Someone complains about one specific thing not being free. You:

I don’t know why people expect to get **everything **for free

Since you've started down the road of what people are and are not allowed to do: you are not allowed to participate in discussions if you can't avoid making shitty logical fallacies in your very first response.

Manuel Vonau

From his bio on that site (https://www.androidpolice.com/author/manuel-vonau/):

Manuel studied Media and Culture studies in Düsseldorf, finishing his university career with a master's thesis titled "The Aesthetics of Tech YouTube Channels: Production of Proximity and Authenticity." His background gives him a unique perspective on the ever-evolving world of technology and its implications on society. He isn't shy to dig into technical backgrounds and the nitty-gritty developer details, either.

So he's a marketing guy with possibly zero tech background beyond watching YouTube videos, who isn't afraid to discuss "nitty-gritty developer details" despite apparently not actually understanding them.

twitter is where most people are

Twitter is gone. There is only X.

According to Musk, there are 556m monthly active "users". A year ago Musk commissioned a study that found at least 11% of active users on Twitter were bot accounts. There's plenty of reason to believe that that percentage has only gone up, especially in light of the fact that there's been a significant exodus of users due to Musk's handling of the platform, and that at the time of the study there were about 368m users. So either 200m people who were previously uninterested in Twitter were so impressed by how Musk systematically made X less functional and more expensive, or bot accounts became massively more prevalant.

Regardless, with a global adult population of 8+ billion, in no world is 556m "most people", even ignoring the bots. Facebook has 3b monthly active users. Tiktok 1b. Instagram 2b.

As for the rest of the argument, the idea that the only way for extremist voices can be held in check is to politely engage them in rational discussion is sadly nonsense. They're extremists. They aren't interested in rational discussion. The only way to hold them in check is to deplatform them, whether literally or just by the old fashioned method of social ostracism.

Your right about them not necessarily relying on the spice melange, but they do rely on the juice of the sapho root to accelerate their thoughts and increase their processing speed. So yeah, they're still on drugs :)

I've got a slightly different version of this problem. I work from home, and if my wife drives my car out of or into the driveway while I'm on a call, even if I'm in my office in the basement, my phone will disconnect my earbuds and route my audio to my car.

So do you just assume everyone lives within convenient travel distance of a wide variety of shops that would supply everything that they could possibly want, or are you claiming moral superiority because you shop at Walmart instead of online at Amazon?

The real problem here is that Twitter/X user’s data can be easily revealed by organizations.

The publicly posted data being easily revealed by organizations is a problem?

I don't think its too uncommon for tourist areas to try to pressure tourists to pay with foreign currency that has a favorable exchange rate to the local currency. That way they can make extra money by quoting a figure in USD (or other currency) that they know they can exchange for much more than the regular cost in local currency. If pressured with "I don't have USD, so its either local currency or I go elsewhere" they'll usually give in and accept local currency.

Edit: More likely it is simply because Egypt's local currency is in a terrible state, so USD is much less likely to lose value: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/05/the-egyptian-pound-is-amongst-the-worst-performing-currencies-in-2023.html

altered carbon was a disaster

Personally, I loved it. I just wish they'd make a second season.

So comments calling Michelle Obama an ape, or a meme making fun of burning LGBTQ+ people, aren't hate speech, they're just "edgy"? Cool. "Remember when God burned a whole bunch of gays? Good times!" is about as textbook "hate speech" as you can get, but you keep working on how to excuse it as "humor".

Regardless, the fact that you're subbed to exactly 2 of the hundreds of communities on that server does not make your personal experience a valid representation or defense of admin/moderator policies and actions from that server. If the community takes the stance of "fuck them" and advocates that "admin’s keep their edgy content on alt accounts and in communities that pussy instances can just block", then they're absolutely going to be a continuing source of problems. If you really want to see their content so badly, you can create a login on another server that hasn't defederated them (including their own server). That's how this whole things works.

I actually agree a bit that the original "cry baby" response you got seemed a bit excessive, but the more you talk, the more it seems to have perfectly identified you.

"The paradox of tolerance is grossly misused these days to censor any opposing viewpoint" Patently false. It is used to censor viewpoints that are intolerant. Aka hate speech.

"The entire point of free speech is the allowance of viewpoints you vehemently disagree with, and to let reason and discourse sway opinion one way or the other"
Only according to the people who think racism, bigotry, homophobia, etc., are just "opinions" that might potentially triumph in reasonable discourse. Everyone else (i.e. everyone who isn't human garbage) understands that "freedom of speech" means "not having to worry about government persecution for dissenting opinions" instead of "I should be able to say whatever I want, whenever I want to, without ever having to face any consequences".

So you're arguing that the claims of hate speech on that instance are overblown because you've seen exactly two posts, neither of which you consider hate speech?

Cool story.

I was being a bit sarcastic, because season 1 was fantastic, but season 2 was (IMHO) absolutely terrible. I couldn't finish it.

So did you just skip the first half of my comment, or did you not understand the words?

Newsflash: not everyone in America lives in a major urban area where a wide variety of shops are available, let alone small independent shops. I live 30 minutes from the nearest city, which is a small city. There's a huge amount of products that are not available in either my immediate area or even in the closes city. I don't mind paying extra to avoid major chains, and I typically look elsewhere before resorting to Amazon, but paying extra and spending 2+ hours in a car to avoid Amazon is not a viable alternative.

If you're going to talk about the "natural state of things", then I assume you simply go out into the nearest forest, cut down a tree, and build whatever you need using the assortment of stone tools you've hand crafted?

How do the other countries find out about the diagnosis? Are you expected to self-disclose?

Hats off to the downvoter who read this and apparently thought to themselves "hell no! 556 million is a lot more than 3 billion, and definitely more than half of 8 billion!!!"

"You cannot forbid people to think in a way that does not correlate with your ideas."

Typical attempt to misrepresent the actual topic at hand.

Yes, you can't police what people think. But you absolutely can (and should) impose consequences when people express what they think in such a way that demonstrates that they're garbage.

For the umpteenth time: freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. If you want to say hateful and offensive things, then expect people to not want to hear anything you say.

That's correct. The indicator light was pretty obvious.

I always found it fascinating how upset people get about the idea of a novel device recording them without permission, but it is a complete non-issue that a familiar device (the common smart phone) could also record them without permission with less of a chance of them noticing.

Do you understand how much effort you're putting into being "right" rather than having an actual discussion?

For context, you started with "EV is bad because it uses coal", implying that it is worse than ICE vehicles (somehow).

Then you had to change it to "EV is bad because it uses non-renewable energy."

Then you had to change it to "EV is bad because it uses non-renewable energy and renewable energy, but not really much renewable energy."

Then you had to change it to "EV is bad because outside of California, which doesn't count (for some reason), it uses non-renewable energy and renewable energy, but not really much renewable energy."

Now that someone is pointing out that other places besides California use significant amounts of renewable energy, your argument has become "I only will accept arguments that provide citations, even though my own various, shifting arguments, have provided none."

This is in no way a good look for you.

I'm not avoiding Islay. It's just that my current collection is exclusively Islay, and I want to start exploring some of the other options. I've had some unpeated whiskies, but so far none of them have really ticked all the boxes for me so to speak.

Classic Laddie is one I want to try, simply because I really like Port Charlotte 10 year and am curious to see what else Bruichladdich puts out.

Thanks for the other recommendations, too. I'm particularly interested in the Penderyn. I was just in Wales (Cardiff) a couple of months ago, and skipped the local options in favor of seeking out Islay options I hadn't tried yet, but I'm regretting that decision.