And most franchises are required to purchase their raw ingredients from the parent corporation, which means that even if they choose to be flexible on their prices their baseline costs are still set by a global conglomerate.

I wouldn’t expect people who don’t have the self-discipline needed to cook a frozen pizza in the oven to be capable of organizing a large-scale national rebellion.

It’s called shucking and it happens a lot especially in the home server home lab community.

Every once in awhile it crosses my mind that if I just gave up my morals I could make so much fucking money.

The difference between me being a middle-class American and me being filthy fucking rich is every day I wake up and I choose not to defraud every single person I possibly can of their money.

I feel like I should get a little thank you now and again, because I could be the greatest monster you’ve ever seen but instead I’m just a nobody and I don’t think I get nearly enough appreciation for my service.

And you could also look at the real world. We have boost air.

I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high.

You’re thinking like you are the customer and the customer is always right, so if you pay for a service it should provide you what you want, right?

This is not that scenario.

You are not the customer. You are a product that is being sold to advertisers. It does not matter if you also pay them money, you are still the product. If you pay them money on top of being sold then you are just an especially profitable product.

Paying them money will not cause you to cease being a product, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.

If you use a different company’s product that starts off with you being the customer, eventually, they will learn that they can make more money by selling you to other people, and they will.

I don’t know if you’re from the states but if you are purchasing mega millions or Powerball tickets, they stop sales at about 6:45 p.m. Pacific time and then do the drawing sometime after 7:00 of the same day.

I interpreted it as you would repeat the exact same day 365 times, not that you would repeat the exact same year over and over again.

I would take the +3 charm and groundhog Day for a year. It would be really awesome to have 3 charm instead of 0, and if I could repeat Tuesday for an entire year then I could learn skills and practice things and read a bunch of books and memorize and establish a plan to purchase a winning lottery ticket, not excessive but maybe like the mega millions I don’t know, and come out of the year into Wednesday with nine figures in my bank account and a clear plan of action.

“Jack of all trades, master of none, often times better than a master of one”.

There are tools that allow people who buy ads to compare the performance of their ads with their own metrics.

The more ineffectual an ad platform is, the less likely ad purchasers are to purchase ads.

If 20% of American internet users used ad nauseam it would cause significant financial damage to ad companies across the globe.

I think the last really big hurdle to an actually democratized internet is that we need to make it easier to host at home.

Asymmetrical download upload is such a fucking pain. I would rather have 100 down and 100 up then 400 down and 5 up like I currently do.

On top of that, there aren’t a lot of good systems in place to enable me to host a website from home. If IPv6 were common it would be easy for me to secure a static IP address and to point that to my DNS resolver and attach my domain, but since I’ve got to be on an ipv4 system since no provider in my area provides an on-ramp to IPv6 and even if they did the Grand majority of Internet users cannot resolve IPv6 addresses, it’s dead in the water.

If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home, we could get rid of the grand majority of the content provider and hosts and instead use democratized systems like bluesky and Kbin and Mastodon and free tube without having to worry about these multi trillion dollar companies’ bottom lines.

I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.

And dear Jesus don’t forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.

Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.

If you’re not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.

Don’t forget, there is a large and worldwide vested interest in maintaining online divisiveness.

The internet has become our global hearth. The grand majority of humanity participate in the internet to communicate with each other for conversation, connectedness, and social expression.

This is very bad for authoritarian regimes, whether they are currently in power or attempting to enter into power or attempting to expand their power.

Should someone do something that is considered “bad”, information about that will spread around the world as fast as a lie ever could.

To prevent that from hampering their schemes, the smart thing to do would be to poison the source. If you hate everyone on the internet because you have been effectively compromised by psychological poison, then you will not trust the people on the internet that you communicate with when they tell you something bad has happened.

Therefore, the mote of power you could add to collective action is rendered ineffective.

And, the interesting thing is they don’t have to fool everybody. They only have to fool enough of us that our own internal division prevents effective action.

I never really believed in a devil growing up, but if I did believe in a devil now, I would definitely say that this is one of his activities.

What did you say? Why does this look like hieroglyphics?

You are right, but it is very simple for phones to convert spoken word to text and sending text information back and forth is very lightweight on data usage. So it’s not happening, but it could happen.

What friend, you’re afraid to learn a little Russian?

The sad thing is it’ll probably start with infinite anime. There are so many currently existing manga that could be quickly and easily adapted to a full anime given the proper AI backing that it could take you years just to catch up.

Our great grandkids will probably be watching Spotify remixes of aitv shows recommended to them by influencers paid for by micro10gapplesoft

Counterpoint:

Thanks to streaming we don’t spend quite as much time thinking about the media we consume and the deeper meanings and subtext and generating internal fanfictions about what could possibly be coming up in the next episode a week from now.

Streaming makes media easier to consume but fills it with culturally empty calories.

The grand majority of conversation I see about a show is, “Have you seen _? No? You should totally watch _, it’s really good!” Or alternatively, “Yeah, it’s great isn’t it?”

Since Netflix came out we’ve definitely taken one step down the ladder rung closer to Idiocracy ass movies.

Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you’re good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.

Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.

Jack is minimally lossy. It would change the audio just from the DAC operation and the noise floor but otherwise be pretty good.