I'm not. Universities aren't places of open or free learning. They're deeply invested in capitalism and benefit greatly from intellectual property laws. In fact, most universities function largely as state subsidized pipelines that take people without a viable, real world skill set and turn them into people who still don't have a viable real world skill set, but who do have a piece of paper telling corporations that they're able and willing to put up with complete bullshit, general mistreatment, and dull, grueling labor for years without incident. Which is good enough for your typical middle-class wage slave and whatever they might want to do.

Americans will do anything but embrace economic policies that benefit the working class.

Mom: "Honey, try reading a book or something for once. You're almost about to graduate from high school and you've literally never read a book to completion in your entire life. Actually, I'm going to say only 1 hour of cell phone time a night until you finish a book of your choosing."

OP: *This post*

The wikileaks thing is highly suspect, though. Like, wikileaks intentionally disclosed a lot of publicly damaging dirt on Clinton and the Dems at a very sensitive time in the election while not releasing ANYTHING on the GOP, even though they supposedly had that information.

Twitter is terrible for people like me. I like following interests: books, coding, landscape photography, linux, etc. Twitter is more about following people, and people have diverse interests. One thing I really liked about Reddit was that it had active subreddits dedicated to particular interests. You could just hang out in those subreddits and only ever interact with things on topic to said interests. Lemmy has a bit less of that, unless your interests are politics, linux, and programming, and shitty memes.

Probably lukewarm take: Social media shouldn't be a utility because it provides no social value or improvement of quality of life in the same way other genuine public utilities like electricity, water, sewer services, or general access to the internet, might. It's also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis, climate deniers, anti-vaccers, and every other person with "insert terrible belief here" included.

Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities. Just because it's fun to use doesn't mean it's good for society or come anywhere close to meeting the definition for the level of necessity typically attached to something as a public utility.

Baby Boomers as a generational cohort are well on their way to completely dying off and generational antagonism is a tool of the capitalist class to turn the workers of different ages against one another. Be better than that. Make better memes.

What about the arrow pointing to the guy who accidentally tasered himself so hard in the balls that he died?

"Rectum? Damn near killed him!"

I know nobody asked, but the reputation Macs have amongst IT industry professionals is insanely annoying to me. I guess it's a difference between what I like in a laptop versus what other people like in them.

I've seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines. And I'm just sitting here, like...why? You are locked into an inferior operating system that becomes progressively more janky the deeper you get into its configuration. I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the "modifier key" for the fucking mouse, so you can change your mouse's modifier key to its ctrl or shift key, apparently. Y'know, in case your standard 20 dollar Logitech wired mouse, like the one I'm using, has shift and modifier keys. Just super useful /s. It randomly had slack muted after installing it, so I could never get message notifications until I figured out what to alter after digging through the guts of its terrible system configuration UI. It can't remember the order of attached displays and half the time I have to rearrange them after resuming it from hibernation. If you want to do basic window manager things, like press the meta key (also referred to as the windows key on non-macbooks) + direction arrow to have a window snap to a quadrant of your screen, you have to install a 3rd party application with Homebrew. Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device. With any luck you don't have to compile anything for it, because...you probably won't be able to. Perhaps most annoying is the fact that, even if you want to use it as a full desktop replacement and plug in 3 monitors with the same resolution into it at a desk (most Macs have at least passable 3rd party dock support), the Mac just won't let you. It only lets you plug in 2 and it duplicates one of those two onto the 3rd one. If you want to plug in 3, you technically can: you just have to download 3rd party displaylink drivers, which, knowing Apple, probably won't fucking work and might permanently fuck up your display.

I get that it's a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that's purely because it's an extremely optimized ARM based processor that's only designed to work with this specific operating system. I also get that machines running Linux also have their own problems, but you aren't paying for whatever Linux distro you're running (probably) and you also have the power to change things with a little bit of effort. If I'm buying a machine like an M1, where the OS is presumably part of the whole "package," it should just work well out of the box.

Beyond those complaints, it's got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat. If they could run linux and had decent keyboards, I might like them. But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point. I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc. But you can install any Linux distro (that isn't Nix based, sadly) to it without issue and its keyboard makes it actually tolerable to code on for extended periods. I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it's the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.

This situation kinda reminds me of John Locke talking about slavery. He says that for some rights to be truly inalienable, that people themselves should not have the ability to willingly surrender them, such as by willingly selling themselves into slavery. Now, yes, John Locke owned stock in a slave trading company, so he's a hypocrite in that regard, but I digress. I feel like this is one of those things where people shouldn't be allowed to physically sell parts of their body for consumption, as "not being eaten by other people" is one of those inalienable rights we should have as a society.

They kind of do this at the beginning of one season of Star Wars: Rebels. The protagonist brings down a TIE fighter on top of Vader and he basically just shrugs it off. They were like...."Uh, who the fuck is this guy?!"