The dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about. Sometimes, stuff equals capability. This is especially true with tools, renovation supplies, and hobby supplies. That old drain snake in the garage? $350 plumber call. Rarely used winter gear in a closet? No $$$ rental on the occasional ski vacation. Sewing machine and supplies? Now you can alter or repair your clothes.

It can also be resiliency. All those extra Christmas candles? Great for a power outage during hurricane season. Buying, preserving, and storing summer produce can save money later in the year. A deep pantry can be a critical safety net for some people with job insecurity.

Of course, there’s still a lot of crap we can get rid of, like old hand-me-downs and things we’ll never use.

It’s really a balancing act between the cost of maintaining capability and the cost of paying for outside services. For me, I basically add an entire room to my house for $150 a month, and still get to keep the ability to do the things I love and have some resiliency in my life.

Strongly agree. We’ve already learned that prohibition doesn’t work and that people will always find other ways to get their fix.

If flavored vapes are “marketed to children”, what about flavored THC edibles and fruity/candy flavored alcohol? What about energy drinks and highly caffeinated sodas? What about high calorie ultra-palatable foods with absurd quantities of high fructose corn syrup? How is nicotine so different from any of the other drugs that society has decided are socially acceptable?

Humanity has had a relationship with mind altering substances since the dawn of time. It’s ingrained in our cultures, and may even be partially responsible for how human intelligence has adapted to where it is today. Nobody is going to overwrite thousands of years of history by banning vapes. People will just find some other way to access nicotine and other substances, probably by switching back to smoking or chewing. A brief ten-year interval of pushback against smoking in select countries didn’t mean that people no longer wanted nicotine, it just meant that people wanted a less objectionable way of consuming it than burning leaves in paper.

• Hottest 14 days ever recorded so far…

So true! Whisker stress is a real thing.

Looking forward to hearing the results of this. No one should be above the law.

I generally listen to a pretty big variety of music, but over the past few years I’ve really been liking jazz and big band music from the 1930s and 1940s. So much so that I made an internet radio station of public domain music from that era so I could listen to it like it was a radio broadcast then.

http://1930sradio.com:8000/WJAZ.m3u

I miss the niche trade subs, like r/electricians, r/construction, and r/machinists. Tons of great content on their subs that just isn’t here on Lemmy since most people on those subs don’t skew as techy as most Lemmy users.

Still not worth supporting Reddit though.

That’s a great article, I strongly agree.

I feel like copyright hurts competition and creativity by letting publishers and studios put out a relatively small number of successful works, and then ride that success for years.

If copyright terms were much shorter with no provision for renewal, it would spur a lot of creativity and competition between studios and publishers because they would effectively be forced to keep coming out with new, high quality content in order to stay relevant.

For our generation, sure, but there’s an entire generation of internet users that have never known a world without streaming services, and never got in to physical media, archived media, or piracy. A lot of them grew up with mobile devices only and hardly ever used desktop or laptop computers.

I was talking to some of my younger coworkers about music the other day. I mentioned something about the hundreds of gigabytes of music, all in FLAC, ALAC, and high quality mp3, and the question I got was “why? Why not just use spotify/Apple Music?” Well what happens when music from your favorite artist gets taken down because it wasn’t profitable? What happens when your favorite show gets cancelled and pulled because it wasn’t profitable?

So much data would have been flat out gone without piracy.

I’d love to see this too! Maybe something implemented in the sharing menu that allows you to copy a direct link to the media or download it.

This is just another avenue for corporate control of the country. Look at the cases:

• A predatory industry (payday loans) that wants to be unregulated
• A commercial fishing company that doesn’t want to pay their fair share for conservation

And previously:

• The coal industry (indirectly through the bought and paid for government of West Virginia) wanting to keep coal power plants from being regulated

This gutting of federal regulations is going to set us back years.

It’s the classic “Eternal September”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Agreed. But Reddit, along with most of the internet, was like that in the early days too. In the days pre-Digg migration, I feel like Reddit was down more than up. After the migration though, there was enough critical mass to encourage bug fixing and improvement.

I’m sure there will be growing pains though no matter the outcome.

Lemmy reminds me a lot of the way the internet used to be- smaller, independent communities with more real engagement and less of a content firehose. With so many instances, if you want something, you have to seek it out or start it yourself- with the added benefit of federation keeping everyone connected.

I’m really optimistic that this will get critical mass. I think the concept of federation is great, and I like to think we’re at the forefront of a whole new phase of online community.

Yep. Nobody dies of just “old age”, there’s always a cause. Unfortunately cancer is the cause that is the hardest to treat.