The problem with explaining anything to MAGAs is that anything that opposes their world view is going to be summarily rejected.

These people can’t be reasoned with.

Trump and Republicans will blame immigrants.

And they will believe him.

I love the idea behind this movement but there’s no validation or proof to know what you make is actually effective.

I’d love to see the guy behind this movement actually do studies on the efficacy of home made pharmaceuticals but then I have a feeling that big pharma would shut it down.

What you did there…

I see it.

My understanding with glass is that it’s still cheaper to make new glass than recycle it whereas metal the costs have just about evened out.

Last I read about high density plastics is that they aren’t as strong after the first use. So they can’t be reused as high density plastic and have to be mixed in with other plastics.

I can all but guarantee it’s the latter. I have even noticed this at most Starbucks. They got rid of separate bins for recycling and just do trash/landfill now.

Fwiw, recycling doesn’t work anyway, except for metal. But even then it’s highly dependent on people cleaning the metal before recycling.

While I agree that the search engine has gone to shit, the problem I have with people who ask really simple questions is that they haven’t done the bare minimum to ask for help.

Simple questions have fairly popular answers and even an enshittified Google search will return the correct result within their fucking AI.

If you have a simple question and the answers seem confusing, tell us why the answers are confusing. Don’t just ask the question.

Being able to Google your question is an important skill, but so is asking a question in a forum. Since forum posts are at their very nature asynchronous, being able to do your own searches shows those who are trying to help you that you have the skills to read their responses and extrapolate to your situation and then take the appropriate action.

I provide a lot of free support on various Linux and developer forums. The sheer number of people who want me to hold their hand is too high.

There is a reason why it worked for the Republicans and won’t work for the Democrats: the bases are vastly different.

Republicans, by in large, will vote for a Republican even if they don’t like the candidate. I saw this a lot when I was a poll worker. They don’t even care about their platform. So long as they have an R at the end of their name, they get a vote from Republicans.

While Democrats vote Democrat, they’ll only come out to vote if they are energized. They won’t come out to vote if they don’t feel like you’ve earned it. We saw this in 2016 and 2024.

Simply put, Republicans are more reliable voters.

The Democrat tent is very large with often conflicting values. A lot of single-issue voters will simply stay home than to vote for a Democrat. Because of this, it is rare when a candidate will arise that will galvanize and coalesce the base.

The last time it happened was Obama.

Right now is actually the perfect time to create a third party. You have effectively two years to get people excited about an actual progressive party and if the DNC come knocking saying you’re going to split the vote, tell them that they are splitting the vote and they should fold into you.

I’m fucking tired of the Democrats learning the wrong lessons from lost elections. They’d rather lose than give up power.

If you don’t know how to use man, just type in man man.

What?! How?! So I can learn to avoid it!

I remember complaining on Amazon about the price of digital books when they were still relatively new. They wanted me to pay the same price for a digital book as a physical book. Back then, Amazon still had pretty decent customer service and wrote me back saying that the price for the book wasn’t for literal pages but for the work in making the book, etc. etc.

I told them I understood that but I don’t get the same rights with the digital book as I did with the physical, namely the right to sell the book.

Books, board games, etc. any physical media is technically a license, yes. BUT the copyright holder cannot bar you from doing whatever you want with the physical copy, within the limits of copyright law. Those same rights simply do not exist with your digital copies and, in fact, is often codified within your terms of service that you don’t fucking own anything and they can pull your license at any time.

DVD is next to impossible to revoke while Blu-ray is not. But you can’t revoke Blu-ray licenses to specific people but to regions. I haven’t heard of this happening but if it did, you could, in theory, still play your Blu-ray disks on players that aren’t connected to the internet to receive those updates. That said, I’m like 80% sure that Blu-ray keys have been leaked and you can rip them like DVDs today.

If Alex Jones becomes press secretary, I’ll be convinced that this is all a simulation.

People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.

I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”

They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.

I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.

Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.

It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.