They both agreed with each other but were arguing with a strawman. One said

their precious smartphones might be problematic.

The other said

maybe smartphones play a role

Which mean the same thing.

I’m not as optimistic as you.

Hosting video is really expensive. Making video is really expensive. YouTube was losing money for about 15 years despite having a monopoly on online video for most of that time and the best advertising tech in the world. I don’t think it’s possible to make a free competitor to YouTube.

On the paid side, there’s plenty of streaming services that are making money. But you have to be already established in order to get a contract. And since you will typically have to use social media in order to get past that initial barrier, it might as well include YouTube.

However, my guess is that YouTube makes the majority of it’s money from larger channels. If the larger channels all join paid streaming services(e.g. Nebula) then gradually that may be able to bring YouTube down.

Don’t buy a Windows key. If Windows was installed initially it should remember your hardware and activate. If it doesn’t, there’s numerous ways to pirate Windows.

Why would you hand your browsing data to the VPN company? It’s just moving the problem.

Unlike Google Maps, OSM is just as useful if you don’t drive. I love it for walking and cycling, it’s got all the little paths, categorized correctly.

Debian. The basic install is very bare bones.

I liked Quora as recently as a few years ago, it had some nice explanations that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Obviously you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but you have to do that anywhere on the internet.

Yes, they are also as painful as possible for every other browser. That’s the point.

Further evidence for this is ChromeOS. It’s just a Linux distro, but worse. It does little more than run Chrome. Yet it’s popular. Anyone that tolerates ChromeOS would have an even better time on most of the standard distros if they had someone to set it up for them.

The same could be said for K-9. What more could you want from an email app.

That sounds like a great outcome for the original company

Yes, exactly, you get it! I don’t like paying for things, you don’t like paying for things. Paying for things sucks. We need post scarcity communism.

If people took existential threats seriously, we should immediately devote all our resources into escaping the simulation to prevent it from being turned off. But yeah… we’d ignore it and go back to TikTok

Elon must have spent so much on x.com yet it still redirects to the primary URL twitter.com

Paracetamol is not considered an anti-inflammatory.

Because humans are powerful enough that we are a bit like gods, and we have to make these choices between which lives we keep and which lives we kill.

Is it ethical to allow the hunting of African game if that money funds the conservation of many more animals? We have to make that trade off. Ethics are subjective, and I’m firmly on the side of allowing hunting as are many other people.

In New Zealand, as with other isolated islands, there’s a unique population of indigenous birds that are now being massacred by introduced mammals. Is it ethical to hunt and trap and poison the introduced pests to save the indigenous birds. We have to make that choice.

A runaway trolley is going to kill 5 humans unless you switch it to another track where it will only kill 1 human. Is that ethical?

A politician could choose to lower the speed limit of a road to 10 km/h, saving lives but costing the economy, quality of life, and future election wins. Is that ethical?

Ethics are subjective, but we have to choose.

Why would there be load on the clutch if the handbrake is on?

True, but low rez web jpegs is a huge part of the market for images. AI will replace stock photos and that’s incredibly disruptive on it’s own.

Conversely, I’m so opposed to the enshitification that I’ve carefully tailored my internet usage to places that aren’t shit and have no prospect of becoming shit, like Lemmy. Since I don’t even have the motivation of not supporting an evil company, I’m more addicted that ever.

In New Zealand, neoliberalisim was introduced by the center left Labour party.