If you would have bought a basement full of canned food somewhere shortly before corona or shortly before the russians went full loco in ukraine, it would have been a top tier investment. And if it wouldn’t have been, they don’t go bad fast and you can still eat them :') In high inflation environment, buying stuff instead of stacking money can make sense indeed.

Better in many regards but for sure not all. Airships could run a lot more quietly for example, that has some value. Until they explode ofcourse, that’s rather loud.

Some solar panels on top of the balloon, nowadays you can even create your H on the go from the H2O in the air!

Budgeting? White PVC windows are cheapest, you pay extra for colors.

I think this hard divider in history is a false narrative. In a sense, the current war, is a continuation of the USSR falling apart, and exactly 1 of those quickly made treaties is to blame: the one that de-nuked ukraine in return for safety guarantees.

In this age of contraception, it’s more a matter of wanting to reproduce (and how often) rather than merely being able to. I can’t shake off the impression that less educated people are reproducing at a way higher pace, producing many offspring of which in before times many would not have reached reproduction themselves, but now they do.

Are the Swiss really that cheap they’re saving on a .ch and settling for a .de?

So… just making sure I am understanding this properly: centralized service monopoly by one government backed provider…? Doesn’t that got quite a communist ring to it?

I don’t think you’re very sincere, but I’ll try to explain how this is not communism and how this works in many countries.

People still have to pay for using the service. Depending on how often they ride, how far they go, etc. A fair, yet subsidised price. What the government does is create a “scenario”, a map if you like, with dots and lines and wishes and logical connections on which likely many people travel often. They identify which cities, which services, etc they want connected, and basically write out a TENDER to which many PRIVATE COMPANIES can participate. Sometimes, it’s a 1 take it or leave it big package deal. Sometimes, it’s split into a “main network” which will be run by a state controlled company, and local and regional networks, for which tenders are created and for which different companies can participate. They usually “win” a tender for quite many years at once, because it costs a lot of effort and money to get services started. It is quite far away from communism. But is does force a private company to not only exploit the few very most profitable connections, and ignoring all the others. Which is exactly what Uber is aiming for: only the profitable lines, 0 others. In a point of view from a society as a whole standpoint: it is still valuable to have more people use the bus instead of their own car, for many reasons, even on lines that are not profitable but require subsidies, for example also because it is still a lot more economical. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper for 20% of people using the bus, than to build yet even more highways and lanes and force people to buy their own vehicles. On top of that, it is the governments’ job to deliver basic services to all people. That is what we pay taxes for. What good is a hospital, a library, a school, if the people who very much need it, for example people too impaired to drive a vehicle and too poor to pay uber, can’t reach these services? Busses make sense, subsidised busses often make sense (not always, some places overdo it running empty busses too often), Uber is for sure not in it for providing a service to society, they are in it for destroying the service system for all and only taking the profit from some and fuck other people.

It stands out, it’s recognizable. I guess that works for some people, I personally think it’s ugly. I stylewise somewhat get that the low-poly idea has an appeal to people, but then the no rounded corners and the choice of material totally kills it for me.

they will try to crack down on it either way, might as well go out with a fight. The more popular it is to use adblocking and the less niche weirdo psycho, the less “normal” it is for whatever shit they wanna do, however far they want to go to literally force bullshit into your brain wether you want it or not.

Do you want cookies? Do you want to share your details with 1049 trusted data partners?

They click this thing once. 1 time only for years of “not being bothered by it” (that they notice actively).

I agree it’s total shit but it is from a regular user point of view, easier to use the “i agree” button on most of that stuff once, than to try to avoid it. Constantly on the same few websites anyhow.

Still doesn’t explain the no ad-block for me though, it’s a whole lot easier on the mind to browse ad-free, it is well worth the tiny effort of using ff and activating ublock…

Might be easiest to hack it together yourself with an rpi and a camera? Seriously, I don’t think you can really trust any manufacturer of an Internet (wifi) capable camera device to not try to gather sweet sweet data.

Uber will only cherry pick profitable routes for profitable customers, stealing them from public transport which will become more expensive as a result. Public transport is a public service available to everyone for a fair price. Uber is not public transport. Uber starting busservice somehow signals they want to move into that space, but they will never be servicing the poorest towns. Parts of PT being privatised by uber probably is bad news for bus passengers on less popular routes.

I still see one party racing with arms and one party trying to survive.

Not sure if arms race is the right way to put it when 1 side is deploying nukes and the other is only deploying shields. Money ruined the internet, ads is just one way how it did that.

a design that throws any modern safety feature in designing overboard is a bad design. It’s ugly, and it will age even uglier. It’s an incredibly dangerous design for anyone not inside it, it should be banned.

hah menus looked cooler than the game itself

There is always a (hidden) power struggle right beneath the big boss of any organisation.

There’s still different approaches to it though. The default industrial gigantic monocultures with massive aquifer drilling is for sure missing a few delayed, less visible costs in the equation. “Improve industrial farming, adjust it back to a more normal scale and add some diversity between the fields and rotate crops!” just isn’t a very catchy slogan I guess.

How much would we save if we’d somehow be able to debloat and deshittify the Internet and all devices? Climate impact, overconsumption of unnecessary crap, mental health care…