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The only time I’ve seen a super conservative person change their beliefs was when two of their fundamental beliefs came in conflict with each other and the conservative side became a problem: An empathy-free asshole I’m acquainted with had a grandchild that was immunocompromised (no idea if it was permanent or what caused it) when COVID hit.

He wore masks everywhere except his house. He told me that that the people at his church “insulted him” and “practically kicked him out” for refusing to remove his mask. He basically made the decision at that point in his life that maybe these people weren’t the best people after all and he stopped going to church.

I’m going to take a guess here and say that the majority of evangelicals (which is the largest block of conservatives right now) do take issue with boob jobs. They also don’t like it when girls cut their hair short or wear non-feminine clothing, to give other related examples. At least, that’s the evangelicals here in Florida that I know.

There’s varying degrees of just how much deviation from their cultural norms are allowed (I’d argue that’s what defines how “conservative” they are). This is why conservatives can get extremely upset when LGBTQ+ people are allowed to be themselves in public… Because it normalizes them.

Conservatives know that if it becomes normal for their kids to see/meet gay dads/moms, trans people, or other non-binary people on a regular basis the very definition of what they believe to be “normal” will be swept right out from under them in the minds of their children. The very foundation of what they believe won’t be passed on to the next generation.

That’s why conservatives are obsessed with children “being exposed” to LGBTQ+ topics/people in school. They know that if their kid grows up around completely harmless LGBTQ+ people that their kid will just naturally start to believe that these people are harmless (because they are), normal, and “no big deal”. That’s their worst nightmare!

I’d go so far as to suggest that it is impossible (today) for someone to claim they’re a conservative while simultaneously claiming that LGBTQ+ people are born that way. There’s nothing conservative about that (it’s beyond cognitive dissonance). Furthermore, it goes completely against the Bible’s teachings that women are property! Property can’t just up and change itself into a man/actual thinking person!

I don’t think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.

Google doesn’t have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.

The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple’s chat app could only do SMS.

I guess what I’m saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.

If you’re trying to get ancient software to work I think “user friendliness” is the least of your concerns. Especially compared to the alternative (Windows) where the answer is just, “No: That’s not going to work no matter what you do.”

The majority of trips taken in the US in cars is 3 miles or less

This statistic is true but incredibly misleading. Firstly, a huge chunk of those trips are trips to the supermarket or other shopping which is not something you’re going to do on a bike. You can only fit so many groceries in a bike trip… Even with a trailer. (Aside: I wonder if frozen foods would even make it safely all the way home in the South if you loaded up a bike with a trailer and had to travel 3 miles?)

The second reason why it’s misleading is that it includes trips after you’ve gone to work. So you commute to work: 41 miles. Actually, you stop at Starbucks on the way and that’s only two miles from your house so that counts as a single-destination car trip. Then for lunch you take a short trip from the office to a restaurant/fast food place. That’s a single-destination car trip.

You go out to dinner some nights at a restaurant 3 miles away. That’s a short trip that certainly could’ve been done on bike but are you really going to get the whole family on their bikes to show up at the restaurant all hot & sweaty for dinner? In the South you’d be so sweaty it’d be worthy of taking a shower and in the North you’d be trudging through snow, freezing your face off.

Then there’s the fact that the weather doesn’t matter when it comes to cars. Rain or snow is no issue: You’re still going to the supermarket but you would not make that same trip on a bike unless it was an emergency and you had no other option.

The reality is that while the majority of trips are 3 miles are less it’s also true that the majority of trips are not trips you’d want to make on a bike.

There’s another problem with that statistic: The majority of people in the US live in big cities! I wonder how much that statistic would change if you removed big cities/metro areas from the data. My guess: “<3 miles” would jump to “<10 miles”.

I live in Jacksonville, FL and we have two supermarkets that are ~5 miles away (in different directions) and we have bike lanes! Nobody uses them. It’s just too fucking hot! For about 9 months out of the year it’s >90°F with ~90% relative humidity (in the morning; late afternoon it can drop to a mere ~60% when it’s not summer! haha). The only time of the year it would be comfortable to do something like ride your bike to get something done (as opposed to just for exercise) is December through February. Any other time it’s just not realistic unless you plan (and have the time) to take a shower afterwards.

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Florida/humidity-annual.php

It also rains pretty much every single day in the afternoon during the summer and sometimes off/on all throughout the day. Rarely rains at all in winter though so that’s a plus I guess.

You can’t change someone’s mind with facts and logic if facts and logic weren’t used to make up their mind in the first place.

You also can’t change someone’s mind about any given topic if their stance on that topic is part of their identity. To a conservative, their very core identity/belief is that everyone is made “by God” exactly the way they’re supposed to be. Before you could get them to believe that something like gender dysphoria is real you’d first have to make them believe that their religion is wrong.

On July 1st when the apps stop working.

Biking infrastructure is only useful in big cities where your distance to work could be quite short (within 5 miles or so). The average American commute distance is 41 miles. It just doesn’t make sense to build out bike infrastructure very many places in the US.

Trains and changing the roads to make it easier for cars to drive themselves make a lot more sense.

IMHO: We should retain automatic federation approval but with automated de-federation for bad behavior. Thresholds could be increased for “merely very active” instances so they don’t get automatically defederated while newcomers get the threshold for “plebs” 😁

Example: If your instance has just a handful of users spamming like crazy or any number of users spamming the same content/links that would put your instance over such a ban threshold pretty fast.

