If the vast majority of people are affected, is it really “extreme” anymore?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Nope, 65th place, slightly behind the US and the country of old men: Albania.

And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.

When you’re 12 and your parents have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll end up in very dark corners.

It’s the same in China.

The best argument against Rand is just listening to her for 5min.

Very rarely do you see such a mixture of arrogance, self-righteousness and utter lack of logic in a single person.

And who does that?

I think you don’t really get my point. I’m not arguing that there are no ways to archive data. I’m arguing that there are no technologies available for average Joe.

It is hardly a good strategy to basically set up half a datacenter at home.

Thin concrete slabs are extremely brittle.

Is it? It’s rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?

You’d have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That’s not really low complexity.

But what actually is “archival”?

Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?

Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.

Well, actually you’re kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.

So I’m not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) “we will deploy that in our k8s cluster” but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that’s incredibly stupid.

Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.

I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.

Most “professional” writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.

I’m involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and it’s 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.

And when people started writing books instead of memorizing epic poems.

It’s usually not a question of legality, but efficiency.

It’s easy and efficient to bust someone for seeding, but busting hundreds for the odd file you can prove they downloaded is expensive and takes forever.

There’s no hope anymore. Simple as that.

For a pretty long time, probably starting even before WW2 in some countries, there was this hope “tomorrow will be better, my children can have a better life”. And that hope was at least somewhat true.

But it’s gone now, and the children understand that. What is the positive narrative for a 16 year old child now? They know exactly that they’ll have a worse life than their parents in many regards.

And you didn’t even mention climate change.

I’m in my early 30s, so I experienced cooler summers, but also the crises in 2007 and the following years (where basically every Eurozone country south of the Alps almost collapsed).

I also experienced the refugee “crisis” in Germany and obviously covid.

What I learned is, that the only thing our governments can do is throwing money at rich people. Literally nothing else. Every single crisis, conflict, bad situation was met with utter incompetence, corruption, and often enough some new way to blame poor people.

I can’t speak for other countries, but ask yourself, what actually changed for the better in the last 20 years thanks to any government action? Rents? Still high. Education? Educate yourself. Healthcare? Here’s aspirin, good luck.

The young people of today see that our entire society is moving in an extremely dangerous direction of collapse, and they feel like they can do nothing against it. They feel powerless against a system that ostensibly is super open and democratic. That’s why so many (not only young people) are voting for extremists. They want to see everything burn.

And just about 5 of them have the same capacity as an iPhone battery. Absolutely insane.

And reusable!

If some bot reacts to this comment, you’ll make the developer very unhappy.

What’s really baffling to me is how completely irrelevant most ads are to me.

And I’m not saying “ads don’t work for me”, I get ads for products that I will never buy. I’m a man and YouTube recommends me tampons, lipstick and perfume. I also won’t buy a car anytime soon, yet I get tons of ads for cars.

Even in the mindset of an ad person, that can’t make sense. Sure, there is the off chance that I’ll buy lipstick for my girlfriend, but how likely is that and how much revenue will materialize from bombarding thousands of men with ads? That cannot be economically viable.

The actually infuriating part is, that we’re still paying for it. And the vendors as well. Only Google profits. If a company spends more on ads than necessary, their products will get more expensive, and those who buy their products will have to pay for it. So essentially I’m paying money for being advertised to, so Google can rake in billions.

And let’s be real here, it’s not too rare, the current victims simply don’t count as much.

All those “tropical” diseases seem to be completely irrelevant as long as only poor people in a developing country get it. But as soon as a good white person dies, it’s defcon 11 and suddenly it’s really important to develop something expensive to help the rich countries.