FriendOfDeSoto

Tried it with VPN on and on Vivaldi on Android and it works just fine. I think you have another gremlin in your setup.

On top of that you could argue that Latvia and Germany are probably more favorable regardless in terms of them enjoying largely functioning rule of law.

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

Because I swipe typed it and didn’t give it another thought. I’m gonna leave it as is so your comment continues to make sense here and thank you for the correction.

In my Venn diagram, “advertize” is a smaller circle wholly surrounded by “promote.” “Advertize” suggests to me there is a marketing effort with paid ads or something like that behind it. It’s simultaneously promoting whatever but promotion can be much broader. Preference doesn’t really come into it.

I find none of these arguments convincing. You have the right to vote. Unless you’re in Australia that means you can just not go vote also. That’s your choice.

Voter turnout has an influence on the vote share the extremes of the political spectrum get. If you’re on the extreme, you tend to go vote for your cause because you found your calling. So if enough people in the middle choose not to participate, you’ll end up with difficult majorities and/or more extreme governments. The latter is also true if either extreme is convincing many of the people in the middle. And that’s where tactical voting comes in. That’s why I would personally lean towards a “go vote and vote for the best of the worst if nothing fits well” approach. But I wouldn’t elevate this to the level of an ‘electoral imperative’ because it is a personal choice.

Somebody is going to jump into this. But I would keep my eyes open beyond just the Chinese market. Vietnam and Thailand are interesting places to watch. V because of the relative sweetheart deal with the trumpist of tariffs. And T because they already do a lot of SSD manufacturing. And China, more than any other country, will be at the mercy of a particular person’s bowel movements on Pennsylvania Ave.

You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they’re in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don’t like billboards. You’re going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.

Online ads are insufferable. I’m running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I’m also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.

The problem online is the cause of the problem. It’s the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It’s also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything ‘for free.’ Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a “militarization” of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.

Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.

The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.

Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.

Btw everybody thinks they’re immune to advertising. And we’re not.

The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.

And just for some context here: personally I don’t mind billboard ads to be honest.

I think the abundance of tools available to block ads online hints at a movement in itself. We don’t need a leader or a central committee.

The wrinkle I see here is that a generalized ‘everybody’ hates ads but ‘everybody’ is also aware of the fact that they finance a large swath of stuff that we would have to pay for otherwise.

None of those ch’s are guttural and you skipped an h;)

The delightful thing is that it works in reverse also: ask a native English speaker to pronounce “Eichhörnchen.”

Best boss I ever had.

It’s an assumption that many people will be unemployed and unemployable in other functions. So far, every big change (like the Industrial Revolution or the advent of computers in the workplace) have lead to temporary displacements, and the longer ago it happened violent side effects. But in the big picture, we have found ways to put the human resource back into the machine. Accountants were supposed to go extinct with the arrival of Microsoft Excel. But their numbers have increased because they can do more useful things with their time than doing the math. The assumption may be more fear mongering. (And it’s too early to tell if you ask me.)

So I don’t think they will kill us off just yet because it isn’t entirely clear that we’re not needed. It’s also possible that so-called AI frees up people and resources that can be channeled into what are chronically underfunded professions today, like teaching or medical care. We have a tendency to think in Matrix or 1984 terms of the future when more positive outcomes exist.

Etar allows notifications after an event has started. In your example you would have to do the math in your head but you could make it work.

In kennels in different houses 500 miles apart.

By physically separating them until they’re all done with puberty.

As an aside, not all siblings hate each other. Or what feels like hate growing up dissipates quickly when they reach adulthood.

The thought behind the post is worthwhile to ponder and discuss.

Personally, I don’t think it’s as dire as the text makes it seem. The speculation that a steadfast refusal of showing text only on PF might lead the AP protocol guardians to include a dummy pic in every post seems to me to be in the “possible but outlandish” category.

If the premise of AP was that every user should be able to see everything everywhere then defederating from certain instances shouldn’t be possible. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

The tree of the fediverse is big and nobody needs to saw off any branches. A picture only branch can sit next to a hypothetical text only one. I can see an argument that newbies to those particular branches could be more explicitly made aware of the filtering they will experience. While I was reading the text about the users who thought they saw everything from Mastodon on PF, my first thought was: this strains credulity. But then again, users are dumb. I hadn’t realized for a while that shared posts don’t show up in my PF feed on the app either.

I don’t think anybody could become too big for their breeches on the fediverse because the fediverse is in no position to challenge the incumbent corporate platforms. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here and on Mastodon (and on PF). But if you come from those polished centrally organized platforms and you’re not willing to invest at least a little bit of time into learning how federating works (also refer to users are dumb above), you’ll already be disappointed and put off before you realize you now need to also become your own algorithm. The threat scenario that PF could become so big that it can dictate protocol also presupposes that AP is the protocol that will endure forever. And with AT it already has a competitor waiting in the wings. As I said up top, the thought about how one dominating branch could damage the whole tree is worthwhile. But in a dramatic shift from this metaphor: we are in no position to have to cross this bridge any time soon.

Another reason why PF won’t be getting out the chainsaw is its usability. It’s only great for looking at pictures. It’s terrible for having discussions about them unless you only use the website. I’m using the Android app and it’s not great. Features came and went. The UI leaves a lot to be desired for me. It currently feels a bit abandoned because Dansup is more preoccupied with challenging TikTok. I still like PF because I go there just to look at pictures. I go to Mastodon for memes and dry remarks. And I don’t feel like I’m breaking the protocol.

This image may be a bit wonky but convenience stores don’t go out of business just because 24h supercenters exist. They both exchange ice cream for money but one of them has a bigger selection of flavors. PF is 7/11, Mastodon is Walmart.

[Icey breath] No.

I can see dead people.