Bizarroland

There are tools that allow people who buy ads to compare the performance of their ads with their own metrics.

The more ineffectual an ad platform is, the less likely ad purchasers are to purchase ads.

If 20% of American internet users used ad nauseam it would cause significant financial damage to ad companies across the globe.

I think the last really big hurdle to an actually democratized internet is that we need to make it easier to host at home.

Asymmetrical download upload is such a fucking pain. I would rather have 100 down and 100 up then 400 down and 5 up like I currently do.

On top of that, there aren't a lot of good systems in place to enable me to host a website from home. If IPv6 were common it would be easy for me to secure a static IP address and to point that to my DNS resolver and attach my domain, but since I've got to be on an ipv4 system since no provider in my area provides an on-ramp to IPv6 and even if they did the Grand majority of Internet users cannot resolve IPv6 addresses, it's dead in the water.

If every person in America had symmetrical upload download and a static IPv6 address for their home, we could get rid of the grand majority of the content provider and hosts and instead use democratized systems like bluesky and Kbin and Mastodon and free tube without having to worry about these multi trillion dollar companies' bottom lines.

I also think a lot of people who grew up on the internet have completely and totally forgotten about how bad it really was. They had ads that would take over your computer, ads that would download viruses, ads that would use your modem to dial 1-900 numbers, ads that would open 800 uncloseable web pages full of porn and start playing loud screaming music and moaning sounds to gather the interest of every other person in the house just a shame you for using the internet.

And dear Jesus don't forget about the fucking toolbars. Dozens upon dozens of toolbars installed in every browser, everything from bonzi buddy to AOL email, detecting that a picture would be loaded on your screen and replacing it with one of theirs as an ad link.

Ad blockers have been necessary to use the internet for the last 20 freaking years.

If you're not the kind of person who would go to the STD clinic and fuck every person there without a condom, you should never use the internet without an ad block.

Don't forget, there is a large and worldwide vested interest in maintaining online divisiveness.

The internet has become our global hearth. The grand majority of humanity participate in the internet to communicate with each other for conversation, connectedness, and social expression.

This is very bad for authoritarian regimes, whether they are currently in power or attempting to enter into power or attempting to expand their power.

Should someone do something that is considered "bad", information about that will spread around the world as fast as a lie ever could.

To prevent that from hampering their schemes, the smart thing to do would be to poison the source. If you hate everyone on the internet because you have been effectively compromised by psychological poison, then you will not trust the people on the internet that you communicate with when they tell you something bad has happened.

Therefore, the mote of power you could add to collective action is rendered ineffective.

And, the interesting thing is they don't have to fool everybody. They only have to fool enough of us that our own internal division prevents effective action.

I never really believed in a devil growing up, but if I did believe in a devil now, I would definitely say that this is one of his activities.

Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you're good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.

Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.

Jack is minimally lossy. It would change the audio just from the DAC operation and the noise floor but otherwise be pretty good.

Next time you get your teeth cleaned at the dentist, which you should be doing every 6 months or so, ask them to give you a fluoride treatment. They literally just brush this minty sweet stuff onto your teeth and let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes.

The fluoride will leech into your teeth and help reinforce any weak spots to decrease the likelihood of developing cavities.

I mean, if you're a conspiracy theorist then in theory it will calcify your third eye as well, but I have no way of verifying that claim, or even proving that the third eye exists other than the pineal gland in your brain, and I've never heard of anyone's pineal gland being calcified.

It would only be ironic if it were a lifesaving device, for instance, if the creator of the defibrillator went into cardiac arrest by an accidental misfiring of the defibrillator on him.

Irony requires a reasonable expectation of an opposite outcome.

A solar eclipse happening on a cloudy day is not ironic, it's merely unfortunate. A song about things claiming to be ironic actually containing nothing that will qualify as ironic is ironic.

It's kind of like in the 1800s they believed that human beings could never generate enough pollutants to actually affect the Earth. There are intelligent opinions statements saying that the Earth was simply too large for anything a mere handful of 100 million humans could do to leave any lasting impact on.

Of course, they had no idea that we would swell to 8 billion humans or that the industrial revolution would take off quite so well as it did, but even today there are many people who believe that nothing that they individually do can leave any type of lasting ecological impact, positive or negative.

And because of that you have bum fuck HVAC technicians venting refrigerants into the atmosphere willy-nilly and assholes driving down the street throwing lit cigarette butts out in the middle of a drought and people just dumping their trash wherever they find an opportunity to dump it.

I said all of that to say that it's probably likely that even minor usage of drugs cause effects that are at best difficult to quantify. I don't think getting high one time is going to be the differentiation between a homeless bum and a Nobel Peace prize winner, but it might be the difference between someone who works a career and earns at their best $250,000 a year and someone who works a career and earns at their best $80,000 a year.

I could have sworn nicotine was technically a stimulant because it has vasoconstrictive properties.

And I don't know anyone who has ever put off going to sleep in order to take more depressants.

I have a follow-up head Canon about the movie Evil Dead 2, in that what we are seeing is Ash telling us the story of what happened and how his girlfriend got her head chopped off with a shovel.

That would explain the camp, The Three stooges comedy and the over-the-top bizarre this guy is just so cool he can't be killed even by an army of the Dead even when he sucked into the past like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

This is held up by the revised ending to army of darkness where he's telling this story to a girl in Kmart sorry, S Mart to impress her as if having a home-built robotic hand wasn't impressive efuckingnough.

Okay, yes, well, good, but why the fuck would Starfleet make their uniforms out of danger enhancing materials? That is like some 4D chess fucking eugenics program going on here.