I am fully aware of what vpn services to use and not. I am not using Express VPN, I am simply doing research for a master thesis, when I came across these results from Express VPN. If you have any ideas or corrections, please let me know why a VPN provider would need to have access to these permissions....
It’s how you boil a frog. They’re not gonna back down off of this. They decided a long time ago to maximize profitability at the cost of service degradation.
Here’s the thing. Cory Doctorow is almost 100% spot on with the first 3 things. The last one, however, is pure copium. Those platforms died, yes, but they died in a very different era of the internet.
There was a time where people jumped ship with abandon and routinely visited cool, new websites every other week. This is the time that I like to call the “big liquid” internet. The internet was popular, yes, but every day people spent a little more time on it than on t.v. and other kinds of popular entertainment - in other words, popular but still growing. Websites like Digg, if they fucked up and just straight up ruined user experience, would die as a result of enshittification. The internet was cutthroat, and the quality of your service mattered. If people didn’t like your website, they were going to leave.
We don’t live in that era of the internet anymore. We’re in the era of the “big solid” internet. People don’t go to “new websites” anymore. They don’t jump platforms. They don’t abandon and adopt. If they’re kids, they go where their friends are - probably Twitter/X or TikTok. Maybe reddit. If they’re old users they’re on instagram and Facebook. It doesn’t really matter how bad those platforms get, because the quality of the service is not really important. It’s that they don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do.
There is no more exploration or adventure to the internet as we once understood it. That’s why Google has waited so fucking long to enshittify their most popular product: it’s because you’re locked in. There is no competition, because the competition died or was killed off a long time ago.
IMO the quality of discussion here is about the same on reddit. Which is to say, not very good, or very deep. It’s shallow observations, memes, and one liner gut reactions to headlines. People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts. It might have to do with social media becoming more or less defined by people engaging with it on mobile devices, which don’t really enable that sort of engagement. But it might also be people genuinely not giving a shit anymore and only wanting that minor degree of superficial interaction.
My brother in Christ, you literally have no idea how much stuff is made out of petrochemicals, do you? Try asphalt, industrial solvents, cosmetics, any real lubricant, fertilizers, pesticides, textiles, circuitry, detergents, insulation, PVC, paint, adhesives, roofing material, synthetic rubbers, as well as a ton of pharmaceutical products and food additives. And that’s not even an exhaustive list. Gasoline is a big part of the petrochemical industry, but it’s not the totality of it.
Right, but there’s no more harm that could come to you after you’re dead, so being an organ donor wouldn’t really qualify in this context. Your organs being donated after death diminishes you in no way and also potentially enriches the lives of others.
This situation kinda reminds me of John Locke talking about slavery. He says that for some rights to be truly inalienable, that people themselves should not have the ability to willingly surrender them, such as by willingly selling themselves into slavery. Now, yes, John Locke owned stock in a slave trading company, so he’s a hypocrite in that regard, but I digress. I feel like this is one of those things where people shouldn’t be allowed to physically sell parts of their body for consumption, as “not being eaten by other people” is one of those inalienable rights we should have as a society.
I always find it funny: the internet is a lot softer and more inclusive than it ever used to be. Explicit sexism, racism, homophobia/transphobia, etc. are treated with zero tolerance most places. But straight up ageism? That’s the last truly accepted form of bigotry. Because getting pissed at a group of people who will be dead soon for not fixing all the world’s problems is easy when you’re young. When Gen Z gets to be 40 and there are no more Boomers but nothing is still being done to address the world’s myriad problems, I like to think there will be some self-reflection on the nature of the world in which they live and the innate difficulty of addressing complex problems driven by societal inertia. But we both know there won’t be and they’ll probably pivot to hating Gen X and Millennials. Or maybe they’ll go the other direction and blame young people.
