This is one of those situations where people are mad at the right person for the wrong reasons and I never know how to respond. I hate misinformation, so I lean towards wanting to try and point out what's wrong, but long-form nuanced explanations don't fit well with the situation and will change zero minds so why bother? At least there's some people switching to Firefox as a result, I guess.
tl;dr There are valid reasons to not use Chrome, and to be suspicious of Google. This, specifically, is not one of them and the fear is mostly overblown by people who have done zero research.
What if people do drugs because their actual lives are dissatisfying because literally everything they could do to enjoy themselves or socialize with others costs money at a time when inflation and poor planning has made the things they need to live more expensive and pay isn't keeping up because of the greed of a relative minority?
Or it's just that people like drugs idk I'm not a psychiatrist or senator.
Maybe I guess? People keep talking about Google selling user data but that is one thing they explicitly DON'T do. User data is their competitive advantage, not their product. They sell advertising, and advertisers can be explicit in who they target. If Google sells the data, they lose the value they hold to advertisers.
So Google is almost certainly still recording what I do and what I watch. But if I'm not seeing ads related to it, am I paying twice? What makes it different from, for example, Netflix keeping track of my watch history to recommend other shows?
I suppose that the videos I watch might inform the ads I see on search, so in that sense you could say I pay twice. But I don't use Google for search anyway so it kind of doesn't matter.
There's a great conversation going on under this comment that I totally agree with. There's probably valid uses for which an exception could be made, but these largely do not belong in mass produced consumer goods.
To answer your direct question, though: In a rational world, EVs would not be a thing, or would be a very limited thing for special use cases like farm work or accessibility. They will not solve our problems, only mass transit and better planning can solve things.
Controversial take around these parts but... I don't mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.
I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I'll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:
If I'm paying, you don't get to also show me ads. I won't even pay for HBO for this reason. They're showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it's still obnoxious to me
The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.
It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there's a million of them and I don't plan to use one as a central portal for news. I'd rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I'd kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
I find the number of people saying "well I'm not going to use YouTube anymore!" hilarious. Yeah dude, that's the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I'll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don't think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.
I got it because it's fun to drive, because I hate cars but have to have one, I figure even if it's not much better for the planet it's at least better for my health and my family's health to spend less time at gas stations and breathing exhaust, and because I was finally at a point in my life I could afford an expensive car.
I didn't realize that I was making a public political decision that would make everyone hate me. It's weird the way some pickup trucks just decide to go fucking nuts around me. It's weird that my mother is in a constant state of fear that my car will suddenly come to life, drive itself off a cliff, and then catch fire. It's weird that random people will be like "It's not actually better for the planet."
I completely understand hating Walgreens, but I would like to point out that CVS is worse in nearly every way possible. If you have a choice, a local pharmacy would be a better option if you're looking for somewhere with ethics and a fast turn around.
CVS owns their own prescription coverage company, CVS CareMark, and their own health insurance company, Aetna. If you are unfortunate enough to be given this coverage by your employer, they will deny everything all the time. They will require you get your prescriptions through CVS. If CVS does not carry the medication you need, they will simply refuse to pay for it. For example, medication my daughter needed for her kidneys to function properly, CVS only carried adult doses and not pediatric ones. I spent two years arguing with them and got about 6 months of it paid for in the end. In the meantime, I just spent thousands out of pocket because my daughter needs kidneys.
Granted, that's anecdotal. But feel free to just Google CareMark or Aetna and see the numerous lawsuits for gouging and mismanagement, the complaints over inability to get them to cover things that should be covered, the BBB complaints about wrong prescriptions and wrong amounts.
CVS is my personal devil. I hate them more than any other company in the world. I hate them in a preoccupied, obsessive kind of way. Please go local if possible.
Seconded. PopOS doesn't get enough love. For a drop-in desktop it's pretty great. I totally get why other distros have some weirdness around closed source and binaries and things. However, the average person just coming from Windows doesn't care, so just make it easy to install Steam and whatever else they want without making them go through extra steps.
I looked it up and apparently this ISN'T the actress from IT Crowd. However, even after IMDB confirmed it I'm having trouble believing they aren't the same person.
Hol up. We're not talking about murder, we're talking about inconveniencing consumers. Engineers are not the wealthy, they are the middle class. They live in this capitalist hellscape, too. Principled stands are great, but if your proposed solution is that people should put their ability to get healthcare, food, and shelter on the line to not inconvenience consumers because legislation and regulation are too hard.... That seems a bit much. Work on fixing the system rather than blaming the cogs.
Jobs is just a thing people talked about but was never the actual issue. The issue has always been fear of change. Depending on the list you look at right now, Peso Pluma is between the #1 and #12 artist right now in music. There are areas of the country where knowing Spanish has become a near necessity to own a business.
Depending on how racist they are, it might be some #WhiteGenocide nonsense, or it might be that they have some honestly kind of legitimate concerns about changing culture, or they just don't like seeing all the brown people around. It seems to vary a lot from person to person.
I'm not saying they're right and I'm certainly not endorsing that way of thinking. I just think it's important to understand the real reasons they're all freaking out. It was never really jobs and always plain xenophobia.
There's priority to this stuff. As they say, your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face. Being forced to wear a mask does infringe on freedom, but being forced to contract a potentially deadly disease because you can't put on a stupid mask is a greater infringement. See also: you don't have the freedom to drive recklessly, you don't have the freedom to set off fireworks anywhere you want, you don't have the freedom to assault people.
I think this is generally true, probably for the rest of my career. I don't think it is true forever. Asking "what happens when this stops being a career" or at least "what happens when there are less jobs to go around" is important, and something I would rather we all sort out long before I need the answer.
This is one of those situations where people are mad at the right person for the wrong reasons and I never know how to respond. I hate misinformation, so I lean towards wanting to try and point out what's wrong, but long-form nuanced explanations don't fit well with the situation and will change zero minds so why bother? At least there's some people switching to Firefox as a result, I guess.