“I drive for free”

So your solar panels didn’t cost anything? Look I’m very pro-solar but rooftop solar for residential makes sense for very few people. It’s not very efficient (even with the best panels available at the time) and the efficiency falls off over time as the panels degrade. Most rooftop solar savings calculations use absurd estimates for power costs in the future to justify themselves and take 10+ years to pay off. Furthermore selling a house with rooftop solar is harder due to having to find someone to take over the lease (which is needed to pay for it for most people).

None of this even starts to address the solar rooftop companies that have gone out of business while leaving their customer high and dry.

Again, I like solar but rooftop just doesn’t make sense for most people.

So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.

It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.

IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.

Honestly, this was a pretty stupid policy in the first place. The maintenance and upkeep for all the houses is way more than just putting solar in the field somewhere. It was a policy that sounded good on paper, but did not actually work in practice. A much better policy would be a community owned solar power facility. The solar panels we have today will be obsolete in five years time if not sooner, a dedicated solar facility would be able to update panels overtime and handle the maintenance at scale. Much easier than trying to upgrade or maintain solar panels on top of a bunch of peoples houses.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.

I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.

I mean Uber started as a black car service and wanted it to be possible for drivers to do it full time if they wanted. Neither Uber nor Lyft were ever billed as “make some money sharing a ride to where you are already driving”, the platform doesn’t even account/allow for that.

I fully agree on Airbnb but I don’t think the Uber example works.

The state AGs are slow on complaints but next time reach for the CFPB, they don’t mess around and you’ll get a call from a human (from Amazon) in a short amount of time.

I spent hours on hold with a company (not Amazon) and they kept giving me the run around. After filing a complaint I got a call back in less than 2 days by someone who immediately fixed the issue.

As if we needed another sign that ZDnet was trash…

I fucking hate these obviously bullshit articles. “Gen Z is using feature phones”, “Gen Z are using paper maps”, “Gen Z is doing XYZ”.

No, they aren’t. At best some sad excuse for a journalist found a handful of tweets and wrote a whole article on it like it’s a “trend”.

Look, I know “journalists” are being squeezed to produce at an unreasonable rate but if you write drivel like this then you have no business calling yourself a journalist, hell I don’t even think you can call yourself a “writer” or “contributor” either. It barely passes as writing and you are contributing nothing to society.

Instead of throwing the NAND away, which increases electronic waste, the factories recycle them into cheaper products or sell them to local companies, giving rise to obscure SSD brands on the Chinese market.

Ah yes, I’m sure electronic waste is their top concern /s

Reprocessing components for lower-tier products or new products is a regular practice in the hardware world. Companies are always looking to maximize profits.

Ok, at least we touch on the real real eventually (at the very end of the article but fine).

I don’t think he’s defending a Meta product as much as he is calling out Sensor Tower for being scummy at best if not full of shit.