Really? I had flashbacks to Organic Chemistry -- my own personal Vietnam.

Not particularly, it's just a large public event and so, disrupting it draws attention to the protest more than other less media-covered events would.

$10MM in liquid assets is asinine. Easily liquidatable assets is one thing, but no one is keeping that amount of cash in just some account.

We don't generally measure post-tax (or "take-home") income in economics discussions. Gross income is the preferred measure because it allows for a more like:like comparison.

Millionaire isn’t 1%. Everyone with a 401(k) in their 60s is one. It’s younger if you count assets like houses.

I mean, yeah. You ever ask an average software “engineer” to have a constructive conversation with someone a different department? It’s a nightmare.

I guess I’ll start screening my surgeons, attorneys, and accountants for how well they know how to use Zoom. This seems reasonable.

Usenet and an on-site NAS agree with me, any data cap below 10 TB/mo. is a non-starter.

The chance that Trump doesn’t try and use a nuclear weapon on Iran is near zero. It’s like drunk, depressed, isolated Nixon all over again, but worse this time.

Love the Pax MAGA:

1. Russia moves west until Putin doesn't need to drum up nationalist fervor back home;

2. Israel gets all the weapons it needs to control every inch of the Mediterranean coast from the Suez to Turkey;

3. All US troops out of South Korea and IDK probably an arms sale to the DPRK;

4. The Seventh Fleet gets permanently reassigned to patrol the California coast as some immigration stunt and to make Pooh happy;

5. Probably a tactical nuke dropped on Tehran.

Seems awesome, right?

Tump high-key fucking hates Google. I don't know that this goes away.

Discovery sucks out loud, federation is all to often at the whims of some admin in a pissing match with another server, even when you know someone you want to follow locating their account is a hassle, it's slower than Bluesky to populate across federated instances, there isn't a good app design out there for free, the web portal is inferior in both UX and UI to even Twitter, I could go on.

If you want to make strawman arguments, go ahead; but, you're ignoring the real problems with Mastodon that have caused users to avoid it.

Gee . . . I wonder why

An order to sell Chrome would be accompanied by an order (or consent decree) to not engage in web-engine and/or browser development.

You should look up a lot of things

If Mastodon wanted to be preferred, it should have been better. I moved to Mastodon over a year ago when the Twitter sale first happened. It was not great then and it’s gotten slightly worse since. I created a Bluesky account two days ago and it already offers exactly the experience I missed from Twitter before Elon.

Would it be better if Mastodon was good and the federated FOSS option was superior? Sure, absolutely. But, that scenario isn’t even close to the case we are presented with.

I know posts like those feel good, but the objective fact is that the political conversation and (much more importantly) public policy has moved drastically leftward in both shorter terms (the last decade) as well as more medium-term measurements (the last fifty years).

Arch on my desktop and laptop, Debian stable goes on everything else.

It won’t be. Because: fuck everything