No good reason to support a monopoly. Sure, I know we can’t help some monopolies (grocery stores, internet service, etc.), but this is an entertainment thing.

There are unlimited ways to be entertained nowadays and YouTube is not a necessity. Let’s see how well YouTube gets by if we all stop watching for fun, and instead only watch when we have to, such as when we’re trying to learn how to fix a car the one time a year we need it.

I will continue to never give Nintendo any of my money on account of their litigiousness.

Grow up

Yeah, I thought Google was so cool around 2004. Now I can’t wait for them to become irrelevant. I need to stop using “googling” as a verb…

Forgotten benefits of gasoline: you can fix it yourself and you’re not locked into a shiny new consumerist downward spiral that demands you buy a new vehicle every ten years when the car can’t go 200 miles in a single charge anymore? And the next guy who gets the battery powered vehicle is just worse off than you were, as the poorer along us suffer even worse condition vehicles and the risk of massive expenses in the way of new battery failure. Why is nobody concerned with the fact that batteries are going to lock us into excess and unavoidable consumerism as they degrade? Engines -might- fail, but batteries -will- fail.

List one battery powered device that isn’t basically disposable.

The other guy is being dumb. He’s trying to tell people what they do and don’t need, and that’s not going to work; especially when you are considering people who are stuck on ICE cars for the exact reasons you’re saying.

I love my ICE vehicle, but I’ve said many times that I’d consider a battery powered vehicle when I can get 500+ mile range. The last thing I’m going to do is allow myself be inconvenienced by something I don’t care about, and this is the story here. I’m passionate about my WRX, but I could never be passionate about a battery and electric motors. When I switch, it’ll only be because the benefit is incredible and undeniable. People will simply not convince me that a 300 mile range in optimal conditions is going to suit me, because things never play out like the paper specs say.

If YouTube were an independent company, I would be much happier to pay like I do for Spotify and even (borderline) Paramount Plus. I have no problem paying artists for their time, and I have spent thousands and thousands on commissions and merchandise from independent people and art businesses. Google already has enough money. I would rather save my money for small(er) companies who actually need it.

If people stopped supporting these ultra-consolidated megacorporations, we might have a healthier economy and better worker’s rights overall. But what do I know lol

I’ve had two ASUS gaming laptops, and both of them began having issues within a year, and the second didnt last more than a couple years total.

The first laptop was one of their enormous ROG 17 inch gaming laptops that looked like it had jet engine exhaust. The hard drive died and the power port broke within the first year, and I had to send it in under warranty. The power brick also died, and I ended up having to replace it myself around the 3 year mark.

Thinking it was a fluke, I ended up buying a smaller, more portable ASUS gaming laptop next which had more of a standard form factor. Maybe six or eight months later, that one suffered some issue that required being sent in for service as well. It began experiencing the same issue about four months later, I’d sent it in for repair a second time for the same issue, and they apparently fixed it.

I got to use that laptop for maybe 1.5 years total before it was completely unusable, in spite of two RMAs.

My current gaming laptop is an HP Omen 17 from 2017, and has been completely stable and reliable up to this day. I love to hate on HP because of their dumb printers, but I’m pretty impressed. I’ll probably end up buying another one, because I will literally never own another ASUS product ever in my life, and there are only so many manufacturers out there who I’d consider for a laptop purchase.

I always ask myself who will buy the products these companies produce if all the workers have been fired. Maybe inflation is just the natural ramp up to McDonald’s charging 5,000 dollars for automated chicken nuggets when there are only billionaire left with money lol.

Time to go back to books, fellas. This party is done.

Gasoline is only one part of what comes from oil. If you participate in modern society, you’re using petroleum products whether you like it or not lol

Took me over a year to recover from Outer Wilds. Can’t explain it…

Yeah, for sure. I used to think they just both sucked, and maybe they still do, but there’s no excuse for the level to which Israel has gone. And now I question whether Palestine was acting in some sort of “self defense” all along.

I think back to other revolutions and such, and although they aren’t 1-1 comparisons, I wonder… I bet the people of England thought the Americans were absolute terrorists during the revolutionary war.

Anyways. Not an expert… just been trying to make sense of the happenings.

Has Israel been the bad guy the entire time, or just as of a few months ago?

I think you’re right. Just gonna have to keep fighting the good fight. I guess lol

I’ve been active. Any time I share an opinion that isn’t in-step with the crowd, I get bombarded by people defending the status quo, insulting me, and telling me that I’m wrong because “just look at the downvotes” which is a hilarious metric.

I got banned from the Vegan community for suggesting that meat was deeply ingrained in our behavior from a cultural perspective, and simply messaging to other people that animals were alive and conscious wasn’t going to cut it if they wanted to reduce meat consumption.

I also tried to convince people that rubbing BLM/anti-“all lives matter” rhetoric in conservatives faces wasn’t going to convince them to support our movements, and the whole thing devolved into everyone throwing insults out, and not one person could ever explain why I was wrong.

Maybe becoming active on Lemmy isn’t a great thing lmao

Same

Yeah, it’s silly. It’s an entire industry built on “frivolous”, optional consumption. They are making a killing even WITH piracy. They (the studios, etc.) make so much money that they can afford to selectively offer their product only to certain streaming services, region locked, and some of them have even paid to develop their own streaming platforms just for fun.

All they have to do is put their product on the real market, let any platform stream it for a licensing fee, and offer things that people actually want to buy: physical media and silly trinkets.

They’re trying to squeeze blood from a stone. If they were struggling, they’d just let me buy their product for a reasonable fee instead of making me jump through hoops and watch commercials.

I used to joke that Republicans were Russian sycophants, bought and paid for by Putin himself to destroy America. But it’s not actually, and maybe never was, a joke.

Yeesh

I can get behind this if everything is processed locally. Let my computer do the computing and stop harvesting my data, internet