I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.

Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”

Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.

it was a matter of Chinese control outside of US government control

TikTok was controlled by a private company based out of Singapore, with investments from a host of international funds including both the US and China.

The “China is controlling our internet” narrative was always bullshit fear-mongering, fully disjoined from the actual business structure. What TikTok enjoyed that Facebook and YouTube and Reddit did not was a sufficient distance from US policymakers such that TikTok’s policies weren’t dictated by Western oligarchs.

not bringing it under US billionaires specifically

That’s exactly what Biden (and then Trump)'s forced sale intended. Bring the US branch of TikTok under American control by awarding it to exclusively American financial interests.

Only if it’s a lesbian who dyes her hair.

105% of the time when someone in a public space says “Let’s not talk politics” or “Let’s not make this political” they are horrible MAGA-aligned morons or incel chuds who have outrageously stupid or hateful ideals.

Might just be where I’m from, but they’re more often neoliberal “don’t rock the boat” ghouls who care more about profits than any kind of ideological mission. Shit can suddenly get very political when it scratches their personal itch. They just don’t want anyone else arguing about politics when they should be putting up billables.

you absolutely never see someone start spouting anti-equality BS in a game subreddit and all the leftists go “whoa whoa, this isn’t the place for that, can’t we all just enjoy our games without making it political.”

Not in those words, but I definitely hear the periodic “okay, tone it down, this is different” whenever a hobby treads into the problematic. The fall-back line of “No such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism” was a balm for whatever it is you were doing that wasn’t ideologically kosher.

On the flip side, I’ve seen people blow up at one another over a political divide - even a purely rhetorical one (arguing whether Dark Elves or Orcs are a racist trope, complaining about the implications of Monopoly or Catan, getting on a high horse about a popular movie or song). The debate over whether “Let It Snow” condones date rape is a popular college age struggle session.

Eventually people just don’t want to hear it rehashed for the thousandth time.

Gavin Newsom was enthusiastically in favor of forcing the sale of TikTok to US-aligned billionaires under Joe Biden.

Wonder what changed.

But so much of the content is uncreative.

Enshittification, baby. Once people know where the feed bar is, they just keep slapping it until pellets stop falling out. The Algorithm rewards imitation, not invention.

A lot of these services really hinge on a tight-knit community of active content producers who fuel engagement and reap some kind of dividend on the back end.

Loops is a technology but it’s not much of a business. The company is literally run by just two guys. They’re not going to bring on prolific content producers without a much more aggressive marketing strategy.

We’ve further mechanized the process of sales and marketing in an industry that we’ve been at the forefront of since the turn of the 20th century.

Modern anti-AI guys would have been eating up Adbusters 'zines 30 years ago.

So much of the modern political landscape is just suburban white people waking up and realizing they aren’t exempt from the police state that’s been harassing everyone else since the nation’s founding.

Admittedly, this is how you get class consciousness. So it’s not bad, per say. Just a bit ironic that Trump’s War On Woke is radicalizing entire municipalities at a breakneck pace.

Everyone thinks they’re above it, that they can detect the bots or remain unmoved.

I’d say the bigger problem is that there’s nothing “to be done” at an individualist level. Bot swarms are going to exist and you’re going to be exposed to them either directly (via your social media diet) or indirectly (via traditional news, casual conversation with people who consume social media, and the public policies that inevitably emerge from these trends). Simply “being aware” isn’t a defense. You’re still going to have your priors chipped away by these tidal shifts in public discourse.

Look at the impact the High Protein diet fetish has had on every fucking food retailer. Seems like every product has to include a sticker telling you how many grams of protein is in it. We went through the same diet fad exposure with GMOs and saturated fats and fiber. We got deluged with crime statistics in news, entertainment, and politics at every angle to justify the War on Crime. We’re still eating tons of shit from the anti-vax trends of the Bush Era.

But that won’t stop society from imploding.

Society isn’t ending. It’s always doing this shit. When you were young, the baseline felt normal because its all you knew. Now its changing under your feet and you’re struggling to rectify your childhood awareness with an evolved landscape as an adult.

You’re the one imploding, as you try to reconcile the contradictions of your past and present.

If this was all they were doing, I’d agree

It takes an enormous amount of ultra pure water to make a micro chip

Israel has some of the most advanced desalination facilities in the world

How would a sybian kill anyone?

Repeated contusions resulting in sever damage to the body and uncontrolled bleeding would be my first bet.

Couldn’t find any reports of an individual killed while riding the Sybian. But I’m willing to bet something like this has happened already

He looks like he’s bending over to get railed.

Not unlike his predecessors from the 1860s

No no no. That can’t be the comb. That’s bullshit.

So, is the pizza pan the clock? Or the plate? I see a couple things that could just be a circle.

I will say that the Real Mozzarella Cheese was almost as hard to find in the art as it is in real life.

But the reason why most of that food is thrown away is not lack of refrigeration, cheaper refrigeration will not solve that problem.

I think “cheaper refrigerators” is an oversimplification. People without access to a functional refrigerator often have bigger problems than a mere absence of a single appliance.

But the energy savings is a big deal. We’re not just talking about food refrigeration but AC, which is a much bigger deal especially as we suffer a warning planet

We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower.

It’s a perpetual two-edged conversation. On the one end, you’ve got reactionaries doggedly insisting the existence of Wikipedia is an attack on their personal reputations and a warehouse for far-left ultra-communist radical propaganda. On the other, you’ve got a very naked western bias to articles (thanks to a preponderance of western editors) and this creeping pay-to-play model of participation that enthusiasts and supporters simply refuse to acknowledge.

The utility of the site is such that nobody is really excited about ignoring it and replacing it is a herculean effort even would-be trillionaires haven’t managed. So the fight continues to be over degrees of control in editing existing articles and publishing new ones.

It isn’t a White Tower, but Wikipedia has become - like it or not - a system of record with an implicit amount of reflexive trust that hundreds of millions of people have learned to adopt. You can’t cynically reject its contents any more than you can naively accept them.

You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?

I think there are enough copies of the Mona Lisa such that we wouldn’t need to question what it looks like if the original was stolen.

In the same way, there are so many backups and mirrors and third-party logs of Wikipedia that we can very clearly see what is being changed and by whom. It is valuable in large part because it is so easily auditable. That’s not to say its infallible, but you can at least point to what you disagree with and challenge it piecemeal. This isn’t like a Grok AI or Conservapedia, where the preponderance is a black box of bullshit.