Man wait til you hear about Gmail

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I can’t tell if you’re joking. That’s depressing.

Aww. Poor SpaceX. To quote the man himself:

Go fuck yourself.

Good bot ❤️

Genuine question (because I’m looking too): without YouTube, where would you go to watch all the diverse videos they host? It’s a really difficult business model. Look at how expensive Floatplane is to the user. Luke and Linus have talked about how difficult it is to run on WAN Show, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1mZrsunukUA

A fediverse platform would almost definitely be a worse experience in terms of speed and video quality because residential internet (at least in the majority of the US) just doesn’t have the upload to support multiple HD video streams. Therefore, it’s not really possible to host at home; a basic server at Hetzner could probably do a dozen or two direct streams with no conversion, but storage is kind of expensive just because there’s so much content, and then there’s the need for moderation, high uptime, security, “good” UX design…

Then of course on top of all that when you don’t have creators getting paid by ad revenue, fewer will be able to spend the time on production quality because they’ll be doing it after work, so the length and/or quality suffers.

I dunno dude, I really hope someone smarter than me has figured this out, but it’s a tough problem.

There legitimately aren’t any, so no, I doubt they were asking that. Derp, yes they were, context is important kids! Leaving the rest of my original answer, as it’s accurate:

In some handhelds, you might see small counterweights added to make them easier to hold for long periods, or to stop them tipping over when in a table, but for internal components (like power supplies) there’s never a need to add weights.

I’ve not even heard of those two, I’ve stuck with Firefox for so long. I’ll check them out, thanks!

Because it wasn’t based on the Chrome engine (initially, anyway). That’s actually a significant enough reason to at least consider it. I’ve never used Opera precisely because of its origins (honestly I thought it was Russian, though there’s not much practical difference in this case), but innovation is innovation. The fewer non-Chrome browsers exist, the worse off we all are.

Obviously, but that is a self-reinforcing loop. I’m not suggesting that government websites drive the most traffic or anything, but the government is kind of special as an entity. In several other areas the US government is bound to show no preferential treatment to vendors or other entities, such as in public broadcast TV or awarding government contracts. I don’t think “internet browsing software” is one such covered area, but forcing people to use one browser to access their websites is pretty equivalent in this day and age, so if they drop support for Firefox a lawsuit might change that.

My point with the money is that a whole team of highly skilled QA professionals isn’t even a rounding error on that kind of balance sheet, but thinking about it further there’s a solid argument to be made that supporting a variety of web browsers for government web services is in the interest of national security. In that case they could pull the money from the military budget for the project.

And the last reason to even consider using it goes out the window 🙄 Thanks for the heads-up.

I’m pretty convinced that a country with an annual military spend of almost three quarters of a trillion dollars can afford to QA their web services in at least the latest versions of the five major browsers(1). Anything less might be seen as corporate favouritism.

(1) Chrome, Firefox, Edge (so Chrome), Safari, and Opera (so also fucking Chrome, apparently) were the five I’m thinking of but I’m open to persuasion if anyone’s got a better list

Yeah, HOAs for residential neighbourhoods of houses with each house on its own land are bullshit, no question. Those are the ones that don’t actually do anything, though (as far as I can tell anyway).

My HOA does have some petty rules, like specifying the backing colour of drapes or the shape of our windows, doors, etc. Some make a lot of sense, like “your balcony cannot be covered in dog shit” (which I’m paraphrasing but it’s a recent addition spurred by at least one person leaving their balcony covered in it for weeks at a time), or “Damage to communal property by contractors or guests will be paid for by the homeowner contracting the workers/hosting the guests”.

I think part of the problem is that under US law there are few restrictions on contracts that adults enter of their own free will. This approach kind of assumes equal power on both sides which obviously isn’t the case here, or even most of the time.

The other issue of course is that greater regulation requires greater operating cost most of the time (if for no other reason than extra compliance burden), and ends up further raising the bar for citizens to band together and build communal utilities it other improvements that would be too great for a single person to bear.

It’s a tough problem, and curtailing freedoms generally isn’t a winning solution in the US, but it sure does need a solution. We all have enough to deal with; middle managers measuring your grass for a taste of authority aren’t helping anyone.

(they have way too much power)

I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about HOAs and I’m certain there are a statistically significant number of bad eggs.

However, that’s definitely not all of them, and in fairness to the HOAs that actually do shit (like mine): maintaining communal property costs money, running communal utilities like heating and cooling costs money, paying groundskeepers costs money, insurance and lawyers and regulatory compliance costs money, etc.

If someone isn’t paying those fees, everyone else’s costs go up and that isn’t fair to the rest of the community. It’s usually a lot of (expensive) legal work to confiscate a domicile, so it’s not the first solution a collection of middle-class homeowners reaches for.

