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?

affordable thrift store items

This has slowly become less and less true.

The big corpo thrift stores have long since had pricing that exceeds reasonable: a 10 year old shirt with some event printed on it is not $9.99, when I can go to any of a dozen retailers and just… buy a new one, often for less.

Smaller ones aren’t quite there yet, but smaller ones also tend to put more effort into fishing anything good in their donation streams out and posting it on ebay, so you end up with a store full of what is, quite literally, just trash.

The last wardrobe refresh I did I ended up buying almost entirely new or used from like eBay because the pricing at Goodwill, Salvation Army, and a couple of local thrift stores were at best similar and at worse wildly stupid.

The days when you could get a $0.99 shirt and $1.99 pants if you went on the correct color day are pretty much entirely dead, because capitalists going to capital, even if they’re literally profiting directly off stuff people are giving them for free.

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.

His advice was always bad.

Somehow, and I don’t get how, he got a reputation for “common sense” financial stuff.

He always was the 10%-to-the-church type which is just braindead if you’re financially strapped: the Jeeesus can live without your money, but your family probably can’t.

Also he’s a sexist, homophobic and probably racist piece of shit (since those come in threes) so really, no reason to do anything other than pretend he doesn’t exist and try to save cult members.

If your retirement window is 5 years, you’re probably very very fucked.

If it’s 10 years, as long as you’re assuming social security is going to contribute $0, you’re probably still pretty fucked.

15 years? Maybe, but at that point that whole global climate change thing we’re ignoring is going to start getting more serious, so I’d wager on fucked.

20? Please, you’re already in the trenches of the Water Wars, so your retirement plan is machine gun when you go over the top, sorry.

Basically retirement is going to be you dying once your insurance lapses and someone coming along later to pick your corpse up and billing your family for doing so.

(I’d love to be proven wrong, but ‘What’s the worst most awful thing that could possibly happen’ seems to be the right choice these days.)

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.

Hey, I live near that McDonalds!

It’s right across from the Dallas Zoo, so you can imagine that there was a not insubstantial traffic of kids leaving the zoo and getting a McNasty with Cheese with their parents.

Everyone around here hated that they turned something fun and unique into another corpo hell hole of blandness, so there’s that at least.

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.