The closest thing to a universal word is a scream. After some experience nearly all humans–regardless of region or native languages–can tell the difference between a scream of sudden fear and the scream of a mother who’s child just died.

The scream of pain is a bit cultural/regional (“ow!”, “fuck!”, “damnit!”) but I’m guessing most humans could tell what someone means when they shout any given sound or word after accidentally banging their finger with a hammer or stepping on a lego brick while barefoot.

Building online communities takes time. Migrating from one site to another takes a little less time but it’s still a long-term thing.

It’s not so different from moving a retail location. Your store is moving from address A to address B down the road. You put up a sign at the old storefront telling customers, “it’s just down the road!” with instructions to get there and yet businesses that do this see massive sales drops. It’s not uncommon to lose half or three quarters of your customer traffic in the first three months after changing locations. It usually takes a year or more to stabilize to a new normal.

I see no reason why the migration of communities from Reddit to the Fediverse will be different since this type of migration is based on basic human behavior. We need to view it as a new location getting a great big lucky bonus surge because of people angry at our competitor and not some on/off switch.

The key is to maintain quality at the new location so the “customers” start to realize they’re getting a better experience here than they did over at Reddit.

STOP WHATEVER IT IS THAT YOU’RE DOING and fill out the form:

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/16136257875348-Data-Caps-Experience-Form

Tell the FCC how much data caps suck and how–if anything–it should be illegal for companies like Comcast to exempt their own services from the data caps. If their IPTV-based “cable” service is streaming 4k video 24/7 that should be included in a customer’s data usage otherwise it’s an abuse of a monopoly over the user’s connection!

Even if they didn’t ban caps outright the caps would disappear overnight if companies were forced to include their own services in customers total data usage figures (because 4k streaming TV services would eat up 99% of the average user’s cap in like three days LOL).

Yes, install your 25-year-old software on your 30-year-old NTFS filesystem (it’s that old).

EDIT: I just looked it up and NTFS turns 30 on July 27th, 2023 LOL

/m/linuxmasterrace would like a word

So… it would have the same level of security as browser-based password managers 😁

In 2002 I was working for an Internet company (Genuity), had a cell phone in my pocket at all times (this one: https://mobile-review.com/phonemodels/sonyericsson/image/t68i-1.jpg), and had cable broadband (1.5MBs) at home. When I bought my first house (condo) at the time I specifically selected a location that had high speed Internet because being without it would be unbearable! I remember telling the real estate agent that I would only buy a house that had high speed Internet and she looked at me like I was crazy! I’m sure she was thinking, “Like that’s important. What a weirdo!”

I guess what I’m saying here is that the people mentioned in the article were out-of-touch scrubs! It wasn’t as bad as they described. My friends and I would all chat with each other online to coordinate and we’d show up at various events/locations (people’s houses, concerts, theaters, etc) with tickets already paid for (usually over the phone though because not every venue had it but TicketMaster let you buy tickets over the phone since like the 1980s).

It definitely did feel like a VIP experience a lot of the time showing up with your group of friends (all in our early 20s)–bypassing the often enormous ticket line–then proceeding to walk up to the bouncer/ticket people and just giving them our names which they would verify by checking a printed list that was attached to a clipboard with a white sheet of blank paper over it to hide the names (so people couldn’t just glance at it and say, “that’s me!”). A few years after 2002 such tickets finally started getting bar codes and it became a bit less, “VIP” hehe.

What I’m saying was that all these things and more were available to the people in the article and they weren’t expensive “luxury” features that only the rich could afford. They were available and advertised extensively for everyone to use. It’s just that these folks in the article were just like soooooo many people at the time and just refused to explore or try things out on the Internet. They saw URLs (and AOL keywords, LOL) in ads and it probably didn’t even register in their brains. They were probably also afraid to buy things online (a very, very common attitude back then).

These people were the early Gen Xers that would be dumbfounded when you’d ask them for their address to get to their party/event/whatever and you’d have to interrupt them when they’d start rambling off complicated landmark-based directions, “No… I just need the address.” (because you were going to just print out directions using MapQuest). Then you’d be the only person to show up to the party on time because you were the only one that didn’t have to navigate via landmarks (“Go three stoplights and make a right after the Sunoco station…”).

I’m not having any problems at all with my dopamine fix. The Fediverse has reached that critical threshold where there’s no shortage of typos to make fun of with snarky replies and people willingly walking into dad jokes.

So yeah, I’m good 👍

most Reddit employees spend most of their time playing Freecell and jerking off

To be fair, if that’s all they did Reddit wouldn’t be in this dumpster fire of a situation right now.

I second this. I haven’t got a certification in like decades but an accessibility certification sounds fantastic.

There hasn’t been an IT certification I’ve seen in forever where I was like, “yeah I can’t just go and learn that on my own” but one that’s all about accessibility does sound like something I couldn’t just learn on my own… since I’m not disabled/blind and don’t know anyone who is.

What I really want is to learn about accessibility testing. Oh man that’d be like having a superpower! With a skill like that I’d be useful to literally any and every FOSS team that exists!

Aside: I am blind in one eye so I’m one accident away from actually being blind some day. I should learn this stuff now just in case!