I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.

Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.

Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.

That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.

Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.

Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.

Don’t have the link, but in America at least, the prevalence of partisanship has been in lockstep with economic inequality.

As in, the greater the economic inequality, the greater that people have voted in Republicans that refused to cooperate with democrats on things like bills and initiatives, and who were further and further to the right. It’s also why those states with the biggest economic gaps between poor and wealthy also have the most batshite-crazy Republican governors and other elected members.

So it’s not resources that are encouraging fascism - it’s a failure to tax the Parasite Class appropriately such that wealth trickles back down to the working class. Because with obscene wealth comes obscene opportunities to tilt the political landscape in ways that encourages corporatism (the original name for fascism) and greases the system towards even more wealth accumulation by the Parasite Class. And now with almost all social services getting dismantled by DOGE, it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse in America.

Yes, ignorance and stupidly account for a majority of Republican voters who are not multi-millionaires many times over. But poor people are too busy surviving to have any energy to think critically. So many of them just reach out for those exceedingly simple answers to complex problems that also promise to solve all of their problems, but never actually do.

most of them see the US as the Great Satan that is responsible for any and all evil in the world.

That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

America is largely fine. The problem it has is a violently coercive economic model that forces people to be profitable to other people or risk destitution, homelessness, or even death by exposure, and a political system that is militaristic, imperialistic, and dysfunctional.

My favourite quote is this:

America has three political groups, but is serviced by only two political parties - the extreme ChristoFascist right has a party all to themselves, while the moderate right and centrists share a party such that it cannot effectively function.

Okay, that is legit hilarious and makes so much sense in retrospect.

I have always taken the metaphorical red pill when given a chance. I would rather live in pain and suffering knowing the truth, than living in ignorance and happiness.

And I don’t mind being ugly. I’m a misanthrope anyhow. Being ugly just means you are more likely to be left alone.

No, I refuse to look away from facts and reality. I read the science before the IPCC gets to it and “politically massages” it into useless pablum. I listen to those who actually do climate science as a day job… and most of them have started calling themselves “climate pathologists” and are refusing to bring children into this world, because to intentionally bring children into such a future would be to inflict malicious cruelty onto those children.

A blissfully naïve ideal, considering the rightward shift of almost all governments world-wide. The political right depends vitally on creating an ignorant, illiterate, and uninformed electorate who breed like rabbits… you really think that they will willingly fund education and healthcare of any effective kind?

Right now, our best bet is to stop pumping out innocents who will only know a life that is brutish, cruel, and (once civilization collapses) short. They may have a decade or three of modern conveniences, but anyone under the age of 30 will likely die long before they would otherwise experience a natural death.

I am not talking about taking yourself out. I’m talking about not adding to what will be a very big problem within the next two to four decades.

The only reason why we have reached 8 billion is because of industrialized agriculture. Climate change - via chaotic weather - will make agriculture in general impossible. When agriculture at scale ceases to be functional - and the collapse of the AMOC will make one of the bigger impacts in the middle of this century - the ability for humanity to feed more than a billion or two will cease to exist. Humanity will tear its entire infrastructure apart in a desperate bid to live another day. Anyone who wants to subject their children to such horrors is not a person who cares for their children.

We are already exceeding the “worst-case scenario” that has projected a likely extinction of humanity within this century. Why add innocents to the potential misery and suffering?

If wages had kept up with CoL since the 70s, it would be minimum 10× what it is now. The only reason why things are expensive is because of Greedflation. Things could easily be 1/10 the price and companies would still be profitable, it’s just that the Parasite Class wouldn’t be making off with their unearned billions that they stole from the working class.

10k is cutting it thin… the Accuracy International ACSR is just a hair under $10k USD… and that is before taxes. Then you need the 1,000-10,000 rounds of ammo for training before you become good enough to start taking out card-carrying members of the Parasite Class from a kilometre-plus distance.

Now granted, you can go a lot cheaper than that, but accuracy and range will suffer. Remember, you want to be far enough away that you can reliably pack up and sanitize the scene before you leave.

Alternatively, swarming AI drones in the hundreds, with on-board explosive packages, would allow you to deploy from abandonable emplacements that can loiter for many hours to even days. No-one is going to question a cube van that sits in a paid spot for a week, at least until it’s roof opens up and a thousand tiny drones with facial recognition take off and take out a few oligarchs.

But honestly, you’re likely talking a few tens of thousands for that scenario, at minimum. I would likely bank at it being in the low hundreds of thousands for a truly effective and difficult-to-counter deployment.

