None of that matters- the default SMS app is just a UI. They don't need to make a single web call to build one. You can do it in a few hours without a server. They may have decided to send all those texts to their servers for analysis in the advertising, but that's because they saw value in it. But the default SMS app has nothing to do with webservers, SMS transport, cloudflare, or anything like that. It's a GUI and that's it. You can find dozens of tutorials on how to make a simple one, they don't actually have anything to do with sending an SMS other than hosting the textbox you type into

That's not what the default SMS app does. It doesn't send to a gateway, the OS does that. The default SMS app allows you to replace the UI for the messaging app and allows you total access to the SMS database on the device. Basically it allows you to fully replace the built in app. It was valuable to FB because of the "full access to SMS database" part. But they would never have had to pay for an SMS, that's just done by calling SmsManager.sendTextMessage at the OS level

More likel nobody used it. Being the default SMS app doesn't mean you pay for the gateway. It means you're the app that's called when an SMS comes in, and you have sole access to write the SMS database. Basically you take over for the SMS app UI. But the underlying sending of SMS is still done by the OS.

No, work is what you do to get paid. You can love it and dream of it or not. But most people with careers are actually passionate about them.

Maintenance on trains is a fraction of the cost of the cars. They also move far more people per unit time than a series of cars do. The reason this is cars is because Musk hyped up on an idea that wasn't technically feasible (and never will be), then decided that he could turn it into an even bigger grift by self dealing to his own company to boost it's revenue and make people think self driving is a thing (it isn't, they have drivers even in the Vegas tunnel) that will actually happen this decade (it won't even come close).

With those two agencies it's probably a good thing. Do you want the prosecution to have unregulated access to a judge's chambers and documents? They shouldn't even be in the same building, too high a risk of influence.

Now if we were talking say the FBI and the FDA, yeah that's crazy. But those two it makes sense to keep a barrier between.

Unless you have an entire empty office building, it may be more difficult than it's worth. You could consolidate, but if the orgs consolidating are too far apart they'd come from different congressionally regulated budgets and that would be hard to reconcile. Long term it's a solution, but its not something you can snap your fingers and do.

Yes, they have the political value "Let's scam people out of money", th t3echnical value of an extremely inefficient method of storing data that's could be done more easily and with less resource usage at least a thousand ways, and the philosophy of a 12 year old edgelord who was just given a copy of Atlas Shrugged. There is no value in any of it.

With it being so embedded into instagram, I wouldn't be surprised if accidentally clicking a link there counts you as using Threads.

I heard an interesting observation that a lot of the price increases are driven by price-gouging rather than supply shortages since the price stayed high after supply chain blockages cleared, and continued to rise. Oil prices are well off peak levels as well and doesn't account for the rising prices in the various goods and services. Essentially, companies observe that consumers expect that prices are going up in this inflationary period, therefore they've got a greenflag to raise prices on consumers. Normally you'd hope that a competitor would undercut them by selling cheaper and stealing their share, but having also recognized the opportunity to raise prices and their margins, they too are taking advantage of the opportunity to raise prices rather than attempt to take market share. The incredible growth in corporate profits and margins is both evidence and incentive for this behavior.

If this observation holds true then, raising interest rates doesn't stop the price inflation, because supply shortage wasn't the cause of the price inflation anyway, it was market sentiment that everyone can raise their prices. So the main tool of the Fed to combat inflation may not be relevant to the type of inflation we're seeing today. In which case, new tools for combating price inflation may be needed. Price manipulation is heavily frowned upon because in the past it was foolishly wielded to disastrous results by setting prices below cost of production, causing supply shortages and skyrockets blackmarket pricing. However, if price ceilings are set to curb unjustiable price growth in an inflationary period, at a level where it's still profitable to continue producing at existing margin levels, then hypothetically it'd be possible to stop inflation more directly. The challenge of course is figuring out how to implement such a mechanism without the many many unintended consequences it could incur if such direct action is carelessly applied.

Yeah, the federated sites are a lot less intuitive than Reddit. I feel like the kbin one is a lot more reddit-like in look and feel though, maybe it'll get there someday, but I don't know if it's good enough as a substitute today.

Can the federated social media system scale to handle something like Reddit's volume? Technologically, I'm guessing that it can, but does the model impose costs on instance owners in a way that'd be impractical for them to scale to that kind of volume?

Yes, I'll definitely miss Reddit.

People keep saying:
1) It's easy to set up a replacement.
2) No good alternatives exist.

If both of those 2 claims are true, that's an inherently unstable state. Here I am back on Slashdot after being away for so many years because after clicking through several of those alternatives, so I'm pretty confident #2 is true. I'm thinking #1 is wrong. I've checked out those federated social media sites and the barrier to entry is too high for it to ever scale to be anything like Reddit. Low barrier to entry is an absolutely essential quality for growing fast enough to hit critical mass and see accelerating growth.

Also, who would want to invest in building another Reddit if the predecessor(s) are so thoroughly unprofitable and fickle?

Perhaps someday a good alternative will come, maybe not, but I think that in the best case it'll be a long wait for a replacement, and more likely, a replacement won't come and people will just silo into passive consumption of Instagram, tiktok 1-way postings rather than large-scale conversational forums.