Feels a little like an Eldritch corporation that doesn’t totally understand humanity, but produces simple guides to existence in a an effort to ease the suffering of our poor squalid souls.

Always nice to know someone appreciates me.

Imagine the timeline, Elon never became an asshole, the ultimate pyrotechnic show, fireworks going off, this strange happy man has flamethrowers and a jetpack, behind him a dozen synchronized Falcon 9 rockets take off and engage in a choreographed aerial ballet.

People post videos of it online, because Twitter still exists as a functional platform.

I think it’s pretty apparent you don’t live in the suburbs or outside of a large city lol. Even then, when I lived in Texas the urban sprawl meant walking anywhere was completely off the table, and biking meant sharing 55 MPH roads. Other states have been better, but the issue of vanishing public spaces has been an issue raised since the 80’s (third spaces, if you’re interested).

All that said, even being active in community and spending time with friends, should people not be allowed to watch tv in their downtime? Should we ban the mindless internet browsing, Lemmy?

I mean, that genuinely sounds amazing. Though I’ll note that paying to go places is still an issue for the youth and the poor. When I was in college, and when I lived in California, there was a similar variety of options, though, driving was a necessity in San Diego.

If you’ve ever heard of suburban hell though, that’s pretty much what I was referring to. There’s a small library about a forty minute walk from me, across at least one highway and partially without sidewalks. A ten minute walk to a park that can seat fifteen, there is a scenic bike route, and no buses. And yet it’s a vast improvement over what I saw in Texas.

The loss of unregulated, uncapitalized public spaces is a well recognized phenomenon (also termed ‘third spaces’), one that grew even more pronounced during Covid.

There are, but they’re all entertainment media. Books, television, games, every avenue of entertainment is being steadily hypercapitalized and compartmentalized. Communities aren’t failing because people have entertainment, they’ve fallen apart because the outside world has almost no places left where people can freely gather. You don’t meet your neighbors because there aren’t any sidewalks, because the parks need to be driven to, because downtown has strip malls instead of boardwalks where people can gather.

I grew up hanging out in the Walmart parking lot because that’s the only place we wouldn’t be shooed away. Entertainment is what fills the absence of community, not the cause of it.

“People shouldn’t consume media” is a hot new take I didn’t expect. A call to return to sitting on the porch and aimlessly staring at the neighborhood for hours while sipping on sweet tea and smoking a pipe.

I think you mean a nice golden parachute to reward them for taking the heat, so they can swap in a new expensive face to implement slightly less unpopular fees.

I don’t know if that’s quite the right way to frame the complaints. I don’t think that having things to entertain you for free is necessarily a human right (even if paywalling all media is a bleak alternative), but I do think people have a right to be charged a reasonable amount for entertainment. There was a long time where you paid 8$ a month and got access to just about every single movie and tv show that had ever been made in the US.

It was wildly profitable for Netflix, who in turn paid licensing fees to all the owners of their content, and customers were happy, it was great. Then all the cable companies started their own streaming services, licensed media was reclaimed as the garden walls went up, and suddenly comprehensive access to media ballooned from 10$ a month to hundreds . The services themselves got worse, ads started getting inserted into paid accounts, and subscription prices steadily rose across the board.

I don’t think people are declaring that media should be free, but after Netflix almost killed piracy because most people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for reasonable access, a lot of people are understandably unhappy with the streaming industry going from an affordable revolution to cable 2.0 in a single decade.

God gave us four fingers and a thumb, so we can properly hold mice by their fluffy little tum.

… Why does Saddam Hussein have an enormous erection?

Y2K: Passed ✅

2038: “Wanna see me do it again?”

Ha ha, well I have absolutely no faith that we will collectively solve that unless 32 bit systems stop working on their own before then. If Y2K happened again today, there’d be a handful of companies handed billions of dollars to fix everything, and it’d wind up half done with demands for more money.

Yeah, there was a chunk of time where there was some spat going on between them and VPN providers, and whenever I would wind up on an exposed VPN server every single captcha would take over a minute of clicking through different prompts. Happened so frequently for the fastest server that I just switched to Firefox and DuckDuckGo because I couldn’t stand getting hit every single time I googled something. Not just every session, but literally every single search.

The worst was when it would test me for several minutes straight, and then have the gall to tell me to start over again. Google’s really been racing to the bottom lately.

I don’t know why I find this existentially horrifying. …Can they be bolded? 😭😭😭