I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The internet has essentially been in a wild west era since it was created, as the government has pretty much no laws or court decisions saying what information social companies can and can’t regulate. On top of that we’re in an era where the SEC happily rubber stamps every corporate merger under the sun. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that as a majority of information on the internet is controlled by a handful of companies. And on top of that, even if you want to make your “alternative” platform, that’s incredibly hard to do since services like web hosting and payment processing are also controlled by a handful of corporations.

Most major corporations have no business acquiring any other companies, and on top of that they need to be broken up. Just thinking of a few, Amazon owning Amazon shopping, AWS, Twitch, Ring, IMDb, and a fucking satellite internet company is ridiculous. The finance, energy, defense/aerospace, pharmaceutical/healthcare, and so many other industries are all guilty of this. Libertarians couldn’t be more right about one thing, competition benefits consumers, but for some reason the only thing US republicans and democrats can agree on is that we should never enforce anti-trust laws. And internet leftists, the people who you’d figure would be all for corporations being broken up, are silent on the issue. It’s infuriating to watch.

Audiophiles out here in denial of the fact that 99% of music is played via Bluetooth.

I don’t care if my streamed music isn’t the absolute best quality when I’m listening on AirPods or in my car.

And guess what, if we have universal healthcare without checks and balances, hospitals will just create more middle management positions to drive up costs.

Healthcare in the US is a disaster right now, but unfortunately just having the government say they’ll foot the bill will make things worse. The bloat in the healthcare industry (as well as pharmaceutical and medical device industries) needs to be combated too.

I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.

I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.

Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.

With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it’s unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.

Moving south to a warmer climate usually means either significantly warmer summers or a significantly higher cost of living. Or both.

Yeah it sucks dealing with extreme cold occasionally and long winters, but it’s a lot better than living in the south where it’s unbearably hot and humid for 8 months of the year. And any place with a temperate climate such as the Pacific coast is prohibitively expensive.

The upper Midwest really has some of the worst weather in North America. Get schlonged by freezing temps and snow for 6 months followed by heat for another 6 months.

Just about as much time as the Democrat candidate spends actually doing anything about it.

US politicians will probably mandate that people can’t set their AC below 80 degrees before they dare stop subsidizing the oil industry.