Yeah as a North American I always look sadly at so many of those European nations, not making any progress because they’re so busy providing healthcare and education for their people, wasting what’s left of their economic power expanding human knowledge while creating beautiful art and food and culture and protecting thousands of years of heritage and natural spaces. Socialist hellholes /s

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Zelensky is still the one trying to start WW3 though.

The “Unhook” addon (increasingly required for Youtube now, in my opinion) will still completely block this as it blocks all shorts. Fuck shorts anyway. Also as TechnologyConnections pointed out in a recent video, the subscription feed still and always has completely bypasses Youtube’s recommended brainrot anyway and allows you to subscribe to and follow the creators and topics you actually care about. Until we have a viable alternative to Youtube (and hopefully stuff like this will drive that to happen sooner rather than later) the other option is to stick to subscriptions as much as possible and only subscribe to creators that don’t abuse this or use shorts at all, preferably.

Maybe it’s time to banish the myth of infinite growth once and for all? Maybe? Nah?

It is, but it’s also necessary sometimes. If governments didn’t have any power and could just be ignored or openly defied without consequences, we wouldn’t have to care about what they want to censor. But they do have power, despite all our wishing that they didn’t, and we can’t organize a resistance to them without careful maneuvering and sometimes at least making an appearance of playing by their rules. Government censorship you can unsubscribe from is objectively better than censorship you can’t. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Collecting action figures is still niche and will definitely draw some ire. Hell, even adults collecting plushies is a problem for some.

Another classic example is adults who enjoy model trains. “Weird” is about the best you can hope for if people are feeling particularly generous and accepting. Our society loves to judge adults who indulge in any form of fantasy and have not let their inner child die. Personally I think the world would be a much better place if more or even most adults kept in touch with their inner child. I’d rather have joy than hate. But some people are just awful, and a lot of other people who I don’t think are necessarily awful themselves have this herd mentality that compels them to follow these awful people and try to mimic their awful views to fit in with what they perceive to be the herd, somehow without ever triggering any empathy or even having any thought enter their head about the feelings of the people they are mocking, bullying or victimizing. Even I do it sometimes. I try very hard not to, but I know I have.

The fact that ESA doesn’t seem to have any interest or motivation to pursue (now commercially-proven and human-rated) rapidly reusable rockets is a big red flag for their entire attitude. Literally every other space program of any substantial size or credibility is pursuing them heavily if not exclusively as you’d have to be blind not to see the writing on the wall. The days of disposable rockets are numbered and rapidly dwindling. The Ariane 6 is an impressive machine, in the same way a supercar is… as a bold status symbol in an incredibly narrow niche with almost zero growth potential. I hope Macron’s challenge is a first step to changing that because they are in danger of falling very far behind if they don’t start to move very quickly to get back into the leader’s pack, who are going to be the group that decides who really “owns” space. And you’d better believe that despite any treaties to the contrary, someday, and maybe soon, people are going to start making rules, staking claims, and creating the weapons needed to defend such claims in space, from Low Earth Orbit to the rest of the solar system, it’s coming and only a fool would pretend it’s not after seeing the state of the art in launch technology and the geopolitics going on in the world right now. If you can’t innovate, you’d better start copying, because being stationary is a death sentence when things are evolving this rapidly.

“But first, we need to discuss the white genocide in South Africa!”

Really nice that they’re doing a sunset period with advance warning instead of just randomly going dark. As Lemmy’s first major “shutdown” we need to accept that this sort of thing seems inevitable from time to time, maybe this can set an example and open a conversation on how to handle this sort of situation in the future. I’d hope this creates some pressure to Fediverse developers to improve portability for users (and communities!) moving between instances, maybe even some kind of immigration/emigration mode for people or communities who want to apply to transfer their account and history rather than simply sign up a new account while posting a link from their old account. Federation should be able to do better than that.