I legit think streaming sites have become worse than video rental places.

It seemed like a big advantage that you could have unlimited number movies on a streaming site while a video rental store had limited shelf space. But it turns you you have to scroll through endless pages of crap to try to find something you actually want to watch.

Also the shops would eventually have any movie you want to watch. With streaming sites many things will never appear there because the corporation that owns the movie owns their own streaming site and will keep it exclusive to them. In the past it wasn’t a thing where you’d have to keep track of which video rental shop had the rights to rent the movie you want to watch.

There was a time when it was just Netflix and pretty much anything would come on there eventually. That killed video rental. But it’s been a long time since you could find everything on one streaming site, and it’s gotten to be more expensive and time consuming to find a good movie to watch, so going to a video rental shop might actually make more sense now. But they’re all gone now.

Luckily there are websites with dubious legality you can find everything on. I’m willing to pay for a streaming site that’s actually convenient, but they don’t exist anymore, just like Blockbuster.

Whenever I hear news of China, they built a new electric railway, invented something new, or made massive tech progress.

A lot of things in China fall apart in a few years. You can build things fast when you don’t care about people’s rights and just force them off whatever land you need, and make people work insane hours. A lot of the amazing things China brags about is a Potemkin village, just made to show the authoritarian leaders they did got the project complete on time and they in turn use it in their propaganda. Authoritarians always love to brag about making the trains run on time, right? The reality is often different from what the media portrays it to be in an authoritarian country.

But still, China is slightly preferable to the US at the moment.

Yeah China is like the Soviet Union.

My grandparents had to hold their noses and be allies with the Soviet Union for a while.

But unlike the Soviet Union which was way behind the West in technology, China is ahead of us on EVs and we will have to catch up. But before worrying about that, we gotta take down the US.

US is the same as China now. Well that’s not true, US foreign policy is way more batshit insane than China’s. If you can even call it a foreign policy… it seems to me it’s just the whims of a deranged old child molester surrounded by fucking Nazis.

And China is further away and there’s pretty much zero probability China will invade my country. With the US, who knows? Kinda stupid to send money to a country I may have to be fighting against within a year.

Stop trying to make BRICS happen it’s not going to happen.

Also it sounds like you want BRICS to be a group of country where they don’t have freedom of speech? Why would this be a good thing?

It’s just all emotion and no rational thought now. People just go into outrage mode when certain topics are mentioned.

Really it opens a channel to criticize ICE without needing to logon to X to do so. But that’s bad because preventing communication is good?

Of course I doubt ICE will care about criticism directed towards their account on bluesky. But that means things said on the internet don’t have much of an effect on things, which means it doesn’t matter whether they’re on bluesky (or any other forum).

Mostly it’s about some weird belief by some about controlling what is being said on the internet gains power. You’d think the events that have happened would have proven this wrong, but still people continue to be upset about things being said on the internet and want some power over those things.

Really words on the internet don’t matter as much as people think, and the idea of blocking unwanted information is annoying at best and can lead to ignorance. What matters is the horrible acts ICE is doing. We should want more light being shown on them, and welcome any potential channel of discussion.

Wanting to prevent discussion indicates you feel you’re in the wrong. ICE is indicating they want discussion, while those that are outraged by ICE being on bluesky are indicating they don’t want discussion on ICE. Why would anyone want to make is seem ICE is in the right while they’re in the wrong? It’s people not thinking and only reacting emotionally and handing ICE a W because they are raging instead of thinking.

It also turns those that possesses it into complete psychopaths. Putin, MBS, Ayatollah fuckface that’s machine gunning down protesters right now.

People get cars that run on it believing that their lives will better. But those cars turn into a prisons that they want to escape and they rage at anyone that causes them have to be in their metal prison for even a few seconds longer. Then we build all of our infrastructure so many people have to sit in these metal prisons for hours every day raging at other people in their metal prisons. Then people go into a great amount of debt to pay for their metal prisons so have to work more years, requiring them to be in those metal prisons even longer.

Mountains of Madness…

Now Nintendo sues you if you call an ape in a video game “Kong”. Probably.

Didn’t I tell you before, ideology is for idiots.

Sure… but I don’t think there’s any particular malice towards people that build PCs. Just greed and incompetence. Gotta buy up GPUs that there isn’t enough electricity to run to drive up the share prices!

But when the bubble bursts and hardware gets cheap, is that something we’d considered to be goodwill towards people building PCs? Or will it just be a side-benefit of incompetence?

Just ebbs and flows of incompetence to me.

That implies there’s some thought behind this. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

But what’s the point of it then?

