There must be capitalists or economists who can see that we've made the switch from low-hanging-fruit consumption to self-consumption. Cory Doctorow obviously sees it, but he's neither. Tyler Cowen or Nassim Taleb maybe? Has either written about this phenomenon? Cowen has The Great Stagnation, which is Part 1. Taleb has Incerto, but I've only read part of book 1. Does he write about the shift to self-consumption?
By "self-consumption" I really mean consumption of all the goodwill built up during the low hanging fruit phase. The shift happened during the period of low interest rates between 2008 and 2020. A lot of people noticed the old Internet was "dead" by 2015. That's because dominance had fully shifted to Apple and Google by that point, and they stopped competing. By 2020 the goodwill had largely run out. Now we're into a period of full-blown theft.
@sarajw I do think people are starting to jump. From streaming to piracy. From food delivery to picking up their own food or making it at home. From Google to searching directly in Wikipedia, Reddit, Amazon, or just asking on social media. I just use taxis or the bus rather than Uber or Lyft these days. Hotels instead of Airbnb.
People are keeping their cars for much longer than they were. They're living with parents or roommates instead of working more hours (or at all).
Young people worldwide are just saying no thanks. They're not believing the promises of earlier generations anymore, that they'll be rewarded for hard work. Because they won't; the fruits of their labor will go to pay the debts incurred by earlier generations.
There's no standard definition for the point at which an attack on a target within Russia becomes a "direct attack" by NATO, any more than NATO couldn't interpret an attack by a Russian proxy as an attack by Russia. The US is risking nuclear war, and to what end?
I think it's unlikely Russia would use nukes if that would alienate their allies, so I'd look very closely at what countries like China say about this. China is the only country with a "no first use" policy, but I can imagine that changing as they contemplate the potential for conflict with the US over Taiwan.
Turns out leaked documents show that Russia's threshold for use of nuclear weapons may be lower than they've ever stated publicly. Which kind of makes sense for a country which is relatively weak militarily but has lots of nuclear weapons. Especially tactical nukes.
"Criteria for a potential nuclear response range from an enemy incursion on Russian territory to more specific triggers, such as the destruction of 20 per cent of Russia’s strategic ballistic missile submarines."
Soon the telescope platform at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile will look very different at night: all four of the 8.2 m telescopes of the VLT will be equipped with lasers! This is one of the ongoing upgrades of the GRAVITY+ instrument, which will allow us to study black holes, stars and planets like never before.
@astro_jcm I managed to see a guide star operating at Lick Observatory once. Photos show a bright yellow beam, but I was only able to see it in my peripheral vision. Very cool to see this perfectly straight yellow beam projecting upward from the dome!
#Obama should have codified #Roe as promised. #Biden should have codified Roe as promised. Campaigning on the Court is a ploy to GOTV and to raise more campaign cash:
“We really need a book titled ‘Those Who Knew Roe Was Never Enough and the the SC would overturn Roe.’ There are thousands such people.”
@mloxton Good thing we had an old white man to give his opinion! I sure don't hear enough old white man opinions! Especially from old white men who were privileged enough to go to medical school!
OF COURSE you favor incremental change! Heaven forbid we should disrupt your cushy old white doctor life so people who aren't as privileged can have better lives today instead of waiting for maybe their great great grandchildren to have better lives!
JFC go back to Twitter. And take your whole fucking instance with you.
@mloxton As others are telling you, it does not. If it did, I would expect it to be people in less privileged positions than yours defending incrementalism. But strangely it's almost entirely old rich white dudes.
I'm also an old rich white dude, and I can see clearly that it's not working. The world is cooking, we're on the verge of WWIII, millions are starving worldwide, the US is facilitating a genocide, and the major American parties are virtually indistinguishable from one another, particularly when it comes to foreign policy and immigration policy.
I used to totally buy into the hype that capitalism and "liberal" "democracy" were great for everyone. That's been gradually changing for a while now, but it was really watching Biden adopt a bunch of policies Democrats had been vilifying Trump for, then hearing crickets from Democrats, was really the last straw.
Then, after October 7, at the behest of a Zionist (now former) friend, I started researching Israel's history. Then I started researching the US's (and other western countries) involvement in oppression around the world.
We aren't the good guys. We're the bad guys. We aren't interested in helping anyone unless it ultimately helps us. And if they have something we want and their government doesn't play ball, we just overthrow their government and install our own. We don't care about "democracy". We tolerate it as long as it benefits us. Otherwise we're perfectly happy to play ball with dictatorships. And we'll install one if necessary.
