BTW I'm a middle age Australian and I've been to hundreds of barbeques - have seen prawns barbequed maybe twice in my life. So I don't even know what the original ads were taking about, a cultural staple that almost never happens?

Nuance? And a Lemmy.ml user?

You also have already failed the purity test by considering a different narrative.

Same, it's fair to have means of communicating that you just don't want to use - and I let that go both ways as is fair. But if both my boomer parents are ok on Signal (with some initial help with notifications) then it makes it a pretty weak argument when acquaintances much younger than them say 'bro Signal is too hard, I uninstalled it'. For them I say 'No worries: email, call or SMS me if you need me'.

Signal is objectively a far better choice than SMS or WhatsApp and all the options I'm aware of. I dunno what OP is angling at either.

The only easy to use E2E encrypted chats are centrally managed, eg: Signal - and even getting friends and family members to move to that is hard.

While a decentralized fully open source self-hosted solution would be great - that shits just not possible for 90% of people. Apps succeed or fail due to barrier of entry and ease of use, and the decentralized options typically have far less user-friendly apps, far fewer users, and often require tech know-how like choosing a federated server or even configuring your own online storage or server (egs: Matrix, Briar, StoneAge). Some bring up Session as another alternative while failing to realize it is also centralized if you want push notifications (which most users do).

ANKO. We were sad when we saw Anko infiltrate the local Target after Kmart went through a merger with them in 2023.

We regularly avoid Kmart because the Anko crap filled the store, with very little in the way of brand options for any product type - just several different models of Anko - and then all the various brands disappeared from Target after the merger and were replaced with Anko.. a massive loss of consumer choices, all for the benefits of owner, Wesfarmers. Bleh. I don't think most consumers notice or care?

No. The 'whole idea' of the cloud is that it's cheaper than self-hosting via your hosted servers you manage in a DC or in-house. That's been its primary value proposition for the last 15+ years.

Rigorous backups and data safety are secondary concerns that you often pay for as an additional service or add-on feature with your cloud provider.

Plastic recycling is a joke. If you look at the recycling they actually did, it was only a few smallish projects like plastic planks for walkways and benches, and plastic carts and shelved for some Woolworths branches to put at front of store with a label to greenwash the problem. Hooray, now those plastic walkways and benches will slowly deteriorate microplastics into the environment around them under full force of the sun and rain.

The only real solution is banning single use plastics and moving back to glass and cans - focus on things that actually are recyclable and get rid of all the plastic.

Will it be hard and more expensive? Yes. Is it worth it and will reduce long term cost of pollution cleanup? Also yes.

P. S. I am not saying that people who try to break their recycling down to recycle plastics are any part of the problem by the way - they're just trying to do their best effort in the system they've found themselves in. The system itself is a joke

Very resonable (imo) response from Gargron (lead developer of Mastodon):

I’ve forwarded your question to our legal help and will provide an answer as soon as they give it to me. What you must understand is that our lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms, and we don’t have experience with law, so we meet somewhere in the middle. Meta presumably has an in-house legal team that can really embed themselves in the problem area; our lawyers are external and pro-bono and rely on us to correctly explain the requirements and community feedback. The draft has been around for something like a year and none of the community members pointed out this issue until now. I’ll add one thing:

"My assumption, {.. shortened for brevity ..} is that when you post content it gets mirrored elsewhere, and this continues until a deletion notice is federated. So I'd assume if an instance somewhere mirrors my content they can't get in trouble for it, and I'd also assume that if there is a deletion or maybe a block and a reasonable interpretation of the protocol would say that the content should be removed, I could send them a takedown and at that point they'd have to honor it."

The goal of the terms is to make assumptions like this explicit, because assumptions are risky both sides. Just because luckily there were no frivolous lawsuits around this so far doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of one.

Cory has had a much more calm response on a fediverse post, offering to reach out to the EFF's lawyers for assistance in drafting a better ToS for Mastodon, and other experienced lawyers have offered help also. Amongst the usual negativity from some users.

I'll be keeping my eye on the outcome but so far it looks positive.

Whew. Must have been hard work carrying all those assumptions in.

Trump's terrible response to COVID19 resulted in a daily thousand people dead for nearly three years, 10,000 a week at it's peak, almost a million in total.

His admin has also been accused many times of using terror tactics.

I think 20 years is long enough that political cartoonists can make 9/11 similes without worrying too much about pearl clutching.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662

"Symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and how severe they are can vary. People with the disorder can:

• Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
• Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
• Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.
• Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
• Believe they are superior to others and can only spend time with or be understood by equally special people.
• Be critical of and look down on people they feel are not important.
• Expect special favors and expect other people to do what they want without questioning them.
• Take advantage of others to get what they want.
• Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
• Be envious of others and believe others envy them.
• Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited.
• Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office.
• At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they view as criticism. They can:
• Become impatient or angry when they don't receive special recognition or treatment.
• Have major problems interacting with others and easily feel slighted.
• React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior.
• Have difficulty managing their emotions and behavior.
• Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change.
• Withdraw from or avoid situations in which they might fail.
• Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection.
• Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure."

I wish I'd never even heard the name 'Trump' but I feel like I know him well enough now that 'all of the above' feels accurate.

Google were maybe seen as the good guys back in the days of Yahoo search, and perhaps the very early days of Android.

But those times are so long passed. Google has been a tax-avoiding, anti-consumer rights, search-rigging, anti-privacy behemoth for decades now, and they only get worse with each passing year.