half the people I knew on social media went rabid conspiracy theory bleeding red Republican. As someone else pointed out, it’s the year that Cambridge Analytica started harvesting data from people on Facebook to use for political campaigning. 2016 was an explosion of what was there before that culminated in the election of Trump. And that’s the year that I really felt the greatest shift in discourse on the internet. The spectacle of 2016 turned everything towards news on social media and away from personal connections.
I think we’re all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000’s era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010’s and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010’s. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.
With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.
Does this mean that Canada is always expanding?
Growing up in Wisconsin, drunk driving was a serious issue. Especially on New Years and the Fourth of July. The joke was that every little town throughout Wisconsin always had a church and a bar. There were so many alcoholics that would spend every day at those bars. It’s a tradition that probably goes back to the idea of public houses and having bars be a central location where your community gathers. Many people take the drinking part of that too far though and so the anti-drunk driving PSAs were necessary.
My wife went to school for English lit and is a professional writer. I cannot get a plot twist past her notice. It sucks so much. There was a video game that featured a serial killer (no spoilers, so no title) and I NEVER would have guessed who it was. I played it and I was shocked at the twist. Then I had my wife play it and in the first five minutes of the game she was like “That man is evil and I don’t trust him” and I was like WTF!!! He’s like nice and friendly and stuff. How the fuck does she do it. I spent hours having to gaslight her about how correct her prediction was. She also always knows when someone is going to die. I have to tell her not to comment predictions about movies because she’s correct at least 70% of the time.
Women want me.
The minds of fish are unknowable.
I’ve just stopped unsubscribing from email lists these days and instead I mark them as spam on Gmail so that Gmail can identify what they are for everyone else. Saw an article a while back with political fundraiser people begging people to stop marking them as spam and its just like, that’s what happens when you keep subscribing me to new lists I never signed up for after I unsubscribe from the ones I’m on. If I go out of my way to inform you that email spam won’t convince me to donate (which I do plenty of on my own without prompting) then you should listen to me.
Opposite problem for me. I had a perfectly legitimate Instagram account that I used fairly infrequently to post pictures of artistic landscapes I saw in my daily life going back to like 2013. A few months ago, I tried to go on Instagram to be told that my Instagram had been deleted for “suspicious activity”. There was an appeals process where they had me take a picture of myself holding a code they gave me, so I did, but they never got back to me and my account was completely gone like a day later. Apparently they don’t have any fucking support staff, so there was absolutely no way for me to fight this. Their entire support team is automated. So yeah, years of special memories I had thrown down the drain. Fuck Meta. I refuse to store my memories on any of their bullshit platforms anymore since apparently they can just be deleted willy nilly like that. My IG account was even attached to my FB account, so I have no idea why the fuck they would just delete one account like that.
The US hacking Iran’s centrifuges would have been preventable though with careful device management as far as I understand. The worm they used, Stuxnet, didn’t come from nowhere. It either came from a USB that hadn’t been properly sanitized or their systems were connected to an external, unprotected network when they definitely should have been isolated. That’s a preventable virus and unrelated to conversations about backdoors being built into technology for governments to access.
I am SO glad that we’ve already reached enough of a volume on Lemmy to get the same magic that Reddit always provided where someone could instantly locate where a picture was taken. Bravo!
The most effective ads I’ve seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don’t remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry’s Razors for all I’ve heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.