I heard from dentists it was better to do it before eating or drinking anything, as you’ve coated your mouth in the good shit to protect it. But I guess it’s splitting hairs.

Windows 10 AME Wizard, get AtlasOS or whatever takes your fancy. Otherwise Linux Mint.

They do. I boycott Chinese made goods, and I don’t make much money. It just requires a small amount of introspection on if I need the item. It has actually turned out I buy much much less because what I do buy is of quality and lasts.

Cosmetics, Household goods and food are easy and generally fairly locally made and produced, unless you insist on buying exotic fruits or stuff way out of season.

Clothes, shoes, anything fabric, again easy. Massive market of quality eco-friendly EU/US/UK made stuff that means I pay $30 for a lovely shirt that will last me decades than $5 a shirt that was made by a child in Myanmar and fall apart within the year. So I am slowly developing a modest wardrobe of high quality natural fibres.

You don’t really need much else. But it just takes a moment to Google and consume conscientiously.

Some stuff is nearly impossible and is actually outside of your control like fuel and SOME electrical devices. But nothing can be perfect.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with having a properly built bunker with all the food and stuff you need.

I agree there are a lot of right wing nutjobs with more guns than gardening tools, but you’re being pretty uncharitable to a very broad hobby that includes just as many hippies and leftish people ready to help their local communities.

Preparedness is something everyone should have, so that when the store shelves empty at the start of the pandemic, no one is concerned about their lack of toilet paper or feeding their kids.

Field Marshal Charles III, King of the United Kingdom and the 14 realms, Lord of Mann, Master of the Arts, defender of the faith, Admiral of the Fleet, is what his friends call him.

They probably haven’t. My experience was a lot of these guys were on the spectrum and the only social understanding of women they have is media. I would say the sexism is very malicious from the faculty, but from fellow students a lot of them this is the first time they’ve been allowed away from their helicopter parents and to begin learning social skills, sadly at your detriment.

YouTube is far from the only video hosting site, and far from the only way to do it. Peertube, Vimeo, Patreon, Floatplane, Nebula, bitchute to name some examples of sites already set up, with monetisation, with youtube creators actively posting on them. Twitch rivals like Kick and Rumble could also absolutely pivot into taking YTs market share too

Yep

Why would I pay YouTube that when I can give it directly to the creators though. I’ll just adblock and not put money in the hands of Google, while helping the creators more.

That would be a side benefit of an otherwise bad idea.

Practical EVs exist too. It’s an open market so there will be something for everyone I’m sure. If you really hate EV design you can buy the conversion kits for a classic.

Styles are changing, I guess they’re focus grouping it and people want cars from blade runner. No longer requiring a radiator or exhaust has actually produced some interesting designs.

The gamer careful with his money has already bought Elite Dangerous on sale for less though. Even $45 for what is currently being offered is embarrassing.

This is on a similar level of derangement as QAnon people spotting Satanist references in pictures of the Clintons. Please touch grass.

Because they conform to the prisoners dilemma, they set up mutually beneficial relationships to get to where they are. That’s what jobs are. “wahh wahh they don’t pay enough” maybe not to what we would want, but obviously they’re not slaves, so it’s working to an extent. Business deals, collaboration, that’s how they scale their businesses for them to be valued so highly.

This is also how the West has largely operated their foreign policy and why that’s working pretty well too, with the EU, NATO and such. People are more often than not cooperating. Doomer online people are just blind to it.

My purpose is to work out if Lemmy is social media, and solidify my position on it through debating (arguing) with people about it, I’m afraid I’m using you for my own ends 😉.

My point about calling lemmy Wikipedia is like calling cereal soup. I agree, because if we widen this definition to include Lemmy, we start having justifications for calling things that clearly aren’t social media, social media.

My ideal is that we just have old style Internet platforms in their own box called forums. And social media can continue on its way with phone number verification, blue check marks, and whatever else goes on.

I suppose the actually productive thought process is to think why we need to differentiate sites from each other like this, and come up with a definition that has function without being confusing. I’d argue the endless debate and confusion around this topic, especially on Reddit, for years and years, indicates a poor definition.

Content curation and discussions sounds like Wikipedia to me, and honestly most information sites. As basically everything on the Internet is community driven by a small vanguard of committed posters. I guess we can just call all websites with social interaction social media.

My issue is, to me, lemmy, 4chan, and old forums are completely different to Twitter, Facebook, bebo, Instagram, Snapchat, tiktok etc etc in look, form and function. But I think if we still are just calling them social media, and there is no consistent definition that also umbrellas most of the Internet, it seems silly at that point. Much easier to just not call lemmy social media.

I could also argue people calling lemmy social media are trying to be contrarian and get a rise out of people. Like calling cereal, soup.

If the expression of opinion or interacting with that opinion is all it takes, then YouTube is social media, IMDb is social media. Blogs are social media, any news site is social media. It has to be more specific than that because every site has a comment section and it’s a pretty useless definition.

I think the object of interest has to be people, and the engagement has to come from fixed personalities. Who develop a rapport. For example, you add friends and follow people, who you recognize, interact with and develop a social or parasocial relationship.

Although Reddit has maybe gone that way in some respects, sites like YouTube (maybe) Lemmy, 4chan, Q&A sites (Quora, stack overflow), and more traditional forums have anonymous people jumping in and out, and the focus is the idea (meme, article, creation, question).

Maybe we ditch the term altogether as everything is adding a social component and it will all devolve into a digital singularity.

It’s not mental gymnastics. My reasoning is straight forward, and I disagree.

I hope we do pull off a 90th minute 720 backflip into futurist utopia, that would be mega. But until people start doing basic stuff like voting in their interest, I’m going to prepare for the worst.