Is someone actually proposing that we’re simply going to dump would-be colonists on Mars with a shovel and some O2 tanks then wave goodbye? Like, no shit we still need to work things out but that just means it’s unknown, not impossible.

This book seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I don’t know why I would spend money on doomscrolling, Kindle Edition.

That’s not what net neutrality is about. NN is about carriers and ISPs treating all services and websites equally. Don’t feature creep NN. It weakens the arguments for why why we need NN.

You described a straight up better product. That’s not convenience. You said it yourself: alternatives have worse quality.

That’s Matrix. End to end encrypted, decentralized, and open source.

Bridging opens it up to other services as well, like how Pidgin/Adium/Gaim used to work.

Signal is a chat app. It uses phone numbers for identity verification and friend discovery but messages go over an end-to-end encrypted protocol. While open source, it uses a centralized network and a single client.

It’s somewhere between Matrix and WhatsApp. Open Source and friendly, but still centralized and anchored to phone numbers.

You’re demanding to view this as “good team” / “bad team”. Fix that first because it stops any hope for peace.

I must have missed history class where the Warsaw Uprising attacked a peace festival.

Being oppressed is not a license to become a monster yourself. I refuse to condone cold blooded revenge (both Hamas and IDF).

It’s far cheaper than your first car and arguably more important. You find a way when you have to.

Excuse the tangent but you made me look it up. >50% of Americans weren’t eligible to vote in 2000 but apparently I need to answer for the Iraq War for the rest of my friggin’ life like that was my personal decision.

Stupid lizard brains are too easily tricked with tribalism and anger though. It takes a real conscious effort to curate your feed like that.

Any nuanced opinion on Gaza gets trashed because both “teams” view you as the enemy. You’re always pushed towards absolutism.

You can read about it here: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/09/epic-apple-no-imessage-on-android/

Using a dominant market segment to reduce competition in another has always been an antitrust violation. A notable example is MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to force Internet Explorer on people.

Teenagers today suffer unique threats to their health and wellbeing from technology. It may be super easy for you to say “who the fuck cares about the color” but that is far from the case for US teenagers. Willingly setting yourself apart from the group in high school is a precarious move in the best of circumstances.

And for the rest of us, this goes way beyond the color being used. The SMS/MMS fallback in iMessage offers a terrible experience for non-Apple users. Low quality media, inability to manage one’s own memeberships in groups, and no encryption. For those worried about the lack of e2ee: Android users participating in an iMessage conversation don’t have that today. You’re not losing anything from this solution.

Legal disclosures prove that Apple knowingly uses iMessage in an anticompetitive fashion. It’s a moat to keep people from switching away from iPhone. They are leveraging their position in the messaging market to shore up their restrictive phone products. I wish US antitrust enforcement was stronger in this area but until then, I hope Nothing has great success in breaking down this illegal barrier.

I would be an asshole to show up to this.

That’s the part I really don’t get. If you’re cis male looking for a job, do you really think crashing this event is going to reflect favorably on you and that you’d be more likely to land a job? People are going to look at you and think that you have good judgment and won’t be a problem at all? What the heck is the thought process that makes this a good plan?

But you’re not researching, hiring, and scheduling a contractor to fix it. You don’t need to become an expert in long term planning and anticipate problems. You’re not mentally cataloging basic maintenance tasks like when you last painted the siding or mowed the lawn.

Home ownership vs renting goes beyond equity and I know a lot of people who were happy renting because it gave them a huge chunk of free time back for trips, hobbies, etc.