If the contractual details of malt distribution were going to affect the quality of beers you were getting then you absolutely would care. Unity’s pay scheme will lead to studios shutting down if there isn’t pushback. Studios switching to a different engine like Godot will make their games feel different for better or for worse and efforts to help fund these alternate engines will help tip the scale towards that being “for better”.

But most importantly of all, this is a company using toxic and predatory practices. Regardless of the industry (yes, malt distributors too), if we don’t push back against toxic business practices, then companies in many different industries will see avenues they can take advantage of to make extra money. These ideas don’t hang in isolation. If Unity’s scheme works, other businesses will learn from it. This is the reality of capitalism. Whatever methods can turn a profit without generating negative attention will be employed. It’s in the hands of consumers, competing businesses, and the government to keep those toxic practices in check. I mean, why the fuck are we on Lemmy? Ultimately Reddit’s actions are not going to affect the majority of users on their platform. Most of us came here to protest shitty business practices.

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.

I most recently encountered this fact from the game, Stray! You know, the recent game with the cat and all the robots. Apparently their city design was heavily inspired by the Kowloon Walled City.

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.

Worth mentioning that wealth and class are technically two different things that happen to usually coincide. In the US the connection is nearly 1:1, but in some places like the UK there is quite a history of high class people struggling with wealth and marrying wealthy people in order to combine their wealth/class. I mention this specifically because “caste” is really just another form of class. It’s a form of class tied more to duty/work and less directly to wealth.

Thank you for calling attention to this! I’ve been trying to raise awareness about why people should avoid lemmy.ml like the plague. My first post on Lemmy was on this thread created by the same person that made the post you linked to. I had noticed the mod action they called out where someone was banned for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of “Orientalism”. I appreciate that Lemmy is decentralized and that at the end of the day your server admin matters first and foremost, but I do really hope the views of those top devs never lead to problems with the software itself. At least it’s all open source and they would be called out if they ever tried anything shady.

This isn’t necessarily always true. PCSX2, the main PS2 emulator, for example needs a BIOS file that can only be obtained from an actual PS2 (or “illegally”). I’m not sure why that emulator requires it when others don’t. The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details. That makes me suspect that there was pushback from Sony about the emulator. So if such emulation laws were to be written they absolutely should protect in stone the right to create and use emulators. If a company can find a loophole to block you, they will.

I’ve always found the Bible to be so arbitrary. A bunch of old dudes at a few councils 1000+ years ago decided what they wanted their core beliefs to be. And then they decided what books they wanted to recognize as legitimate in the Bible. The only difference between which books are “apocryphal” or “heretical” and which are “inspired by God” is which books those old men chose and which they rejected. Why is the fever dream that is Revelations considered legitimate when other more coherent books aren’t? Understanding how arbitrary it all is played a big role in my deconversion from Evangelical Christianity. The people who tout the Bible as the “one truth” rarely understand how arbitrary the process that got them that book was. They would spin some tale about how “God spoke through those men” or whatever, but it’s all just bullshit excuses. You can imbue any event with supernatural backing when it conveniently fits your narrative.

And I’m not even someone who thinks that “all religion is poison” or whatever. Just the “Bible based” belief system that treats the Bible as infallible. I think logic and emotion are just as important of tools when talking about morality and religious guidance as the Bible is.

In the past I would have agreed with you, but in the age of increasingly sophisticated AI being able to nearly perfectly imitate people’s voices or images, I think we need to start asking more of social media companies. When truth starts looking indistinguishable from fiction we’re going to need to find new ways of parsing which is which. Fact checking will be extremely important.

Ugh, I knew a lot of other European countries overreacted to Fukushima, but I hadn’t heard much about Italy specifically. Sounds like they didn’t have as much nuclear energy to start with (unlike Germany), but they had big plans to increase their usage of nuclear energy to around a quarter of their energy grid until they halted it all in response to Fukushima. The Wikipedia page about it is tragic.

Germany in particular pisses me off so much. No country bought into the fear mongering about nuclear energy after Fukushima as much as Germany did. Shutting down nuclear power plants in the face of climate change is so incredibly irresponsible. For all of their faults, I give a lot of credit to the US and France for not shying away from using nuclear energy.

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.