I think it’s far more likely there’s some sales goal and or performance indicator at play here.

I’m really hoping for thermite. A lot of thermite.

Honestly, I think almost everything else is worse than Google.

I set my default to duck duck go, and it’s getting better, but I still fall back on google with some regularity

This is pretty much it.

The city knows about your protest so they can plan accordingly.

They may also make requests of your protest, eg, could you self organise your own traffic wardens to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

It’s just that in America they realized if they complain enough, they get to rub they’re hands gleefully at the thought of all that electricity they’re going to sell, AND all the public money they’re going to get to upgrade the grid!

Assumedly, to deal with a race condition.

It muddies the water around, supporting the various states, and the public image of that.

The same thing for the Palestine genocide ongoing now, the US has a second war to supply.

An ipod with a much larger screen (320×240 vs 480x320), a camera, and could take phone calls, browse the internet, and do email.

Oh, he was an absolute asshole. Seems I deleted that sentence. RIP me.

“I have enabled and ushered in a new age of knowledge access like no other, here’s a cool way to eat that goes against all reasonable nutritionists’ advice. Sounds good to me!” - Really seems like a fitting way to kick off this century IMO.

I think people love to hate Steve. The one thing people love more than a great figurehead, is hating one. I think that Steve had a great internal model of how to combine form/function.

iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but it may as well have been. It brought the smartphone to the mass market.

Part of it was a great advertising campaign, which unlike the smartphones at the time, pitched it as a luxury good as opposed to an executive enterprise one. You owned a blackberry to answer emails wherever and whenever you were, you owned an iphone so you can check Google Maps. A large part of it was redefining both the form factor, and use case of a smartphone.

The US won’t. The EU probably will.

Read up on the civil rights movements or how women got the right to vote.

Protests 100% work

Congratulations on being old e ough to buy property when it was cheap.

For the rest of us, we all adapted to the low interest post-08 world. Now, we need to adapt to the higher interest post-21 world.

You need more upvotes.

High interest rates are here, and it’s likely to be some time before we get back down to the 1% interest rates we saw during covid (or even before).

Companies are shifting either to real or imagined pressures of the stick market. And those pressures are less about chasing unlimited growth and want to see some return.

Ergo. Layoffs. Meta producing dividends.

If interest rates stay high, I’d expect to see large megacorps shift more and more to profitability over growth.

Time to donate to the internet archibe.

so, we’ve moved from “ots not real” through past “maybe its real, but its not.human caused” all the way to “its real and we can’t do anything about it”/“its too late to do anything about ot”

I’ll do my best to explain what I can. But it’s hard, and many PHD dissertations will be written on this. It’s not exactly something that can just be explained.

But yes, Covid was probably the most easily identifiable source. In addition, you could make a claim that Putins’ moves, the support from Russia to for various “alt-right” groups, and their eventual war in Ukraine (assumedly, aiming for culmination in reuniting the Soviet Union) have an impact. Lastly, we have various AI projects reading “maturity” (or at least public notoriety), and various services realizing they were missing out on a piece of the “AI pie”.

Covid was… bad. It’s a new, deadly disease that potentially leaves people with life altering side effecs (long covid). The Vaccines are good, if not great even for having been developed so quickly and drastically change your likely outcomes, but they aren’t full immunity (like we have for Polio). This left governments in a dammed now if you don’t support people, or damned later if you do. They all chose various levels of later. Some governments supported businesses directly and left people alone to suffer, others supported people and left businesses mostly alone. Either way: Cash injections into an economy produces inflation.

Fighting inflation… the most commonly accepted method in the western world is to raise interest rates* and then let it play out. With the loss of cheap money from low interest rates, many businesses are now being pushed by their owners and shareholders from focusing on growth to make profits (eg: Raise prices, crack downs on password sharing, API use).

There are other claims you could make, and construct narratives with. For a few years now companies have been growing by expanding into growing countries, but now the number of countries left is short, and companies are running out of places to expand into to grow. Once again, as growth becomes impossible or undesirable, the focus shifts to extracting profit from your existing base. We are reaching maximum saturation.

*Alternatives: If you would like to slash government spending… see Argentina’s inflation (it’s bad), for windfall taxes see Spain (it’s good).

But they want you to use their app.

And they’ve decided if you have a HA plugin, you won’t.

So we do our research, and avoid scumbag companies when making purchasing decisions, or more likely, pick the lesser of a several evils.

This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause “significant economic harm”???

I assume they have their own app and run ads/user analytics through it that make them money.

I have to wonder if you bought their products on the basis that they worked with HA, if you could have some sort of claim here.

If Facebook hasn’t had a mas exodus, neither will Reddit.

Facebooks death is slow and ongoing, and I’m pretty sure Reddit’s will be too.