I'm guessing from the unlimited money hose that was Silicon Valley venture capital.

Problem is, and the reason we're hearing about this now, the money is being redirected to AI, and all these negative income companies don't have enough capital to keep going.

That's why it seems like the entire Internet is going to shit all at once. The corporate money that tried to monopolize everything we access online has been cut off.

But the good news is that compute, bandwidth , and storage has gotten cheap enough to host powerful FOSS alternatives ourselves.

I'm cautiously hopeful this leads to a golden era of the open Internet.

I buy steam games, even ones I've already pirated, for a few reasons.

• Quick and easy downloads

• Seamless updates

• Almost all my other purchased games in one place.

• Cloud saves

• Durability, just knowing my games will be available to download on my next PC for the foreseeable future.

And I pirate just about everything I watch mainly because I'm not willing to play musical subscriptions to watch the shows I want to see at the end of a long day.

If the film industry had a service that offered a similar experience to a Plex share, I'd pay quite a bit for it. But instead they have this system designed to extract maximum value from every viewer, and I'm tired of it.

Gabe Newell was right on the money when he said piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.

For many people, Google controls the entire network stack from their ISP, router, OS, DNS, their browser, all the way down to the platform hosting the content they watch.

Google has captured such a wide part of the Internet that any changes they make will have at least a moderate effect on our lives. Even if we don't use any Google services.

The only thing that can stop them is probably the EU at this point. And I'm sure Google has a plan for that.

She's speaking to those who get all their "news" from alt-right sources. But if you haven't been paying attention to alt-right media, none of this will make sense.

I'm not sure it's an effective campaign strategy, because as we've seen, the broader public doesn't understand the intended message behind these convoluted narratives. And the people who do understand them were never going to vote for a democrat in the first place.

Hey, you know the only perk you get with Reddit Premium that isn't available through a free browser extension?

Yeah that's going away in 60 days.

It will be replaced with something so awful we dare not mention it while people are still pissed off about the other popular thing we killed with little notice.

We here at the Reddit management understand you have concerns about the destruction of the global hub of collaboration, but you'll get over it.

Peace!

Fortunately that doesn't work.

Even if Musk totally shut down Twitter, then opened an identical platform named X, the contracts Twitter held are still enforceable under the law.

There might be stipulations in the contracts where severance isn't payable if the company fails, but if I remember correctly, this severance is something mandated by state law, and not just a contractual perk.

So bottom line, Musk is liable unless his lawyers are able to worm their way into a settlement.

The real danger behind Chat Control and similar measures, is that countries won't even have to utilize parallel construction anymore. No longer will dragnet surveillance mostly target the big guys. They'll be able to basically automate prosecution of any crime that they desire.

Think about how many little slices have been taken out of our freedom pie over the last 10 years. How many similar dystopian laws have passed despite our outrage?

Technology is outpacing our ability to protect ourselves, and countries will keep pushing boundaries until nothing is left sacred.

Oppression never sleeps.

I got a message saying I apparently have premium and/or coins, and to use them before they expire.

But, even before the Reddit plague I had no way of even knowing that, because I used old Reddit and RiF.

Anyway, my point is that this change only affects official Reddit app users, and new Reddit users.

So Reddit found a way to take stuff away from the users who weren't directly affected by the third-party app shutdowns.

It's a genius way to make sure everyone is pissed off all at once.

I've flipped flopped my consensus about the game a couple times, but my conclusion is this...

Starfield is not going to be what you expected from Skyrim in space, at first. It will seem weird and claustrophobic and broken.

But if you give yourself a bit to acclimate to the world they've built, there is a surprisingly engaging game underneath.

I believe they've left most planets barren on purpose, so they can easily shove DLC wherever they want for the next 10 years.

"New facehugger planet, 20 hours of exciting quests and valuable loot! - $29.99"

That's 100% going to happen.

The guy above definitely could have left the politics out of that comment, since there's nothing more bipartisan than rich people fucking the working class.

That's how it's supposed to work, but in many counties the bondsman doesn't actually front any cash to the court, and they don't get charged if the suspect runs. They operate as a sort of slush fund for the owners, the officials, and the cops.

So these companies are often just another way to siphon money from people accused of a crime.

Super shady stuff.

Trump has such a large fanatical following that it's almost certain the next Republican president will use a Trump pardon as a poker chip for gaining party support on whatever plan he needs pushed.

So personally I think it's almost certain Trump will be pardoned.

But it's possible he could die in prison before that happens.

I've been wondering why this isn't talked about more.

All those commercial mortgages are intertwined with banks, and retirement accounts, and all sorts of "stable" investments.

Plus it's not just the offices directly affected by pandemic remote work that aren't renewing their leases. New companies wont lease a building since it's not expected anymore, and big companies will be counting the beans to see how much they can save by reducing office space.

This is a phase shift in commercial real estate that I don't think banks have budgeted for.

I'm sure everyone on wall street knows it's coming, but if they can act surprised and get another bailout in a major crash, that's just going to cost you and me our futures, again.

I'm just guessing here, but due to the expensive safety, security, disposaal, and political requirements, big reactors are likely going to be the most cost effective for a long time.

Sounds like a town so devoid of life that it would be more productive to just let it collapse.

There's a bunch of tiny rural towns that have basically no jobs and no real reason to exist anymore.

Globalization was not kind to rural America. And people listen to snake oil salesmen like Trump because he's the only one talking at them with a distorted compassion.

Exactly what I was thinking.

That guy isn't making any big decisions behind the scenes. He's just being puppeteered until he dies.

For example...

Go look at your local Walmart and it's bazillion products. They expect to sell almost everything in that store multiple times within a month. All that generates enormous waste on a scale that's literally impossible for the earth to sustain for another 100 years without total ecological collapse.

We're living in the single most polluting decade in human history, every decade, since all of us were born. Even if the entire Lemmy user base become subsistence farming monks, the factories would just keep churning out poison unphased.

I'm not saying it's bad for people to try and consume more responsibly. I'm just saying it doesn't make a difference over any meaningful time period until there's a radical change in how our global economy functions.

Environmental catastrophe will continue until we literally cannot ignore it, only then will we do anything substantial about it. Unfortunately that's just how our society works.

I can't fathom why these media companies still love to do exclusivity agreements. There's no way it's more profitable than just allowing everyone to watch your show from any service, with commissions for the number of views.

I'd probably start paying for a streaming service again if I could watch every show in one place. But I'm not interested in playing musical subscriptions.

Cashier: "So, uh... Why are you returning this?"

Serial Return Activist: "Because I have to use Chrome to install the device, and I don't want to use Chrome because of browser monopoly and privacy concerns."

Cashier: "Got it."

Checks box marked 'Found A Lower Price'

Plenty of real people are quite aware of our current issues, they just get drowned out online.