Hyperreality

I called, but no one answered the phone.

More generally, it's an important reminder for content creators that their entire youtube career is built on quick sand.

You can be earning a decent living one day, the next day youtube can block your account or remove monetisation for no valid reason, and you're shit out of luck.

I mean, if you're making a lot of money on youtube, power to you. But you should be saving as much as possible for that day and have a back-up plan. It may never come, it may come tomorrow.

I cringed when one creator mentioned giving up on her degree to focus on youtube. I mean, sure she's making bank right now. But who knows how long that'll last.

I get that women don't feel safe rejecting guys openly, but it's pretty sad to realise they're that scared of you.

I mean, you start questioning what you did to scare them. Was it how you looked at them? Was it how you're dressed, the hammer, the way you asked them out, ... ?

entrenched investments in fossil fuels do not exactly get replaced overnight.

Germany reunified in 1991. Until then a large proportion of the country was an impoverished communist dictatorship and soviet client state. Currently they're at 50% renewables. Was half of Texas annexed by Cuba until the 90s? Is that why they didn't have money to pivot to renewables?

Moldova is still partially occupied by Russia and has a per capita GDP of $6000 dollars. Indiana has a per capita GDP of $61000. Guess whether Indiana or Moldova generate more electricity from renewables...

The US is the richest country on earth. Not having made the pivot to renewables is a political choice. You can blame corruption. You can blame undue influence of the fossil fuel lobby.

But let's be real, a large proportion of Americans would rather buy a new and unnecessarily large truck than install solar panels on their roof or invest in a heat pump. I mean, IRC some or other government agency suggesting you should get rid of your gas stove became politically controversial in the US not so long ago. Michelle Bachmann ran a campaign against energy saving lightbulbs, for gods' sake!

You don't need a new powergrid to install solar panels on your roof or replace your gas stove with induction. All that is required is a realisation that saving energy isn't gay, anti-christian or communism.

TBF Biden's actually doing something about it, and California's been ahead of the curve since forever, but half of congress and 'real America' is throwing a tantrum.

Bit of a tangent, but I strongly suspect a lot of the anti-nuclear and anti-solar/wind energy propaganda has been financed by the likes of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Not just in Europe, where at this point it's frankly blatant, but in the US too.

The US may be autarkic when it comes to energy, but given oil and gas is traded on international markets, lowered demand (and energy prices) benefits everyone.

I know everyone likes to shit on German for their over reliance on Russian gas, rightly so, but last time I checked over 60% of US electricity is generated from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Germany something like 50% of their electricity comes from renewables.

Any western politician who argues against investing heavily in renewables and/or nuclear, is essentially betraying their countries and voters' interests. If they're not corrupt, they're dumber than a microwaved turd. And spare me the pro-business/pro-jobs argument, if in practice you're forcing domestic companies to subsidise Saudi Arabia and Russia through increased oil prices.

Same thing with the UK back when they were still members. Part of the EU, not part of Schengen, so you couldn't just walk off the eurostar without showing your passport. More checks when flying too, had to stay in the non-schengen zone of airports, etc.

Obviously, it's politically contentious in Romania, but I think most Europeans, just like these Germans, think it's stupid and counter-intuitive that Romania's not part of Schengen yet.

Without googling, I assume it's because somewhere like the Netherlands or Austria needs to placate the far right with symbolic nonsense, that causes Romanians unnecessary delays, and makes them feel like second tier Europeans.

At the risk of asking an incredibly stupid question, but if I only ever torrent video/audio, scan everything I download with defender, and only ever use a recently updated version of vlc, what's the risk?

I remember getting viruses in ye olden days, but afaik the main problem is malware now.

I think most lemmy or mastodon users don't even realise we're on kbin when they read our comments.

Even in this thread, a large proportion of the comments are from kbin users.

News = man bites dog.

Racism in alabama = dog bites man = incredibly common, so not news.

Also has a smaller laserjet. No nonsense, just USB. Toner lasted a few thousand pages.

Basically indestructible. Brother replaced it with a wifi samsung laser, bad move.

Wifi? Rarely works and requires a data harvesting app to be installed on your pc.

NFC? Doesn't work.

I now connect to it via usb. Works fine like that. I preferred the old printer.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game."

Brexit means brexit. We won't have Brussels bureaucrats telling us to not dump shit in our rivers!

I mean, experts say shit is bad for you, but we've had enough of experts don't ya know!

And if anything, British shit will make our rivers even more British by displacing any water that comes over here from overseas.