I understand it’s fun to blame boomers for climate change, but this was something that started before their generation existed and it will continue to be a problem after they’re gone. You can also blame them for inaction in addressing it, but given that the only real solution is an extreme degree of collective austerity across multiple civilizations, which is something innately at conflict with the expansionist nature of capitalism as an economic system (something which also predated boomers and which will continue to be a problem after they’re gone), then I would say that if you expect the problem to start being solved as soon as that generation is dead and buried, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
No, not stupid. Insane. The definition of insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again and expecting shit to change. That is crazy.
One thing genuinely confusing is having people reply to a comment I made from a federated instance, and when I try to reply to their comment, I get taken to the reply in the context of the lemmy instance they commented in, not the one I commented in. For example, if I’m on Beehaw and someone from lemmy.ca replies to my comment, and I want to respond to them, what I’ll typically do is click on the button below the comment that shows the context of the conversation, because I comment a lot and don’t always know what comment I made that someone is replying to. When I do that, it takes me to lemmy.ca, which I can’t reply from, because I’m not on lemmy.ca. This is confusing, because this routine thing pulls you into other parts of the fediverse that your reply might exist in, and which other people can see, but you can’t comment on that instance because you don’t have an account there. But if you go back to your own instance and find your comment through your profile, you can navigate to a reply someone from another instance made and reply to them as long as you’re still on your instance. This is both cumbersome and, to a new user, terribly disorienting.
It was also just a straight up James Gunn movie with an ensemble cast of misfits. It’s like…his thing. That’s what’s so weird about so many Marvel movies. They gave them to competent directors and basically said “make one of your movies, but with our characters and setting.” Iron Man 2 was a Shane Black joint: took place at Christmas, lots of witty banter, there were some buddy cop elements. But the shell of it is an Iron Man movie.
It’s a lot of fun. I remember taping it on VHS back when it was still airing on t.v. I would pause the VCR when commercials started so that it recorded episodes mostly unbroken.
I can only imagine 50 years from now, when climate crisis is in full swing, there are no more salaried jobs for people without extreme, cutting edge technological specializations or PhDs, and people are doing shit like menial servant work or acting as delivery drivers for 16 hours a day for the ultra wealthy just not to starve, you’ll have some 70 year old zoomer politician that introduces a bill to legalize prostitution in order to open up “new sources of income for struggling Americans” while quietly including a clause that effectively creates death camps for the poor. Conservative Americans will praise the bill on the basis that it’ll get rid of “welfare queens” and create more economic opportunities for the people who don’t get turned into Soylent Green.
50 years after that, America is littered with the hollowed out ghost towns of long abandoned suburbia. The coasts have been destroyed by flooding from the melted ice caps. Automated workers outnumber Americans 10 to 1. There are around 30 million Americans left in the continental United States. Almost all of them are literal slaves after slavery was re-legalized. Almost everything is owned by a handful of incredibly powerful families. Virtually everyone lives in or around Chicago. Whatever hope people once had for a better future is a long distant dream of a bygone era as the world slowly dies and the people who are left simply persist without ever truly living.
If Tesla has given up on fully self driving cars, wherein driving is a much simpler mechanical activity to replicating the full breadth of human construction tasks, then I don’t see how people are expecting tradecraft to get replaced by Mr. Fixitron anytime soon.
There were more natives in the Americas and Caribbean when the European settlers arrived, too. Only one side had way more advanced military technology and no scruples around genocide and slavery.
In what world does a VPN need access to Camera and Bluetooth? (i.imgur.com)
I am fully aware of what vpn services to use and not. I am not using Express VPN, I am simply doing research for a master thesis, when I came across these results from Express VPN. If you have any ideas or corrections, please let me know why a VPN provider would need to have access to these permissions....
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Never has never will (lemmy.ml)
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those ppl... (feddit.de)
Yes, also Teslas (media.mastodon.scot)
Get the boat (feddit.de)
Sugar, spice and too little nice (lemmy.world)
Business is going well (sh.itjust.works)
The slow decline isn't slow anymore (lemmy.world)
Because it's almost time (feddit.nl)
Merry KREE-mas everyone.
Hey OpenAI (feddit.it)