Advertising isn’t covered by the ADA

But usability is. I’m certain that you understand that Courts interpret laws when judging the merits of a suit, so you must also know that tendency is to hew to the “spirit” of the law rather than adhering strictly to the text. An actual lawsuit would involve therapists and psychologists giving expert opinions on what effect it might have on a person’s recovery if they are offered alcohol with every order, and I am assuming they’d say that kind of exposure would be harmful.

I thought you might bring up websites. Nobody is talking about making websites that display goods illegal, any more than having them on the shelves should be illegal. This is not equivalent to displaying goods. This is equivalent to the cashier asking if you want to booze-erize your groceries today at checkout, as a store policy.

A Court may well find it reasonable that having no ability to turn off these ads would set back recovery and effectively prevent a person suffering alcoholism from using the service, while people who do not suffer the disability can use it with no problem. Mandating a toggle for certain kinds of advertisement like alcohol would not be an undue burden (though from a technical perspective, it would probably be easier to just have the toggle disable the checkout offers altogether and that would probably be good enough in the eyes of the Court).

In my view it would fall under “Denial of Participation” (emphasis mine):

It shall be discriminatory to subject an individual or class of individuals on the basis of a disability or disabilities of such individual or class, directly, or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements, to a denial of the opportunity of the individual or class to participate in or benefit from the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of an entity.

https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/ada/#section41

A Court may well agree with that interpretation after hearing testimony to that effect from expert witnesses; I don’t think it’s as cut-and-dried an issue as you imply above.

This is the post I was responding to when you decided to jump in with your spicy bullshit take:

Since Xiaoping’s market reforms, China has nationalized numerous exploitative private companies, decreased working hours to 8 per day, improved working conditions, gotten rid of hundreds of thousands of corrupt officials, purged greedy billionaires like Jack Ma, and built the most extensive high-speed rail and public transport system in the world.

China, with 5x the population of the US, had 121k covid deaths, while the US had 1.2mil. Because the latter prioritizes capital/profit over human lives, while China does the opposite.

These are clearly in the interest of the Proletariat/working class, not the ruling class; China has actively punished the latter.

And all that without overthrowing foreign governments and causing genocides. So how is China even comparable to the US, aside from their economic growth? Has it ever occurred to you that maybe western media tries to show their geopolitical rivals in a bad light, even when they’re objectively better?

I’m not ignoring American undersupply, it’s not relevant in this thread, but I have explicitly mentioned it being bad, and you even quoted me that it’s bad. You are now being blocked, if not for being a troll then for being so irredeemably stupid there’s no point interacting further. Good fucking day.

If you’ve been in advertising for twenty years and don’t know that running sales is a form of advertising, you must have been in middle management. My small company of fewer than twenty people:

• runs sales to drum up business from new and existing customers alike (which is also the entire point of advertising and we even talk about them internally as ads), and

• does not give a shit about customer feedback, we update on our own schedule according to what management believes is needed and this sometimes coincides with what customers ask for

I’ve worked for gigantic corporations as well as small shops, from cashier to systems administrator, on three continents, and not once have I seen a manager review customer feedback about anything but the call centre staff.

So the law does cover usability of websites, and Uber/Doordash/whatever should at least put toggles in the settings to disable certain classes of advertisement manually so that recovering alcoholics can use their service without risk of exacerbating their disability. Good show.

The ADA covers usability and accessibility of publicly-accessible spaces (even those that are privately-owned) by people with disabilities, it’s why wheelchair ramps and accessible parking spaces aren’t optional.

Courts have historically not cared much if it’s an established legal precedent “but on the internet” - just being online doesn’t mean it’s not covered by existing law (it might not be, but only if being online makes substantial enough difference). If someone with a disability like addiction can’t use a publicly-accessible service (even if it’s privately-owned) because the operators of that service aren’t providing required accommodation for their disability, that could be argued quite convincingly to fall squarely under the ADA’s authority.

It could also be argued that it’s discriminatory to show known alcoholics booze ads, like a department store putting the wheelchair access ramp in the loading bay in the back of the building or blocking accessible parking spots with shopping carts.

For a practical example, if the customers at a grocery block all the accessible spots with carts, someone who needs one could sue the grocery for not keeping the spots clear. Their argument would be that while the grocery didn’t put the carts there, they also failed to keep any accessible spots clear of obstruction as they are required to. Deliberately advertising booze to alcoholics would be like video evidence of the grocery employees putting the carts in the accessible spots, it could lead to hefty punitive damages or fines as well.

Edit: Please take note of the word “deliberately” above. For a sure cash judgement with punitive components, the plaintiffs would have to show that the advertising was based on data showing the person has a drinking problem; for a win that would just get things changed, the argument would be there should be toggles to manually disable certain classes of advertisement.