We cannot allow perfect to be the enemy of good. Governments move slowly, especially the US, so moving the needle a little bit this year will let us move it a little more next year. Gradually, funding environmental progress becomes more and more normal, and greater and greater actions to deal with climate change become acceptable. All great accomplishments started with a proverbial "pissing in the ocean" if you look back far enough in their development.

Let's also be clear that the only alternative to Biden that exists, for the 2024 US election, under the current US voting system, would be far worse than Biden in every environmental category. It's important to push back on the bad, but it's even more important to promote the good work done by his administration, no matter how small of a good we think it is in the moment. If all we do is gripe about the bad, we're helping every wealthy oligarch that wants us to think of governments as impotent and useless while they burn the planet to the ground.

All the cybersecurity in the world won't matter if a handful of ~~manipulated idiots~~ people shoot a bunch of unguarded and remotely located substation transformers.

If "nearly every app" that people already use suddenly has a big warning on it, people will quickly decide the warnings are meaningless and start ignoring them, like Prop 65 warnings. Congratulations, we've moved the needle backwards.

You have to meet people where they're at. I finally switched to Linux when MS introduced a feature I wanted no part in (Recall AI), but I would have given up within a day or two if the transition hadn't been basically seamless. I was able to pick up right where I left off, using all the same apps I did on Windows ~~except MusicBee RIP~~, but now I'm in a better position than before, on an open-source OS instead of closed-source. Now there's a little less friction between me and better, freer software.

When I look at Firefox in Discover, it only shows the list of permissions the flatpak will be given out of the box, with no warning of it being "potentially unsafe." This certainly does seem like the better way to handle it.

Also, the warning on the Flathub website is clickable - it expands into the full permissions list. Why it defaults to "no information except maybe dangerous" is beyond me.

Yeah, the only reason coal emissions are going up is because they're growing too fast for even renewable energy buildouts to match increasing demand, so coal is their only option to keep up with power and steel production. The alternative is to slow development, and they're understandably not willing to do that with the US breathing down their necks and India right next door growing just as fast.

As a fellow virgin, if you actually do want to not be a virgin, but see yourself as having "failed" then think deeply on what the reason is.

First of all, if you've "failed" then what did you actually try that failed? Do you constantly take steps to meet new people and find friends, male and female, whether in hobbies or online or anywhere? If not, why not? If you have, and therefore have lots of friends you speak with regularly, are you recruiting them to help you find a romantic partner? Meeting lots of people, making friends, and then asking those friends for help is a great way to accomplish almost anything. It's much easier early in life, but it's never impossible.

If you have taken steps to meet lots of people (and I mean a lot of people), but none of them or their single-and-looking friends wanted to date you, then did they give reasons? What is it about you that they don't like? Are you taking care of yourself? Maintaining good personal hygiene? Dressing well? Do your peers find you unpleasant to be around? Are you simply boring? If you meet lots of people and all of them reject you, there's likely something you're not doing that you need to be doing. Work on yourself to be someone that people want to be around.

If any of what I've said here is relevant to you, even if it's unpleasant to think about, it's very important to be consciously aware of it so that you can accept that your current reality is one you've chosen, consciously or unconsciously... and that you can choose differently.

I'm one year younger than you, also virgin guy who would maybe like to have a partner, but through introspection and years of learning shit on the internet, I'm aware of the likely reasons I haven't gotten one yet - I just don't meet people, and when I do, even when we get along, I tend to fall out of touch immediately. I believe I likely have undiagnosed and unmedicated ADHD along with some steep but situational social anxiety, both of which I know have and will continue to keep me from forming and maintaining many social connections that I otherwise could have, which I could be leveraging to find people to date.

So, I recognize what my stumbling blocks are, and that if I decide I really do want to find love and get laid, I have to deal with those stumbling blocks. For me, that will involve speaking to a head doctor and learning more precisely how my brain works and what strategies I can use to overcome those blocks. It's not about fixing me, it's about being able to be more me. But until I do that, I accept that my current status of "virgin, but maybe wants to change that" is there because I have, in some way, chosen up to this point not to change it.

If you figure out what your stumbling blocks are, or even if you haven't, tell a close and trustworthy friend or family member about where you're at, where you want to be, and how you feel about it. They might have options, or be able to help you take whatever steps you need to be where you want to be. If you feel like you just can't make yourself do the thing, get someone else to give you a kick in the ass.

Why are you all so upset? These stock buybacks don't pay for themselves, you know!

God I hate the stock market.

The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they're willing to pay for.

Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.

Let's also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.

YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest "premium" tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same "household" or you're technically breaking TOS, so in practice it's often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.

Two of the "premium" features should be free anyway. You can't watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that's played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn't cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it's put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.

Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.

It's not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn't reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn't match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.

Ctrl-f: genocide
Phrase not found

It's frustrating that so many who even talk about this are apparently too chickenshit to say what it actually is. Israel is openly committing Genocide. History will not be kind to Benjamin Netanyahu or the IDF.

We keep saying that blocking ads is a security feature, and it keeps being true.

The linked article is two sentences long and offers no context or understanding of the situation. It might as well be a headline. The only useful part of it is the photo of the wind farm being dismantled, which also shows a completely different wind farm in the background, on the other side of the expanding mine, that is not being dismantled:

But you wouldn't realize that just from reading the article.

My understanding based on this much better article from Recharge News is that the following information is critical to understanding this decision:

First, the wind farm being dismantled is the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm, which consists of 8 turbines built over 20 years ago in 2001, totaling just over 10 MW of capacity (1.3 MW each). Recently constructed wind turbine power outputs are estimated at a 42% capacity factor, which is to say they generate about 42% of the peak power they're rated for because wind isn't always blowing; this would likely be lower for the older wind farm, but we'll use the current amount. The 10 MW wind farm would have made 3 GWh per month, which based on an average of 893 kWh per month per household is enough to power... 3386 homes [edit: corrected my horrible math]. Not nothing, but not a lot by modern standards considering the Chinese just built a single wind turbine that outdoes the entire Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm by half and then some.

Furthermore, as the turbines were built 20 years ago, they were always going to be decommissioned around this time, and that's documented in the agreements back then under which the turbines were built. RWE continues to construct many turbines elsewhere, claiming 7.2 GW of turbines are currently under construction, 720 times the rated output of the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm. They've also built 200 MW of wind capacity in that locality, likely what we see in the background of that image.

If RWE were to replace the turbines that are being decommissioned, the coal underneath them will be worthless by the time the new turbines are decommissioned, and it's supposedly the last of the coal they will be allowed to dig up. They've clearly made huge investments in building out wind power, so this represents the last vestiges of cleaning up their act.

I could not advocate more strongly that coal should be left in the ground, but this all comes down to corporate investors who care more about money than the environment, and agreements made 20 years ago, as well as the fact Germany and much of the EU is still desperate for any source of energy to maintain their current level of industry right now while they're still building out carbon-free generation to fully replace coal/oil/gas. Reality is complex, and to me this isn't as big of an insult to clean energy advocacy as the microscopic EUObserver "article" could lead one to think it is.

Coal is still dying in the West, so let's not go thinking this one last gasp means that trend has changed. If we're lucky, and demand for coal falls quickly enough, they might even scrap this mine before they've gotten everything out of it. Keep pushing!

It's odd that the article makes no mention at all of his @ElonJet account on Mastodon, which was spun up after the Twitter account was banned. I don't see how it's "moving" anywhere, especially given the Threads/Instagram account just got suspended: Sweeney posted about it on his Twitter, and Engadget updated their article.