Parents… No.

Communities (which are more than just parents). It’s a little more complicated. It’s really common to see communities celebrate a home town boy who made good.

But are they happy that in a broader sense they aren’t good enough? Do they like being someplace you leave behind? This whole discussion stemmed from a place that had great education and is now circling the drain. I don’t think communities enjoy that kind of thing.

A boomer who provided a great education for their kids in 90s probably wasn’t expecting to grow old in a community with 3rd world healthcare and lunch ladies teaching their grandkids classes because the school won’t hire woke teachers.

It’s fair to say it’s not helping the communities that provided those schools and raised those kids to be successful adults. I think it would be nice if more people were able to use their success to give back to the communities that gave them so much.

Society as a whole doesn’t really benefit much from concentrating wealth, education, and marketable skill into a few places. But if I were graduating Harvard Law I wouldn’t be looking to move back to some rural community where the best steakhouse in town is a Chili’s.

They get into a good college in a blue state and never come back. Academically successful people tend to move towards bigger markets for bigger salaries.

It is a bit of a utopia for a privacy minded Linux fan. Most social media I’ve had to find my community. Here it is THE community. It would take an effort to avoid it.

And you have a nice day too.

It’s not most Americans. It’s about a third (which is still huge) and less than half of the population living in a gun owning household.

Then there’s a spectrum of how “important” guns are culturally. There are in my experience 3 categories of gun owners.

1. People who own a gun or two. They may take it to the range or hunt, but mostly it’s tucked securely away and they don’t think about it or use it.

2)Then there are collectors and enthusiasts. They enjoy firearms as a hobby. They have multiple. They watch firearms videos on social media. They go to gun shows and might join a club related to the hobby.

3)Then there are the paranoid psychopaths for whom gun ownership and the insistence that they could have to defend themselves at any time is constantly at the forefront of their mind. They wish they had a reason to shoot someone and may end up shooting someone anyway.

Context matters quite a bit here. Not all boycots are created equal.

I used to be the guy who wandered into Target every other week to get one thing and left with an $150 cart full of junk I didn’t plan on buying. I joined the boycotting over their DEI policy shift. I wouldn’t judge someone for continuing to shop there. Though I would encourage them to spend less. I view that boycott as an important lesson in respecting all stakeholders and not bending the knee to authoritarianism, but hardly an existential crisis for anyone or anything but Target.

I’m not sure if I’m technically boycotting Tesla because I’ve never done any business with them. However, it’s my firm conviction that someone who buys a Tesla today, is a piece of shit. Someone who knowingly invests in Tesla is a piece of shit. If they’re someone I continue to interact with after that they’re very likely to hear about it.

Tesla, in my opinion, is complicit in everything Elon does. It has proactively financed, and propagandized oppression and undermined democracy and the functioning of a government that is supposed to serve and represent me. Anyone who buys a Tesla today is also complicit.

So you have a pair of strawmen there.

1. I’m not advocating for a single solution today to ensure the continued existance of the company. A supplementary strategy is completely viable and could be implemented in the short term. They have the all the resources they could possibly need from a technical and legal framework already. They may need to tinker with the financial backend, but it’s hardly an insurmountable challenge. If they can figure out proton, they can figure out plugging one of 1000 existing solutions into their checkout (Before we have another strawman I’m not saying those are the same thing, I’m saying they have a history of being smart, resourceful, problem solvers).

If that off the cuff, apples to oranges, example is too silly by a third, how about the entire US canibus industry? They’ve been prohibited from using the federal banking system and seem to be making ends meet alright.

If you work in the space then you know they’re going to have more and better solutions down the line. The EU is looking for solutions to circumvent the big US processors. Alipay and WeChat pay can already circumvent US credit card processors, and have made significant inroads in the US.

2. I’m not advocating for trying to split content by payment processor. Though I know others have. Right now they probably have to comply and they will need to continue using the major payment processors for the foreseeable future, but while those payment processors can prohibit “immoral” content, they can not prohibit Valve from including, and promoting competing payment solutions. They probably can’t even stop them from giving other processors preferential treatment.

I AM taking the position that unless they do something… Anything… A first turn out of the driveway to be 10% less dependent on alternative means of payment processing, there will never be a path to being 100% free from coersion.

They could be doing things today and right now it doesn’t look like they are.

Valve is estimated to be a multi billion dollar organization with a per head profit of 3.5 million. They have an extremely captive audience that’s deeply financially invested in the platform and would jump through a lot of hoops to keep using it. Pretending they’re helpless and shouldn’t be troubled to start steering in a pro-consumer direction just because they don’t have a 100% solution today is defeatist bullshit.

If 50 Cent could sell album for crypto from his nothing website a decade ago I feel like Valve has the technical wherewithal to implement one of 1,000 preexisting checkout solutions in the short term.

