The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.

1. Make something fun to play

2. Make something I could put into my college portfolio

I did both things, but it was never about making money or being exploited, and I think I prefer that.

After two years of talking up mastodon/pixelfed and most folks ignoring me, I've gotten 2 pings from family members about signing up and migrating off of twitter/instagram. It's only a matter of time and how quickly the rug gets pulled out from under folks I think.

They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.

You cannot and should not just "listen" to problems that you're not allowed to work on or expect the other person to work on. You are an active member of this persons' life with your own point-of-view and emotional needs, not a dumping ground for emotional flotsam.

It's like saying Rego[1] should just be done in a procedural language when in fact it also wouldn't be useful in that context.

[1] https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/policy-language

In 2017 I built my first desktop PC from the ground up and got it running Windows/Linux. I just removed Windows after the 11 upgrade required TPM, and I bought a brand new Framework laptop which I love.

This is to say that Apple used to represent a sort of freedom to escape what used to be Microsoft's walled garden. Now it's just another dead-end closed ecosystem that I'm happy to leave behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad

There's no obligation to "Own" land, if you want to put your capital elsewhere then either use your existing land as collateral for a loan or otherwise sell it. Technically everyone is actually leasing land from a government, it's not a commodity and it has a finite supply, so unlike corn or even housing, what is a speculator even speculating on?

I also want to be clear I think it would be very silly to ban speculators, the act of speculation is something that we all do when we own literally anything, but speculating on limited finite ground space that no one actually owns doesn't make any logical sense. Just properly tax speculation into a space that is unprofitable to hoard.

Arguably, speculation should always be unprofitable and we should ideally regulate against it in every way, shape and form. I'd ask what purpose does holding onto a unproductive piece of land serve at all to society beyond an easy to grease financial vehicle?

When I traveled through Japan a few years ago, my group stayed at everything from super expensive Onsens, to basic airport hotels, to capsule hotels in Tokyo. The flexibility to choose the kind of stay I wanted was fantastic and allowed us to stay within a budget while getting the full experience both inside and outside of metropolitan areas.

Your perspective disregards how little a post-grad college student should have to care about managing spaces they only sometimes use and would otherwise need to fully maintain themselves.

Even more tenement type layouts would be spectacular for increasing stock, but this is just half of the problem. It's all entirely dependent on reducing the level of greed landlords can get away with today.

These "rules" weren't voted upon by either creators or consumers. Most of them are arbitrary and capricious. Features implemented by YouTube, like showing where people skip to the most, are also an attempt to cut into sponsorship dollars, was that within the "rules"?

Let me be clear: Following the "rules" under these monopolistic circumstances is the philosophy of cowardice in the face of power and doesn't hold as much intellectual merit as you might think.

Split up any and all monopolies, and nationalize what should provide a common good such as payment networks and internet infrastructure.