• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle


  • You can’t have this both ways.

    When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…

    “That’s weather not climate!”

    When there’s a wildfire somewhere…

    “That’s global warming!”

    We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.



  • MrFagtron9000@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlEnjoy it while it lasts.
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.

    They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.

    Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.

    Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.

    On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.






  • MrFagtron9000@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlFirefox is the only way.
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.

    When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.

    Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.

    The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?

    What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.

    Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.


  • We can’t incentivize people to change their behavior because no one is going to deliberately lower their quality of life.

    What politician is going to win on a platform of…

    Let’s make air travel so expensive that normal people can no longer regularly fly!

    Vote for me I’m going to double your electricity bill!

    You know that big SUV you love that is entirely impractical but you just like it because of how big it is… If you vote for me I’ll make gas $7 a gallon so that you can’t afford to have a giant SUV anymore.

    You know how you like to eat your Taco Bell nachos in your car with a plastic spork… If you vote for me I’ll replace the plastic spork with a cornstarch spork that starts to melt when you use it.

    The only thing that is going to save us is technology. Like air travel being fueled by biofuels, electricity costs kept somewhat normal by building new nuclear generation, giant SUVs being powered by batteries charged by nuclear/renewable energy, actually recycling the plastic spork.


  • The problem seems so bad I’m surprised they haven’t passed a law that just bypasses environmental regulations and other red tape along with telling the towns and cities to go fuck themselves when it comes to zoning.

    Or even just having the government directly build houses.

    Or just throwing tax credits and incentives ar builders to build “starter” or lower income housing.

    Or anything. It just seems like they’re doing jack shit about it.

    The neoliberals can’t blame this one on Republicans considering Democrats have control of the entire state.




  • The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.

    We didn’t get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc…

    But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It’s a camera, it’s camcorder, it’s a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald’s ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can’t do.

    You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.




  • Google+ didn’t work because they didn’t push it hard enough and they made it an invite only beta instead of just allowing everyone to join.

    Yes - I’m being serious they didn’t push it hard enough. If you had a Gmail or YouTube account it should have just instantly become a Google+ account in some sort of private mode so it doesn’t inadvertently leak your info.

    If they would have just pushed it out to everyone, day one, mandatory, no opt out, then we’d still have Google+ today.

    Like if they made Google Talk the default messaging client on Android we’d still have Google Talk. I don’t recall Apple making iMessage an optional messaging app you don’t have to use.


  • I had to log into my 84-year-old grandmother’s YouTube account and unsubscribe from a bunch of stuff, “Not interested” on a bunch of stuff, subscribed to more mainstream news sources… But it only works for a couple months.

    The problem is the algorithm that values viewing time over anything else.

    Watch a news clip from a real news source and then it recommends Fox News. Watch Fox News and then it recommends PragerU. Watch PragerU and then it recommends The Daily Wire. Watch that and then it recommends Steven Crowder. A couple years ago it would go even stupider than Crowder, she’d start getting those videos where it’s computer voice talking over stock footage about Hillary Clinton being arrested for being a demonic pedophile. Luckily most of those channels are banned at this point or at least the algorithm doesn’t recommend them.

    I’ve thought about putting her into restricted mode, but I think that would be too obvious that I’m manipulating the strings in the background.

    Then I thought she’s 84, she’s going to be dead in a few years, she doesn’t vote, does it really matter that she’s concerned about trans people trying to cut off little boy’s penises or thinks that Obama is wearing ankle monitor because he was arrested by the Trump administration or that aliens are visiting the Earth because she heard it on Joe Rogan?