Also infrastructure dollars spent on data centers are not spent on more useful projects.

It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. It is extremely hard to get the billionaires to allow us to spend any money on infrastructure. They do it begrudgingly and in exchange for huge amounts of free money. The last major push for infrastructure in America was in the mid 1980s when the Democrat party compromised with Ronald Reagan giving Reagan all the military spending he wanted in exchange for 1 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending to build out much needed cities. If you're over 50 that's why and how you are able to afford to buy a house.

I think one of the things that confuses economists is that the economy shouldn't be a zero-sum game and you're taught that it's not but in practice because of the bizarre political realities it is.

I just really wish that the world could just pick one distro and go with it.

I get that techies like the ability to pick their favorite distro and I get that Ubuntu is gotten close to being the default but in practice it's not.

There really needs to be a consistent way to install and deploy software and a consistent set of tools and libraries for accessing things like audio and video and for programming things like basic UI components.

If Linux could just settle on one distro and maybe two or three desktops (a light one, the heavy one for mainline desktops and maybe one for mobile and tablet) I think it could capture a lot more market share. Sort of like how stuff like ruby on rails and a lot of frameworks get popular because while they might not do things the best they just pick a way to do something and go with it.

Choice paralysis combined with diluting the developer pool creates all sorts of problems at this junction.

And I really really want a good competitor for Windows. Because holy crap Windows 11 is terrible. It is the most user hostile software I have ever seen in my life.

With the way lobbying works you just can't do that. Especially with the droughts driving up the cost of beef through the roof.

One thing you could do is single-payer healthcare especially in america. Back when I used to work really shitty call center jobs I need people that would take their antibiotics until they felt better and stop because they were saving them for the next time. That was because they couldn't afford to see a doctor.

There's an old saying, it's cheaper to be a good person.

Very very few people are going to do that. They're going to try another browser and it's going to work just fine in that browser and then they're going to use that browser.

That's because the advanced privacy features aren't in the current builds yet. It's very new stuff that they were using to prevent the kind of fingerprinting that is used to track people.

And it probably will not affect you because even after they roll out the new privacy features you are probably in a database somewhere of existing customers or something like that. The problem is going to be brand new customers getting flagged by mistake.

So the old farts floating around here are probably never going to see the effect, although as I mentioned on another thread I've been flagged before by Sony and was unable to buy anything on their game stores for ages.

It's more likely to affect somebody just starting out. Somebody who doesn't have purchasing history with a company.

This doesn't break the website it prevents you from completing a purchase. Generally speaking if you get flagged for fraud you won't be told. It just shows up as a decline. I had it happen to me trying to buy games for my PS3 from Sony back in the day. I would have to go to Amazon and buy a gift card and then load it because Sony had decided I was an evil Mastermind or something and they would not approve me for purchases no matter what. The card had a zero balance and I have an 800-point credit score.

You haven't seen it because Firefox isn't really doing all that much to prevent fingerprinting yet. They have a bunch of stuff in the nightly builds that will be in production build soon and it's going to be a problem.

How much of a problem will probably vary. Us old farts are probably in a database somewhere already that will allow us to get through. But if you're in your twenties and just starting out then when you go to make purchases it's going to be an issue.

Most consumers won't know what the hell is going on and they will just try it in another browser like Chrome or edge and it'll work and that'll be that. And they will never think about Firefox again.

So you disable all the tracking and that's cool and all but a lot of businesses use that tracking to decide whether or not you're committing fraud or not.

So you use Firefox and they can't track you but then they won't let you make purchases on their website...

As a regular user then you go to Chrome because you find it if you use Firefox you can't buy stuff but if you use Chrome you can.

It's a problem that Firefox is seemingly unaware of and probably needs to find a solution for. Basically we need to find a middle ground of some kind.

I guess you could say the companies shouldn't do that because they shouldn't be tracking users but it's often the only effective way to catch fraud.

Yeah but win amp was the first to whip the llamas ass, really.

It's a little surprising that this doesn't happen more in the US, where some people seem to like being rugged and independent.

It is very viable to go off-grid, or at least have enough backup energy storage and generation to survive days of no grid power.

You don't even need to deal with regulations, there are products that allow you to have it all isolated to your own home, or simply plug critical appliances into a box of batteries and solar panels when needed.

And I think it's safe to say they're going to lose sales. I don't think they'll lose all of them but I would expect to lose about half that quarter or about 12%. Worst case it could be as high as 15.

A normal company losing 15% of its sales would be dead meat. Wall Street would cut it up for parts.

But people bought into Tesla when it was so ridiculously overvalued that everybody is afraid of being the one who pulls the trigger. Nobody wants to get caught holding the bag when it eventually collapses.

Meanwhile Elon musk's last two pay packages are worth about $100 billion dollars. If you're wondering how he's going to get that money since those were stock deals he's going to dump the stock into pensions and 401ks. To put that into perspective it's more money than Tesla can make in 50 years with the subsidies...

It's not a question of when company is going to collapse it's just which of the big four are going to buy up the remains and who gets caught holding the bag. I am pretty certain it won't be Elon

After world war II Russia was a burnt-out husk and it never fully recovered. Putting a criminal in charge of the country was the final straw. Russia was never a threat and there was zero reason to have a cold war with them except to keep the military industrial complex going and to line the pockets of well connected defense contractors at the expense of the public at Large.

At this point with Russia not even able to subdue a nation of 20 million it's stupidly obvious they are no threat so we can't use them to go booga booga at voters.

So China is the next step. And China for their part is happy to use America as an external threat to keep their populace in line. Because we've always been at war with Eurasia.

We never fucking learn.

It's just crazy how much money was spend making that mediocre game. Something like 400 million.

You would think the CEO responsible for that disaster would be drummed out of the industry and never work again but I don't even think they bothered to fire him from Sony. I think it's pretty obvious that the fucker was trying to throw money to create a big franchise so that he could move up in the company. It must be nice to waste hundreds of millions of dollars through mismanagement to advance your career and then take absolutely no hit whatsoever.

Trump wants to be the king you pay tribute to in order to do business.

Dude you can put solar on your house if you want nobody's stopping you. The problem is that economies of scale are a thing and a utility can produce a lot more electricity a lot more efficiently than you can slapping some solar panels on your roof...

That's got nothing to do with lobbyists that's got everything to do with how just well, everything works. A large public works project is going to be more efficient than a single person doing something. Again, economies of scale.

What's holding back solar is America has close ties to several Nations who make all their money off of oil and we just elected a bunch of people who are wildly corrupt and will cheerfully accept bribes in exchange for blocking deployment of renewables.