ragebutt

One time I went to a conference at a hotel with like 12 stories and they put me on the first floor. I was so upset.

Funny enough, apples behavior was enabled by microsoft setting really shitty precedents in the 90s. oh whoops!

Seriously though microsoft was a force in the 90s and early 2000s. If you weren’t around for it you simply don’t realize how insane it was for something like computing to have come around and quickly take over the world with microsoft being the thing. you only had a pc (or maybe laptop). That pc ran windows over 90% of the time, and you used internet explorer over 90% of the time. Like I’m not making this up, IE, the worst browser of all time, peaked at 95% market share in 2002.

Nowadays edge is a minor contender but a distant third (chrome about 70%, safari about 17%, edge about 5, Firefox 2.5). Windows market share still dominates on PC but has fallen significantly from 90+% in the 1990s to 75ish% for windows 10 and falling. Plus nowadays people don’t use PCs nearly as much. I’m on a phone right now, which is the dominant computing device (and windows phone was a joke)

Anyway in true American capitalistic fashion when they had this undeniable monopoly apple was a joke at the time and Linux was for extreme hobbyists and servers and such. So what did microsoft do? Destroy competition, destroy any political machinations that could threaten their future with hefty lobbying, destroy open standards in favor of their own proprietary bullshit, etc. Europe attempted some antitrust stuff against them similar to what is happening to google now (to forcefully break off IE from windows) but it was unsuccessful

So when you’re frustrated about the fact that tech does not play nice together? Does not adhere to open standards, forces proprietary bullshit on you, open displays anti competitive and anti consumer behavior? Blame microsoft and politicians that were grossly ignorant to a rapidly changing world (although to be fair you don’t have to be a tech genius to understand that computers being forced to work with each other and have transparency in how they work is beneficial)

And the next time you see some dork praising bill gates for being the “cool billionaire” because he has a charity remember that his wealth is built on these destructive practices. He lead microsoft through this period and this doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed countless businesses that dared to compete by leveraging the size of his company (eg draining their resources with lawsuits) rather than competing fair and square.

He personally fucked the landscape of technological advancement for generations on top of that because he had the arrogance to think that microsoft knew how best to handle it. Now it’s blown up and he doesn’t care because he got his bag. His charity is the same problem: he holds his wealth and decides what causes are worthwhile, like a king. Fuck him, and fuck all the technocrats that have no sense of ethics aside from “make me more money and do whatever I want”.

He means “there are a ton of children with parents who cannot enforce boundaries and there are a ton of grown people who will make poor financial decisions”. Nintendo will exploit both

Hopefully someone will exploit Nintendo with a paper clip again

If you ever have a chance to have it? It’s pretty gross. Also called “strong zero”

Jk people love that shit. But I’m a beer is my alcohol person and don’t like sweet drinks, especially fake sugar sweet drinks. It’s like hard seltzer. They sell it in America now I think

Edit: I just realized this wasn’t a Japanese train. This shit is pretty big in Japan

They also uploaded a stock market one

They also use vibrations to sense partners but I don’t know if they can tell gender from that

Tortoises use sight and have a good sense of sight to be fair but they also use scent from the cloaca to gather information about things like sex of a partner

he knows what he’s doing

This is beyond car brain. This is the increasing amount of people simply not giving a shit about the social contract over the years coupled with cops not doing their actual jobs in favor whatever it is they do (sitting in their cars fucking around in their phones and harassing minorities?)

But you see the lack of concern for the social contract in many other aspects of american life. Asking people to wear a paper mask during a pandemic was probably the most notable recent non car example. We all know how that went. In other cultures it’s a regular practice; you simply do it as a courtesy when you have recently had a cold. In A america during a pandemic 30-40% of the population revealed themselves to be utterly pathetic toddlers that can’t handle being asked to do something by a perceived authority figure or slightly inconvenienced.

I like mine but I have my phone set so that only a small handful of critical apps have notifications on and the watch basically only has notifications for messaging, email, and calendar reminders

Notifications were a great idea but apple and google ruined them by allowing advertising to fuck the whole system up. They should be forced to use their power to create a multiple lane environment for notifications - critical notifications and advertising related notifications need to have clear identifiers so I can identify them easily and opt out of what doesn’t matter to me.

They’ve instead gone with this system of allowing app developers to self regulate and many abuse it. Some give a granular system within their app to allow promotional notifications to be turned off but many do not. A lot who do silently turn settings back on with app updates and such, and after 6 months you’re suddenly getting a sea of promotional notifications again.

It trains you to just ignore notifications. Now they have AI summaries of the sea of notifications instead of just fixing the root of the problem, which is that 80% of your notifications are fucking garbage. But you can’t install an adblocker for this, you just have to stop using amazon, corporate social media, and shitty mobile games (net win though)

Advertising is cancer and ruins the world. Destroy advertising. If you work in advertising you’re a scumbag. Aaab (all advertisers are bastards)

roblox has a lot of pedophiles, that’s kind of similar I think

Congrats on quitting. Shit is super hard

To clarify things from my post: I didn’t even touch upon the environmental harm from vaping. If you use disposable vapes you’re kind of a shithead that is wasting a ton of lithium, that is mined by literal slaves, for your 2 day smoking device that you’ll probably not recycle properly. People recycle these batteries to power e bikes and literal homes. Vape shops with racks of these plastic boxes filled with single use 18650 (or similar high discharge) batteries are an environmental disaster

Nicotine pouches and gum lower the lung risk but are another space where long term risk is unknown.

They do irritate the gums and raise the risk of gum disease

Nicotine in general, gum or pouch, negatively impacts brain development and strains the cardiovascular system.

The acidity from the pouches still irritates the airway and oral mucosa and the constant increase of mucus production can lead to chronic bronchitis

The vasoconstriction effect of nicotine means that there is still potential lung involvement due to decreased blood flow even though it is not inhaled

Nicotine in low doses has some effects similar to adderall or methylphenidate but unlike those medications it tends to increase blood pressure and on long timelines create cardiovascular problems even in low doses. additionally it’s far more addictive (though tbf this is possibly/probably due to ease of access) and most users tend to use a fairly substantial amount, 20-40mg for a pack a day smoker, 35mg for someone who burns through a 5% juul pod in a day, etc

The gum is typically used short term and is actually marketed as a cessation device so that’s one thing but the pouches are huge now as you’ve said. It’s somewhat telling that for a minute they were big with the right wing grifter crowd

Vaping is less carcinogenic than smoking by a significant degree but it is carcinogenic

Acrolein, a carcinogen, forms in small amounts from the breakdown of glycerin during heating

If a “dry hit” occurs the effect is worsened, acrolein forms in higher amounts, and formaldehyde (another carcinogen) can occur from the breakdown of both glycerin and propylene glycol

Vaping still leads to inflammation and oxidative stress in the lungs and long term use will almost certainly lead to irreversible damage

Harm reduction is important. Vaping is likely better than smoking but it is not yet clear whether that is the case. It is likely the case based on short term anecdotal data from people who have switched but this does not mean that long term use won’t create more severe lung issues over a period of 20-30 years. We don’t know.

In the meantime for further harm reduction to reduce risk you can vape with low temperatures as this mitigates much of the carcinogen risk, you can use reusable devices and frequently change coils and ensure the coil is saturated, and you can use a liquid that is free of flavorings as these present much of the “unknown” variables.

Or you can work to quit. It is challenging. I smoked and vaped, I know it is tremendously hard. But frankly these companies don’t deserve your money. They’re all fucking scumbags