I guess if you have multiple computers you can access the files from either computers. But for people that just have one computer the whole thing seems kinda useless. And then MS forces people to use this product they have no need for by holding their computer ransom. People don’t want their files on One Drive, they only have it because MS forced it upon them.

This is like forcing a passenger to fly a 747 and then saying “well the plane crashed because of pilot error” and ignoring the fact that someone was forced some to be behind the controls of something they understand against their will.

For a home user, a backup service or just a way to share files actually makes more sense than something that mindlessly syncs file actions, including deletes. One Drive could be useful if it were what people expect it to be. As it is, it’s useless for most people, and bad on them for thinking MS One Drive was a useful product I guess.

Right… so what happens after I have to sell my shares to pay my rent? Or maybe my company does really well and your company doesn’t. My company is successful enough to expand, but fuck that, I’m not diluting the share value by hiring more employees that would get a share in the company. Or maybe new employees don’t get shares? After I retire do I get to keep the shares in the company? Is it legal for employees to sell the shares in the company? What’s the value of something that’s illegal to sell?

If there’s less demand for the products my company sells but still enough demand that the company could still function, but with fewer people, how is it decided which employee loses their jobs and which continues to be employed?

The “owning the means of production” thing isn’t actually feasible. When socialists that promise that get into power they invariably redefine the definition of that. Ultimately there’s going to be people that are making decisions that impact other people. Call it wealth, call it power, you either have someone calling the shots (and hopefully that person is fair) or you get tragedy of the commons everywhere.

1. I think ideologies are for the intellectually lazy. Different solutions are optimal for different problems. People thinking free markets for everything just want one simple solution for all problems they don’t want to think about which solution works best for individual problem. Same goes for people that that socialism for everything. It takes effort to find different solutions for each problem, so the intellectually lazy gravitate towards ideologies that claim one solution will solve all the problems. That’s never worked because it always winds up with telling an expert in a field they have to do things in a stupid way to conform to ideology.

2. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

You think Trump has done something worse than starting a war to preserve slavery in which about a million people died?

You have fucking slave masters carved into mountains (stolen from indigenous people during a genocidal campaign) down there FFS. Being American is all about pretending the past was some glorious thing, and believing you have real principles. It’s a nation founded by hypocrisy and you feel like you have to preserve the hypocrisy because somehow that’s the source of freedom and equality.

Americans only really care about wealth and power, and Trump has both. They’ll be carving his face into Rushmore (ignoring any protests of the indigenous people, because fuck them right?) within a few decades. This will be to express dominance over the people that don’t like Trump. A few decades after that they’ll be teaching kids in school how Trump was the greatest President in history because why else would they carve his face into a mountain. American history is just a tool for control, because you’re unable to question it. You worship Founding Father the same way they worship Big Brother in 1984.

You’re incapable of understanding of how things really work in your country because your country demands you believe in the hypocrisy it was all founded on. Everyone knows how stupid your country is just we never told you because it would be rude like telling a child Santa Claus isn’t real. But now you’re not an ally. Santa Claus isn’t real and Founding Father was a slave owning oppressor. Whatever rights and freedoms you had came from voting (just like everywhere else) over many years, but y’all either voted for a fascist or didn’t vote at all, so you’re losing all of the rights and freedoms you believed a magical piece of paper written by fucking slave masters granted to you.

At SpaceX there literally used to be a “Musk management department”, solely tasked with giving the imbecile random tasks that don’t affect mission critical stuff, and making sure he’s not saying absolutely moronic BS in interviews.

Kinda still is that way. Just that through graft he scammed NASA into giving that “Musk management department” billions of dollars to build 11 massive rockets which have all failed. But they do a lot of spin to claim half of them were successful.

The SpaceX that operates from Cape Canaveral still continues to do successful launches though. Now that Musk has burned through all of the money he scammed from NASA we’ll have to see if he starts pulling money from the wing of SpaceX that can actually launch things into space his stupid “Starship” project.

Yeah just like how all of those Civil War Generals were erased from history for betraying their country for the sake of preserving slavery.

Let’s be real. Americans are incapable of shame. As long as USA continues to exist, Trump’s actions will be whitewashed and there will be statues of him made in the future.

We’re not too far off given how many apps on my phone by default send notifications like “do you want to do this thing now?”

And so many interfaces that have been enshittified with pop ups wanting me to check out their new AI features.

A toaster constantly asking if I want toast is probably less annoying than a lot of technology now.

They’re protesting against Putin, not Putin’s lapdog.

Russia is falling apart, maybe after the next collapse you’ll learn that only weak people want authoritarians to rule over them. Or maybe you’re deluded into thinking having authoritarians rule over you will make you equals somehow?

When will Russians stop being so stupid?