There's no plan for climate change. It's all about maximizing profit opportunities. Which is why we're focusing on EVs and useless "carbon capture" projects and not public transportation and high speed rail. Our system cannot produce those things. No amount of incremental reform will get us there. I know because I've been being told it would since I was a child, and we're no closer today than we were then.
You want to think that you got where you are be cause you deserve it. That's a powerful motivator. You don't deserve it. I don't deserve it. We got lucky. We were born in the right place at the right time, to the right parents. Maybe we worked hard, but not harder than an awful lot of people who are much worse off than we are.
@mloxton I am not sure what "democracy" you think we have when our only two choices are old white dudes who are completely indistinguishable from one another on every single policy that matters to the wealthiest. We're just an overly complicated one party system where all the apparent conflict between the "two" parties is just theater. Extremely destructive theater, but theater nevertheless.
@mloxton I think at best there was some backlash against Obama because he was Black. I am not sure what else they could be reacting to, at least not in terms of political reform. Demographic shifts, perhaps. Fewer church attendees, whites forming a smaller fraction of the population.
But, honestly, I don't see it as being much of a shift. I hate Trump, but he's a charismatic leader who has latched onto working class discontent that's been growing for a long time. So I see it as having happened because things were getting worse not better.
In 2016 I saw Trump very similarly to how you do. It was seeing Biden continue so many of the very same policies Democrats were vilifying Trump for that really opened my eyes. The Democrats pretend to be the party of the "left" but they aren't and never have been. Even under FDR. FDR only appears "left" today because he was president at a time when communism was actually a widespread belief in the US. He was trying desperately to avoid a communist revolution. And Democrats are still milking the perception of him as "left" to this day.
@ajroach42@tuckerm FWIW my Oryx Pro 9 crashes fairly regularly if I do heavy-duty stuff using the discrete GPU, possibly due to their use of cheap thermal paste and heat sinks that don't have sufficient thermal capacity. I've also had issues with the WiFi card. I don't think I will buy another laptop from them without some indication that they've improved their processes.
LOL imagine moving from Windows to MacOS because of Microsoft's AI fuckery. Almost as shortsighted of a decision as moving from Github to GitLab when MS bought the former.
Worse, really, because Apple's been progressively locking down MacOS for over a decade in the name of "security" but by sheer coincidence that also happens to shepherd people into their app store.
If you @ me with Apple defenses I will block you. I have no time for people who think it's a good use of their time to carry water for a trillion dollar company.
On a more constructive note, in many ways it's easier to use Linux than it's ever been. But there are also more choices than there ever have been, and some things are harder. There is no clear winner when it comes to usable Linux distros; if you ask five people you will get 15 answers.
It would be better if Linux were easier to try out. But that's extremely difficult if you have a Mac. I think it's still fairly straight forward to boot a live USB stick on a PC, laptop or otherwise, but even that's not a given with secure boot. Thanks to all the security issues involved (and a desire to make it as hard as possible to move away from Windows) PCs no longer boot from removable media by default. So booting anything else is a big hurdle.
But, honestly, if you can't even make it over that hurdle, you have no hope at all of using a computer instead of having the computer use you. The lesson for those of us who DO know how to use computers is that we need to help people make it over that hurdle. We can't just tell them to use Linux.
I didn't learn to use Linux because some rando on the Internet told me to. I learned DOS because my dad taught me. I learned to install OS/2 because my dad showed me how. That got me over the hurdle of installing new OSes. Then a friend was trying out Slackware, and I was able to help him out because of that experience I already had with different OSes. Then the same friend sold me a Pentium 200 in a motherboard, and I built a Linux box around it.
I don't think the Internet changes the necessity of this sort of experience and support at all. You need people who can be THERE, because you might brick your computer, and that's scary, even if it's theoretically possible to use your phone to look stuff up.
Linux has its share of enshittification these days, primarily via Red Hat and Canonical. I use an Ubuntu derivative (PopOS) on my laptop, but if Canonical were to vanish off the face of the planet they could pretty easily switch over to Debian as a base, because Ubuntu still uses Debian as a base. I use Debian on my desktop, and if I ever reinstall my laptop it's what I'll use (it came with PopOS preinstalled).
AFAIK Debian is the only noncommercial Linux distro that has a well-funded nonprofit organization behind it. It's not necessarily the easiest to use, but it's been around for over 30 years and could well be around and still unenshittified 30 years from now. I can't say that about any other Linux distro. Slackware has been around that long, but it is still developed by its original developer, which is a huge risk factor.