I think selling steam giftcards (an existing solution they’re already using) at a markdown to expand that business would be pretty viable for a company that regularly marks their products down by up to 90%.

They could literally do both of these almost instantly as preferred options while still accepting the big cards.

The short term strategy would probably be to introduce Y payment processor and make it the preferred method of payment. Encourage it’s use industry wide and encourage consumers to adopt that method as widely as possible.

If that takes off… Then they can tell the other processors to get fucked.

I don’t think we should be giving corporations a pass for caving to challenges from authority whether it’s hard or not.

Whether it’s valve pulling NSFW content, universities expelling students, or CBS firing people over political speech it’s all anti-consumer behavior driven by a financial incentive to cater to a bully with too much power. They’re all just rolling over and showing their belly rather than deal with a problem in the short term.

If Valve or Itch had paired that statement with a statement about what other payment processing options they were pursuing that might someday lead them back to a pro-consumer position I’d be on board for granting them some grace on the issue, but to the best of my knowledge from the articles I’ve seen, their position has been “tell me what to do Daddy”. If I’m wrong about that I apologize and I’ll start reading different sources.

There’s just too much capitulation to anti-free-speech behavior and I’m not ready to give anyone a pass at this point.

Just say you make bat soup. Don’t try to make it sound fancy.

She’s not an idiot. She represents idiots. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Her and Susan Collins with their “oopsie… I fell for it again” routine. I don’t know who it’s for at this point, but they’re both still in office so I guess it’s working.

There is so much of that kind of marketing at this point, that it had not occurred to me until reading this discussion that “Liquid Death” was intended to ironically over the top.

Even if there isn’t a document with a big header that says “Client List” and firm documentation of what crimes were committed, we know there are flight logs, there are victim statements, and there are records of financial transactions.

That is absolutely enough to bring charges against at least some of these people. We are accepting a false narrative that there has to be some chiseled in stone singular document listing bad actors.

The problem with banning it all together is that there are hundreds of critical applications for which they’re really is no alternative for PTFE, PCTFE and various derivative products.

Could we get by without Teflon pans, stain resistant fabric sprays, and consumer spray on dry lubricant… Sure. I’d really like them to take it out of food packaging. That would be nice.

But the world needs to interact with incredibly strong acids, and cryogenic temperatures and all sorts of other things for which human lives depend on having an absurdly inert material.

Medicine has improved by leaps and bounds. We have greater life expectancy and mostly a better quality of health along the way. Child mortality is down globally.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?time=1996..latest

Improvements in our understanding of neurodivergent students has resulted in better educational and quality of life outcomes for millions who in past decades would have fallen through the cracks.

The proliferation of environmental lead from paint and gasoline are WAY down, and the hole in the Ozone was just about peak in 1995.

Open source, public domain, and freely available knowledge have democratized education, technology, research, and product development in ways that would have almost been inconcievable in 1995.

We are able to communicate more globally, even with total strangers, often across language barriers, and for free.

Video games, films, and television are able to create visions that would have been technically impossible 30 years ago. And technology has reduced the barriers for people to gain entry into those industries.

I carry around a tiny super computer with instant access to all the world’s knowledge. That would have been a dream in 1995.

There are of course many things that are worse. It’s a harder time to be starting out in life. “Luxuries” are dirt cheap and necesities are unaffordable. We’ve traded our sense of community for a paranioa of “others” even as the world has gotten safer. Globally the world has been swinging toward extremism and it constantly feels like capitalism may collapse and we don’t know what comes next if that happens. But failure to see how much is better and for how many seems like too much doom scrolling and too narrow and outlook.

It’s just consumption in general. It predates capitalism (as we know it). For thousands of years humanity has been using beer and wine to cut the fat, sugar, and salt on our palate so we don’t feel too full or sate and can eat more.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I can tell you what I personally love about Gnome.

I like that it’s Spartan. I like that it looks good without me having to customize a thousand different settings.

I like that It has client side decorations, so every window doesn’t have to have an obscene, chunky, mostly useless title bar.

I don’t miss every single application having 100 different options packed into a menu bar. Once you get used to it, you realize that it was mostly getting in the way the whole time.

It’s just a really streamlined workflow for 98% of what you do. The problem is that 2% where it’s too spartan and God do you wish you had some options.

But I also think KDE is a great desktop environment. If I were more of a gamer I’d be using KDE. I think XFCE is an excellent desktop environment for aging hardware and Windows converts. It is very much a matter of taste, Use cases, and your preferred workflow.

There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.

Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.

In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.

Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.

There’s also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.

And the Amazon “scandal”.

And then there’s the telemetry stuff.

Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him… unapproachable and edgy.