Low density places are always going to kind of suck on a lot of metrics. You just don’t have the people to support a lot of stuff. I’m sorry that small towns are dying but like there’s not really a reason they’d thrive.
Cities have been important since like the dawn of history. At least farms grow food. Suburban sprawl is the worst.
Cost of living needs to go down and wages up, but no one should be vying for low density.
I like to sometimes remind people that being numb doesn’t mean you aren’t being hurt. If your arm is numb and someone is stabbing it with a knife, that’s probably still a problem.
This really is the simplest solution.
Also, the government can’t really do a lot about it because of free speech laws, but like Google and Facebook and so on that gleefully spread anti-vax nonsense should be held accountable. Youtube could just refuse to host anti-vax videos. But I guess all they care about is money, and not enough people are angry enough to start hanging directors and c-suites yet.
but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.
Yeah. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy (I do software development for work) and I had a really bad time installing mint on my desktop. I got it to work after a day but that was far more than a casually interested person would put up with.
I send people links to posts on Lemmy, and tell people I can’t see Instagram/Twitter/etc.
Is it working? No, not really, but it feels like it should.
Yeah if I take photo/video I put the camera in front of my face or chest so no one behind me can see it.
It definitely changes the options available to overcoming it!
A small club has a bylaw saying they serve no hard alcohol at parties. That’s a real rule that is enforced. But they can change it with an agreement, or just ignore it from time to time.
Something like acceleration due to gravity is going to happen no matter what.
Thinking about it, a lot of things that I flag as idiotic come from putting emotions first. We’re all emotional creatures, but idiots are ruled by them. It’s idiotic to blow your rent money on candy, but the short term emotional high for an idiot is too appealing. It’s stupid to blow up at someone instead of admitting fault, but admitting fault feels bad, so the idiot can’t take that. Reading an essay is informative, but that’s boring work and the idiot might feel bad if they don’t understand it, so they’d avoid the whole thing. If the essay doesn’t agree with their worldview, that’s going to feel terrible.
Sometimes cultures have really toxic ideas on them. Probably all cultures have something. Like in the US there’s a lot of “the only emotion men are allowed is anger”, for example.
How do you fix that? Is there a general solution? Because sometimes it’s like enforced by the very people it’s harming.
But it’s all social. Made up. It’s not like physics. We can’t all decide that acceleration due to gravity on earth is now a nice round 10 m/s². But we could just decide working long hours is bullshit.
I’m going to guess it’s the same origin as “the cruelty is the point”. Some people just don’t want other people to be happy.
Also some people aren’t fact driven. Working fewer days feels like it should be less productive, so it must be.
Neglecting public education is really going to keep biting us in the ass.
Something like half of US adults can’t read at a sixth grade level.
If we took some of the idiotic venture capitalist “it’s cat gifs on the block chain” nonsense and put it into education and infrastructure, we’d be so much better off.
I don’t really know how to get from here to there, either. Give me magic powers to Thanos snap away some people, maybe?
The problem with Mastodon and Twitter is structural, it’s based around following people, not topics.
I’ve long thought this but infrequently find other people who think the same!
On here (and reddit, rip) and most forums, I don’t really look at the user name. I just read the content I think that’s a better setup.
Snake case, usually. Some perhaps unfounded fear that something will blow up on a dash in a file name kicking around. Or I’ll do a weird typo/premature enter and part of the file name will be treated like a -flag of some sort.
A lot of people are really quite stupid. On top of that, they’re in social groups (ie: tribes) that have shitty values.
Long term investing in education would help. So would things like removing lead from the environment, and fixing healthcare and labor laws so people aren’t so stressed all the time trying to survive.
Something like half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level (Snopes says this is basically true but there are complexities https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/ )
I think it’s a little like “no one goes there anymore it’s too crowded”. If people started posting on mastodon people would use it, and it wouldn’t be so nerd-dense.
A friend and I had a minor fight about this. She was like “but all the good content is on Twitter” and I was like sometimes you have to be the change you want to be and suffer a little to make the world better. I think you can suffer through less immediate memes. She did not accept this.
But anyway yeah you’re right that content needs to move. NPR and others could probably just switch, but none of them probably want to be the first to move.
Well, fediverse stuff like Lemmy and Mastodon come to mind as one solution.
Web forums were pretty sweet sometimes, too.
I bet there are other options that don’t devolve into “some billionaire asshole owns this” and “value is being extracted”
Oh yeah GW1 was harder at launch because you only had limited NPC support, but the later expansions really expanded that (no pun intended) by adding more robust npc Heroes that could join your party and be customized.
Though GW1 came out 19 years ago, so a good chunk of potential GW2 players were in diapers when it came out. Gosh, I’m so old.
GW2 is very “solo” friendly. I put solo in quotes because there will typically be other people around, but you don’t have to talk to them or wait on them for most stuff. Like, earlier I was flying around one of the maps doing a little quest thing, and I joined in several events to fight monsters with other people. Didn’t say a word. It’s all very seamless.
I would hope the CDC or other government agencies would have their own website and feed, and not rely entirely on a private entity that could go away at any moment.
Aren’t there like a dozen weather apps?
Meanwhile, one of the 3 guys at work is working nights and weekends for free. He’s salary. I keep telling him to go outside and live life. Stop giving everything away to the owners. He doesn’t listen. He thinks he’s going to save the company. I’m like buddy if those extra hours are all that’s between success and failure, the company’s fucked. That’s flu away from disaster. He doesn’t listen.