10k is cutting it thin… the Accuracy International ACSR is just a hair under $10k USD… and that is before taxes. Then you need the 1,000-10,000 rounds of ammo for training before you become good enough to start taking out card-carrying members of the Parasite Class from a kilometre-plus distance.

Now granted, you can go a lot cheaper than that, but accuracy and range will suffer. Remember, you want to be far enough away that you can reliably pack up and sanitize the scene before you leave.

Alternatively, swarming AI drones in the hundreds, with on-board explosive packages, would allow you to deploy from abandonable emplacements that can loiter for many hours to even days. No-one is going to question a cube van that sits in a paid spot for a week, at least until it’s roof opens up and a thousand tiny drones with facial recognition take off and take out a few oligarchs.

But honestly, you’re likely talking a few tens of thousands for that scenario, at minimum. I would likely bank at it being in the low hundreds of thousands for a truly effective and difficult-to-counter deployment.

Fund a sterilization program for young people who have come to understand the future that humanity is hurtling towards, and who want to avoid bringing a child into such a brutally cruel future.

Both my niece and nephew have sworn off of children, as they have good educations and have fully understood just how badly humanity is fucking itself over. They’re just trying to find doctors that will do those procedures on people under 30.

Europe as a whole is swinging too far too the right. Y’all all are descending back into Fascism. The recent popularity of the AfD in Germany being a prime example. My own parents - who immigrated from Germany - are deeply disappointed in the direction the country is taking.

I created a bunch of blogs myself, did all of the development and design myself, managed the servers myself, and wrote all of the content myself.

Sure sounds like labour to me.

And there is no requirement for labour to generate income immediately. A majority of labour is front-loaded, with income being back-loaded.

I still have one of them, and I receive around $60 per month from it despite the fact that I haven’t touched it in over a decade.

Server maintenance and updating code to work with current releases is still “labour”. Because sure as shit you’ve been doing these things… no hosting provider is going to let you go 10 years with zero updates or patches to the website or the underlying framework that allows the website to run. Because failing to do that is how entire hosting platforms get rooted and infected with malware.

There are plenty of programs out there which can end up being required for your workflow - as in, that exact program; no exceptions - and yet, have no Linux or even non-Windows version.

Not everything is a platformm-agnostic subscription-based SAAS yet, nor should that ever be the case.

Also not super enthused about another browser written in C++. I skimmed some of their code and it seems pretty high quality, but still… this is going to be chock full of security bugs.

If you are going to do anything stability-based these days, Rust should be a big consideration.

We don’t have anyone actively working on Windows support, […] We would like to do Windows eventually, but it’s not a priority at the moment.

As much as I applaud this focus on just one broad OS architecture, as it will greatly speed development, leaving out Windows is likely to cut off 85-90% of all early adopters. I just hope that the benefit of a simplified target will outweigh ignoring the vast majority of the market.

And honestly, methinks they should focus on Haiku OS before Windows, as it is closer to a Unix heritage than Windows is. And Haiku OS desperately needs a native modern web browser with all the bells and whistles.

Libertarianism requires its members to engage in due diligence in order to execute their libertarian ideals properly and make the choices that are correct for them.

This, unfortunately, excludes the lower-60% of all Americans, who are so ground down, economically terrorized, and mentally overwhelmed with their daily struggles to survive that they have little to no opportunity to approach any major choice with anything even vaguely in the realm of due diligence. They just don’t have the headspace to do so, and are forced to spend all their available mental efforts on just putting one financial foot in front of the other.

This is why having social support frameworks enforced/provided/funded by the government is so important for so many working-class people - it allows them to put those issues on autopilot, significantly reducing their own cognitive load and allowing them to better process the most important issues in their lives.

Ergo, libertarianism is a wealthy person’s toy. It is something that they can champion, because only they have the economic options and financial freedom to fully and properly engage with it.

Until everyone has vanishingly few catastrophic-level issues on the horizon (like one missed paycheque leading to homelessness, or a sudden illness leading to medical bankruptcy), any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.

And when you have those kinds of widespread government-provided supports that lift all boats - and not just the megayachts - why bother with libertarianism? We should continue to use what got everyone into that safe state in the first place – socialism.

Remember, the Parasite Class already uses socialism for themselves. It’s called grants and bailouts and subsidies, and allows the Parasite Class to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

It’s just at a scale that makes it impossible for working-class people to leverage.