High tariffs and other economic sanctions would essentially be just that, but like another comment said the west isn’t ready for it.

We’ve managed to entangle our economies too deeply with cheap Chinese production, so actually sanctioning them would be painful to say the least and they know it

Yeah to expand on this, in professional settings you’ll want a higher sampling frequency so you don’t end up with eg. aliasing, but for consumer use ≥44–48kHz sampling rate is pretty much pointless

Probably the latter. Seems like a cynical marketing ploy, really

Surprisingly enough, some essential oils do have research-based actual uses, such as topical antibacterials, antifungals and antiparasitics.

While there’s quite a bit of woo woo around them, there’s also a lot of interesting research into phytochemicals like essential oils. Same with a few other “plant-based” things like pine resin; there’s even a clinically tested pine resin salve that helps with wound healing and is used for treating difficult wounds in some hospitals in Finland.

The problem with essential oils is trying to filter out the snake oil claims from the actual research-based claims. Most vendors tend to have pretty, well, wild claims about what their products can do, so your best bet is scholar.google.com or www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and the like

So because VPN works for you, it’s impossible for it to not work for literally anybody else?

Huh, interesting. I didn’t expect to learn about volcanoes today but here I am! Thank you for the explanation

Ohhh, I had no idea there were different kinds of volcanoes but it does make sense in hindsight.

Well, I guess this might have been covered in primary or secondary education at some point but it’s been about 3000 years since my last geography class

Definitely! I find that most problems in life can be solved with cement; if it didn’t solve your problem, you just didn’t use enough of it.

Ahh right yes, gotcha. I misunderstood you and thought you didn’t think the statistics were believable because they’re so skewed

How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.

no one ever tactfully includes ads

This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.

Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.

While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not

Why does it seem statistically unlikely? If the assumption is that minorities are somehow being targeted, wouldn’t statistics like this be exactly what one would see?

If Trump wins, I figure it’s fairly likely that Russia will turn its sights towards attacking one of them smaller NATO members at its borders. Probably not a full-on invasion at least at first, but more of a test of whether Article 5 actually holds water or not – and with Trump in charge of the US, it’s unlikely he’d decide to stand up against Russia

Average conservative moment. What’s scary is that calling for an ethnic cleansing of leftists isn’t a fringe opinion anymore, and people like him are gaining more and more power by the year.

And it’s not like this is just the US. Here in Europe, Italy is ruled by a party that is a direct descendant of Mussolini’s Fascist Party; Hungary is… well, Hungary; extremist right wing parties are very popular in Germany; Finland’s government has multiple literal neo-Nazis in it, with one extremist right-wing party eg. blocking legislation that would help guarantee the impartiality of courts; and the list goes on and on. It’s pretty telling that at least here in Finland, the under-25’s are much more conservative than Millennials or even Gen X – the majority of them voted for either a “fiscally conservative” party (ie. they’ve started down the “everything I don’t like is woke” path and would be fine with concentration camps for leftists as long as they’re privately funded) or an extremist right wing party, which has members who have eg. publicly fantasized about murdering gay people and who stan Breivik

Well, whatever the solution to this problem is, I’m fairly sure “put a blockchain on it” isn’t going to be it. Distributed ledgers do potentially have some uses, but using them to carry “proof of humanity” information doesn’t make much sense

Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)

Oh yeah it absolutely is bullshit, I’m not saying that. Or, well, it is true they’re likely collecting tons of data but it’s not like US companies don’t do it too and for reasons that are probably just as bad. This is why I tend to think that if you’re going to ban TikTok for collecting data, you can’t ignore Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple et al

Well, they’re totally different platforms . The rationale behind the TikTok ban (and I’m not saying I’m in favor of it or opposed to it) is that they can do spooky spooky things with your personal data and your attention – your opinions can be nudged once there’s enough data on you and your eyeballs are on the app half the day. And just to repeat, I’m not saying I agree with the ban (well, not with banning just TikTok anyhow…)

Temu and AliExpress have their own problems (like the absolutely mind boggling waste of finite resources) but nobody’s worried Temu is radicalizing boys or collecting tons of your personal data. And yes even Temu does collect data just like everyone else nowadays, but it’s a shopping site; compared to a social network there’s not all that much you can get out of your users or too many ways to really influence them outside of making them spend more money

Are we assuming that everyone is always going to be biking with no other options? I don’t think anyone is even advocating for that.

BUT WHAT IF YOUR LEGS ARE BROKEN? WHAT IF THERE’S A NUCLEAR WAR???

The people who seem to think that biking is an untenable option because you might have to very occasionally use other modes of transport make me wonder if that mindset comes from the fact that people feel that it’s normal to only use one mode of transport pretty much ever, because that’s how many people are with cars.

You’re just throwing a tantrum at this point