Like it or not, Twitter is still the de-facto place for breaking news stories. You just have to sift through the dross.

As much as Mastodon is a far nicer and healthier social platform, it has a long way to go before it gets anywhere close in this particular regard.

Oh, don’t get me wrong - Budweiser/Coors/Michelob etc. are all awful. However, most US states have good local breweries and craft beers. Lagers are generally not as popular as IPAs, but you can still get good ones. Admittedly, this varies quite a bit depending on where you are in the US.

1. No it’s not.
2. I already use salted butter for toast – American is still worse.
3. Yes it is.

As a cooking ingredient, maybe, but if you’re using butter on toast, bread, etc. then Irish/French/British butter is clearly better.

Also, the superiority of European chocolate isn’t to do with the cocoa content or the sweetness - it’s just creamier and has a smoother texture.

I’ll agree with you on the beer, though.

I see what you’re getting at, but that’s a flawed analogy.

Firstly, public roads are paid for collectively through taxes but everyone can benefit from them, not just large multinational corporations. That’s not currently how user data is used in the context we are discussing, since the users themselves do not benefit materially from the data they produce.

A more accurate use of a road analogy would be to say that, at the moment, the users build the roads themselves (generate their data), and the private companies say to the users “Thanks very much for building the roads, we’re now going to charge anyone who wants to use them and keep 100%. Oh, and you have no ownership rights, so we can restrict access to these roads as we see fit.”

Yes, and legislation that forces companies to pay higher wages (or in this case, royalties given back to users) is itself a form of wealth distribution that can help to reduce income inequality.

We can talk about the overthrow of capitalism, if you like, but that’s a whole separate issue.

Right, so instead of big tech companies keeping all the profits made from utilizing user data, a big chunk of it goes back into the pockets of the users themselves. Like a cooperative organization that shares profits with its workers.

The point of it is to redistribute wealth using the existing capitalist framework, which is a left-wing endeavour.

Private ownership ≠ capitalism. Monopoly is a critique of free market capitalism, which naturally leads to a concentration of wealth for those who hold all the assets. Giving people ownership of their own data would help redistribute that wealth in a more equitable way.

No, it won’t fix the underlying problem of Capitalism, but it would at least be a step in the right direction.

That’s fine for the tech-literate minority of us, but totally unrealistic for the average citizen.

So basically don’t interact with 99% of online platforms, then?

Big tech companies making vast profits off of users providing data for free instead of paying workers wages in exchange for manufacturing goods is only going to deepen the disparity of wealth in society.

What we desperately need is essentially a Digital Bill of Rights so that we can legally own our own data.

I use FLAC for long-term storage, 256kbps Ogg when transcoding for mobile devices.

Opus is the best lossy codec in terms of efficiency, but many devices/apps don’t properly support it.

It depends how you’re using the term ‘genocide’.

While the CCP might not necessarily be intentionally mass-killing ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region, there is very strong evidence that they are doing their utmost to stamp out Uyghur culture and forcibly assimilate them. In the process, people are being incarcerated, tortured, and raped, amongst other things.

It could be argued that this is a crime under international law, where the definition of genocide includes

intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".

Or you could argue it is ethnic cleansing instead. Either way, it’s a lot more serious than just overzealous “counter-terrorism” measures.

Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.

Yup. How long have we been waiting for graphene batteries to revolutionize technology? About a decade now?

That’s how it goes all too often with these settlements, sadly. Remember when Fox News got to settle with Dominion over the fact that they knowingly pushed election fraud claims that they privately knew to be false? They just paid their fine and went right back to business as usual.

Never underestimate the power of Poe’s Law.

Are you LARPing as a Fox News viewer, or is that a genuine question?

I often think back and wonder about the 5G = COVID people on Twitter and r/conspiracy. Where are they now? Do they even feel in the slightest bit silly? Were they even real? So very many questions.