thedirtyknapkin

i didn't say he was great and did everything we needed, I'm saying this isn't nothing. yes it could have been a lot more, but this is the first time we've seen anyone make even close to this much progress in decades. no other president has even mentioned antitrust in decades.

i think busting up major corporations and limiting their influence on people and politics is the single most important thing we need to be doing.

and all of those numbers combined will still be less than 5% of users.

brother, 99% of users will never even consider installing their own os. the issue isn't that Linux is hard to install, the issue is that pretty much anyone brave enough to even mess with their operating system is either already on Linux, a boomer, or trapped by professional software that isn't available on Linux (that's me, a videographer)

the only way Linux is breaking out of extreme obscurity is if it starts coming pre-installed on commercially available and desirable hardware. the steam deck did more for Linux in a single product launch than the entire decade of combined efforts before that. before the deck i would have said it was simply never going to happen, but who knows. maybe it'll be up to eccentric billionaires that never went public with their companies to push the Linux future we all want.

can we blame people for human nature? this is all taking advantage of our brain chemistry in a way that isn't going to be fixed by yelling at people.

we can blame a person for making a bad decision. even if that decision is the norm. people on the other hand are inherently going to do what's common. that's how common is defined. it's what people are likely to do. so when we have unfathomable amounts of data on what people are likely to do it's easy to guide people towards their habits. getting mad at society for walking down the lanes that were set before them isn't going to accomplish anything. we're better off acknowledging the shortcomings of people as a collective and that the only ones that can really change this kind of thing are the ones guiding this behavior. advertisers, media conglomerates, tech companies, governments, etc...

people are people. they will do as people do. the only things that can be changed are individuals and systems. but you can't change what people are.

it's one of those things where it does legitimately improve security, but for them to require it the way they did when almost no hardware at the time has it is pretty transparent.

there are plenty of other hardware requirements that could improve security if they arbitrarily decided to require them. they did this for the rain you describe, but have the plausible deniability of saying that it's for security.

basically, the same bullshit line that's used to justify half of the bullshit unpopular changes that anyone pushes anywhere.

"it's for security" - no it's not, as a for profit company chances are pretty good we can prove you don't actually give a shit about customer date if we look close enough at your practices. it's for profit.

"it's for the environment" - admirable thought, too bad that's not profitable. I don't believe you mr. for profit company.

"for the kids"- it you have ever tried to talk to a parent after the subject of their kids safety comes up you'll see why they always do for this in. it's the deepest, most primal, and least logical part of our brain. most parents become slovering fucking cavemen the second you disagree with whatever they've been programmed to believe will protect their kids. it's just too easy to manipulate people with. if you say you're great to protect kids I'm instantly skeptical and need a lot of proof.

you may not know which one is next, but this one is clearly there.

have you not been paying attention to all the headlines about actual meaningful anti trust action in this country? that's because of Joe Biden's cabinet.

the true power of the president is in appointments. in much the same way that trump is responsible for repealing roe because it was his supreme court justice picks, this is Joe Biden's doing. so if Google does indeed need to sell chrome, that's one thing he did.

really though, he's changed the course entirely on anti trust. these are the first meaningful anti trust cases since the 90s. it's actually a huge deal.

i didn't say they were equivalent, i said they're both blights that remain in the past. terrible things that cause mass civilian casualties for decades after the conflict.

one can still be worse than the other, but anyone that uses them should be punished.

how?.

or how about this, both of them are terrible for this. i strongly support Ukraine's right to defend its borders, but landmines belong in the far distant pass. if Russia drops a bioweapon on kyiev will we follow suit? i sure fucking hope not.

grow a spine and actually believe in something for yourself. landmines are wrong, no matter who uses them or why they are used.

the second anyone was allowed to use houses as an "investment" to gain wealth we basically guaranteed this. obviously anyone with a lot of money tied up in housees is going to try and make their value go up. once we got multinational billion dollar conglomerates involved it became child's play for them to make that number go up through infinite methods of varrying complexity carried out by thousands of people working together with billions of dollars behind them.

this problem is inherent to a housing market that people are allowed to speculate on. we just need to make that stop entirely. limit house ownership. no one needs 100 houses. especially not companies. if that results in less rental houses than desired, we need to build more apartments. apartments are different beast, but if the cost of houses are lower then it will be harder to inflate rent if they can afford a house instead. this may result in some people who want to rent a house, but not an apartment, unable to find that. that's not a big problem. they might just need to rent an apartment instead. certainly it's much less of a problem then the current state of no one being able to afford housing.

the rich don't need this vector for growing their wealth. they have enough others and are doing quite alright at it. the world will function just fine without mult billion dollar corporations investing in buying properties for the sole reason that they think they can extract wealth without contributing anything. houses should be for living in, not for extracting wealth.

yeah, the lies are blatantly obvious to anyone that has actually followed and understood politics since before Trump. the longer you look at it the more obvious and undeniable the bad faith obstruction by the Republicans is. the only people who understand that and support them genuinely believe they'd be better off without the government telling them what not to do, or are full Christofascist warriors that want to create Gideon or whatever.