Representatives don’t give a fuck what their constituents have to say on social media. It’s full of foreign trolls and bots.

But if you go in person to a town hall / public hearing on an agenda item, they know that you are:

• A real person
• An American
• Extremely likely to vote in the next election.

Source: I successfully killed a local zoning change by convincing my neighbors to go out and speak against it, despite lobbying from a large developer.

You didn’t mention a lack of ads. They remove all the ads when you subscribe, right?

You mean “slam”

So, all posts are from the perspective of people that are really into music. Enthusiasts that care deeply about individual albums and artists.

Whereas streaming services are most likely designed to cater to casual listeners like me. I can’t remember the last time I listened to an entire album. I haven’t liked any individual artist enough to attend a live concert. I generally listen to music while I’m doing stuff as background noise.

I used to listen to the radio for that. But streaming services algorithms were a strict upgrade to that due to lack of ads and talk show hosts.

Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll be able to determine whether a given piece of music is AI generated or not by listening to it.

So I don’t think direct purchase of digital LPs could ever be viable for people like me. And I’m guessing (based on the success of streaming services) that there are a lot more people like me than there are enthusiasts. Yes, I can switch to the least bad streaming service according to Lemmy, out of solidarity (and no other reason). Remember 99% of people won’t do that.

Just adding a perspective that might be missing from this community

Subnautica

Shrug. Meta employees make bank.

Dunno how attractive they are viewed as, because everyone there I personally know were already married before they joined Meta.

Pretty sure most of that was actually the Saudis paying their bribes independent civilian purchases in exchange for their new air base on US soil.

$$$

Consoles are a shrinking market. If they were offered money by TV manufacturers to cooperate with putting more ads on it, they most certainly will.

And I suspect Microsoft/Windows will too. Apple might not, though.

In the US

FTFY. The long term outcome for this is that the world stops revolving around the US. For better or for worse

Eh, that’s mostly sensationalization by Western media.

According to my Japanese friends, the new government is quite moderate and their stances on a lot of issues are a lot more nuanced than the headlines imply.

Yeah initial setup requires their app (once).

But you can use their app without creating an account, which is such a breath of fresh air compared to everyone else.

https://reolink.com/

Offers all the features Google/Amazon do, but without the subscriptions.

Plus they joined the open home foundation, so they’re unlikely to enshitify.

Might I suggest Bitwarden.

It’s open source, syncs across every platform I know of, and supports passkeys.

That’s going to become more and more difficult to do over time.

Cars are being designed to be difficult to repair and to fall apart in less and less time.

$1M carries the weight of about 1M signatures, which is to say… not much.

You know his Gestapo ICE are going to take that as a challenge

That sounds like an awful lot of work to workaround a problem that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

That’s where time dilation will kick in

You’ve never been to rural Japan if you think they primarily use public transport.

Hell, even in the outskirts of Tokyo most people have cars and drive.

That said tho, there’s no excuse for urban city centers to not be walkable.

Just now. I was reading this thread and grinning at other people’s misfortune so my wife decided I should join them and bit me 😵