If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.
If we’re going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They’ll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations… Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don’t like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it’s damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
The main subs or sublemmies or whatever they’re called on here have enough users that it’s a perfect alternative to Reddit.
Little niche subreddits, like my favorite gaybros and askgaybros, just a few dozen users and I’m going back to Reddit for that.
If they weren’t paid there would just be way more sponsorship deals and ad reads.
YouTube has some competitors…
Twitch - Not for general purpose video uploads and sort of stingy with how much you can upload. Twitch only saves highlights and YouTube saves everything you’ve ever uploaded.
Tiktok - Chinese spyware. Every video is vertical. Every video has stupid songs playing in the background and that TikTok logo. Not really for long form videos or anything serious.
Vimeo - You pay them to upload your video.
I’m glad they stopped recommending things to me with my history off. I just want to see my subscriptions I don’t want to see what the algorithm thinks I want to see.
Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.
About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.
The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.
Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.
If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we’re in a depression.
The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That’s why they switched to Chromium.
Oh… so to answer your question no one is “allowing” a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You’re free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you’ll do it you’ll probably just use Chromium.
The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.
You can’t have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn’t happening because it’s snowing…
“That’s weather not climate!”
When there’s a wildfire somewhere…
“That’s global warming!”
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can’t attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.