That’s…exactly why you would get involved?

TikTok might lose out on revenue. Why not sell your US arm for lots of money?

This is literally one of the most widely talked-about options regarding the ban of TikTok…

Everything is for sale when you are a $1T+ company. That’s why Amazon has the likes of Blink, Ring, Alexa, Anthropic, etc.

I don’t know why Amazon hasn’t bought TikTok yet.

Lots of data, access to the Chinese market, a social media app under their wing, and an aligned work culture. Alongside the gains for ads, moving their shit to AWS, and retail gains, it seems like a better idea than throwing money into the AI fire.

I can somewhat understand this. I have IBS, and most people with a bowel issue will tell you that IBS is basically your doctor saying ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Instead of getting help from your doctor, you go online and you hear about people finding relief through taking weird supplements, or eating only rice, or taking pre and probiotics of varying types. None of it has any proof, but it’s better to try something than to struggle - and sometimes you’re lucky or you find some short-lived relief.

The difference is that there often isn’t evidence for these things working, whereas there is plenty of evidence out there that says that chiropractors are doing legitimately dangerous practices to your body. The difference is that someone is trying to make a profit from this lack of knowledge.

I’ve told this story before, but newborn chiropractors are a thing, and many new parents will take their BABIES to get their neck and back snapped around. It’s frankly fucking disgusting.

The same goes for pregnancy, where you essentially gain a deficiency because you’re building another person inside you.

It’s like this in many countries. In the UK we’ve never had to deal with people being held in contempt of parliament, but in recent years we’ve seen corruption and a blatant disregard for “rules” that would have made politicians sick a decade ago. It’s at a point where the UK has considered a constitution to ensure that anyone caught being openly corrupt or breaking the rules can be arrested.

Many right-wing politicians have shown that the rules have been lax for a very long time, and IMO it’s a sign that perhaps we as a society need to seriously look at how we stop the right (and perhaps even the left) from abusing their power without consequence.

It’s surprising how being stuck on music from your youth is common. While I do listen to new bands, I was reminded the other day that Futures by Jimmy Eat World is almost twenty years old.

To pair with this, we’re now bearing the fruits of having unlimited media available to us. You can hear rappers on SoundCloud that directly influence metal from the 2000’s, you can hear artists from small countries reference shows like Community, or US artists reference the UK show The Inbetweeners. Even at the top, Taylor Swift referenced a song called Best Of Me by The Starting Line in one of her songs, and now thousands of fans have swarmed to listen to their music, despite the band being split up and the front man now making new music under Vacationer - also getting a fan bump.

Years ago I listened to a podcast from someone that was in a band called Busted in the UK. The went deep into how they wanted their band to be like Sum 41, but how within about 6 weeks they had released a pop album, were on your, and on covers of magazines as the new face of pop. Many bands saw the rise of pop punk, and feel that the UK (and other countries in Europe) missed the boat because the recording industry was stuck in the past. Look back at pop punk and tell me how many bands of that era weren’t from North America, and look at how many were eventually churned out once the recording industry shifted towards downloads and streaming.

Influence is everywhere now, and those that seek out music are rewarded.

You can’t have it both ways.

Piracy took off because the ability to outright download any song you want within minutes was so much better than anything else available. Spotify dominated because it allowed for streaming, which again, much easier than downloading and wading through lists to get the right song.

Ultimately, utility wins. If I care about musicians, what is my option? I could download from Bandcamp, but that reduces the usability of just streaming, and most artists aren’t on Bandcamp. I could support their gigs, but frankly, Spotify does a decent job of this already by telling me when my favourite artists are touring. Any alternative needs to be as usable, but public about giving a shit about musicians.

With all that said, I’d say that most people don’t give a shit about musicians anyway. Hundreds of artists have come to prominence during the Spotify era, and they seem to be doing just fine, and while I’m being purposely facetious in this example, when most people are struggling in their own jobs due to rising costs, they probably don’t have fucks to give about musicians.

Such as?

While I agree with your overall point, if you think the US is “easy” to move to, you’re deluded. It’s far easier to move to the UK, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, and many other countries.

As a software engineer that works for a US company, with 15 years of experience, I can work pretty much wherever I want, except America.

The reason your immigration is so lop-sided is because your visa system is a joke. Many of your visas are taken by chop-shops that exploit foreign labour through low wages and threat of deportation. A sane president would make a more granular system that allows easy movement for people from “welcome” countries, while denying visas to specific sectors/countries that manipulate the system.

We all lived through COVID, so we should already know this.

When I was younger I used to play at a well-known football academy. Some of the better players stayed on, and one of them (easily the best player in our cohort) signed a professional deal. He was 10x better than me, a player that was probably considered pretty good by normal standards.

Compared to pros he was nothing. He never played a game, had his contract terminated, and he eventually found his level in the 9th tier of English football (lower regional leagues).

Age aside, Ryan Reynolds would look hilarious out there. At his fittest, I still think he’d almost definitely get injured trying to go up against a pro defender. Similar to the sort of smurfing videos you see of pro fighters destroying a local gym in disguise, the difference between even someone at National league or League 2 level to a “good” footballer is crazy.

No idea why you’re downvoted. Seasoning a cast iron pan sufficiently enough to fry an egg is challenging, whereas most chefs will use a non-stick pan solely for this purpose. It’s basically the one thing that non-stick is good at.

Well, Meta has money, and Threads probably won’t last more than a year or two.

It has, but they don’t have the users. I think that most social networks are a “right place, right time” phenomena. If Twitter or Instagram were to be released today, with all of its current features, it would probably be DOA.

BlueSky and Mastodon are solid, technically, but neither have cornered a part of the market that speaks to the average person. BlueSky is “we’re Twitter, but with no users”, and Mastodon solves a problem that few care about.

The infrastructure around sending small chunks of data around at that scale, at a time when people were sending larger files/messages around was interesting, enough so that even to this day “design twitter” is the canonical system design interview question.

They were also initially behind some cool things in the front-end space, like Bootstrap.

This is 100% the right way to go about it. If you tell them you want to let her go at the right time, but want to give her the best, most comfortable life possible while you can, they’ll be able to help you plan for what you can do to make her happy.

The only advice I can give is that if you do need to put her down sometime, make sure you’re in the room, and comforting them until the end.

For several reasons:

• It’s where people are. It’s the whole fucking point of social networks! If the user base drops to a point where people are no longer there, I’ll go to the next network.

• If I were to boycott everything owned by a cunt, I’d probably live in a mud hut, naked in a park somewhere.

• The self-gratification on here doesn’t make me want to use Twitter any less.

• For all it’s faults, there isn’t a legitimate competitor. Mastodon has no users and has a less intuitive interface than Twitter. BlueSky is…I couldn’t even tell you what the fuck it is. Threads is basically a meme project by Zuck (another billionaire cunt) to toy with Musk, and it’ll be dead within a year.

FWIW, I fucking hate Musk. I’m a software engineer, and one of the few big tech companies I wanted to work for was Twitter. Their branding was cool, they worked on cool tech problems, and I heard great things about their workplace culture back in around 2010-2012. Musk fucked up a company I liked.

I’ve long considered Musk to be a fraud, and to be honest Twitter is the least of his problems. He’s clearly a very sick man that probably needs professional help above everything else.

If he were a normal person, someone would’ve cornered him and coerced him into medical detainment. If people thought I had a coke problem that affected my ability to conduct meetings and think clearly, I’d be out on my ass. Musk can get away with it because he owns his companies, and no one cares enough about him to help him. He’s a dancing monkey that doesn’t realise that people are laughing at him, not with him…