CU and the lack of federal public funding for elections (by which I mean the state funds the campaigns of those who want federal offices) basically resulted in the US political class ending up fully in the pocket of the corporations.

That’s what absolutely destroyed our ability to elect anyone other than what the corporate doners want, and thus you end up with nothing but corporate-friendly politicians, and thus a whole bunch of people who have no problem with facism and well, here we are.

I seem to clearly remember a story from the Bible about this, but perhaps they’ve simply skipped that part during their reading?

This is also a royal pain if you’re into retro computers and want anything from like 2001-2004, because damn near every single motherboard from those eras need to be recapped, like, without exception. Either they’re dead, or they will be soon.

Super annoying to get a thing you want to play with and the first thing you have to do is replace 20 caps and spend 3 hours doing it before you can even see if it would otherwise even work, lol.

I had a discussion about using the Slashdot style voting rather than the Reddit style.

It not only has the additional tag, it has the max “upvote” display limit of 5, and the display code will expand and promote the best rated comments, while hiding the garbage.

I think comments on most forums would benefit from there being no ‘big upvote’ number to chase, as well as making the highest rated comments in a thread of say, 200, more obvious.

maybe that’s me being overly harsh

That’s actually probably fair: the M-chips are impressive, but they’re just an evolution that’s come out of the A-series stuff for their phones.

Which, of course, Apple bought and did not actually create. (I’ll let someone else argue the merits of buy vs do it yourself, especially when you give your aquisition endless R&D funds to make good shit.)

Seriously, they got so expensive so fast.

At this point, if I want a burger, I’ll go spend $11 at Chili’s and get an actually good burger, some chips, fries, and a drink.

Why would ANYONE who is not literally bereft of any other option go to McDonalds at this point?

He could sell his various parts as they fall off. What’s a trump toe worth you think?

ReactOS is cloning NT, so the 2000 part of that is correct.

95/98/98se/ME are completely different beasts, even if they happen to share the same GUI.

Listen, I can’t just not use Amazon. Where else am I going to get my SYPHILICHODE nail trimmers and LEAKCROTCH underwear?

You can’t just find horrible garbage to buy ANYWHERE, you gotta buy it on Amazon.

I can live without it for a week, but man, these underwear don’t last too long so I gotta keep buying more!

(/s in case this was not sufficiently clear, but this is the ultimate problem with all these pointless little internet symbolic gestures: nobody will notice, remember, or care about them since they’re only going to be a very minor stoppage in buying things, which everyone ends up buying ANYWAYS after the week is over.)

Hey, Tesla tires and wheels are suuuuuper expesnive relative to normal cars.

Like several hundred dollars per tire (or in the case of the fatty dumpster, like $600) becauase the cars are so heavy you can’t just use ye olde normal tires on them.

I would very much like EVERY tire and wheel thief to go after nothing but Teslas and leave everyone else alone. Better money, and absolutely nobody will ever recall seeing you steal shit.

I have an endless amount of respect for ANYONE that’s willing to swallow their pride and do shit like this when it’s in the interests of other people, their country, or whatever.

Takes an actual good human to go ‘fuck it, this guy is a complete piece of shit but I’m going to make nice because it’s what I need to do for others’.

Can’t imagine Musk or Trump or JD doing that, ever.

Hey if you’re near a Tesla storage lot, there probably IS a couple hundred cybertrucks nearby.

Sitting there, having their wheels stolen and rotting since nobody is buying them, but that’s still technically nearby.

Elon has always been a terrible person

The problem with Elon is he’s been provably an idiot for the past 25 years.

The first thing I ever heard about Musky is that back in 2000-ish he wanted PayPal to take their infra, throw out all the Linux/BSD in use, and move everything to Windows NT.

Anyone who was even remotely IT adjacent in that era can come along and tell you how utterly moronic that idea is.

Anytime I’ve ever heard him blather on about some stupid shit that doesn’t exist except in his delusions or talk about, well, ANYTHING technical or specialized all I was ever able to think of is that he got lucky that Thiel didn’t drain all of his blood and leave his corpse in a ditch.

Or do think, with their last gasp of breathable air, they curse the liberals and communists?

I would expect it would go something like “Dang woke DEI molotov cocktail, it’s trapped me in the master truck! Truly this is Obama’s fault.”

As a totally unrelated side note, I wonder how much thermite you’d need and where you’d need to place it to have it burn a hole through the car and into the battery, turning your cybertruck into a cyberfire.

A lot of this reads like you have, like all of us will, just kinda gotten old and aren’t into or interested in the same things you were 20 years ago.

But, while the magic does wear off, you also went back to the same kind of locations an expected your new adventures to measure up to your past adventures, and that’s a recipe for disaster because comparison is the theft of joy. Maybe you need to go to somewhere dramatically different, like perhaps Africa or the mountains in Chile or Bolivia?

(Also you sound shockingly bitter and come across in text as more than a little grumpy, and people can pick up that aura so uh, some of this might also be on you.)

But, I also wonder if people are using meta or x platforms to do the exact same thing?

Absolutely. And they’re using Youtube, Fediverse platforms, old-fashioned forums, and anything else that you can have user-generated content posted on it.

TikTok is being singled out because the real story of ‘every platform has CSAM and CSAM for sale’ is not very palatable for the oligarchs that own the platforms, and it’s much simpler to point to a foreign-owned platform as “the problem” and not the ones they run/invest in.

until you were able to watch porn

You mean you never watched 3gpp encoded 240p porn over WAP sites via a java browser on your dumb phone?

…what? Stop judging me.

“I don’t like cold war relics!” declares man currently sucking on Vladimir Putin’s dick.

how something like Zen

Zen is a Firefox fork.

What’s hilarious to me is that this was totally a Thing when I was younger.

Not for measels, because we weren’t braindead dumbfucks, but for chickenpox.

You’d have whole groups of kids get together to have everyone get sick at once, instead of one kid at a time for months and months as it spreads through classes at school.

IDK if it made sense, but it was legit a thing that people were doing.

Of course, there’s a vaccine now, so if you’re still doing this you’re one of the aformentioned braindead dumbfucks.