Hats off to the downvoter who read this and apparently thought to themselves "hell no! 556 million is a lot more than 3 billion, and definitely more than half of 8 billion!!!"

twitter is where most people are

Twitter is gone. There is only X.

According to Musk, there are 556m monthly active "users". A year ago Musk commissioned a study that found at least 11% of active users on Twitter were bot accounts. There's plenty of reason to believe that that percentage has only gone up, especially in light of the fact that there's been a significant exodus of users due to Musk's handling of the platform, and that at the time of the study there were about 368m users. So either 200m people who were previously uninterested in Twitter were so impressed by how Musk systematically made X less functional and more expensive, or bot accounts became massively more prevalant.

Regardless, with a global adult population of 8+ billion, in no world is 556m "most people", even ignoring the bots. Facebook has 3b monthly active users. Tiktok 1b. Instagram 2b.

As for the rest of the argument, the idea that the only way for extremist voices can be held in check is to politely engage them in rational discussion is sadly nonsense. They're extremists. They aren't interested in rational discussion. The only way to hold them in check is to deplatform them, whether literally or just by the old fashioned method of social ostracism.

Manuel Vonau

From his bio on that site (https://www.androidpolice.com/author/manuel-vonau/):

Manuel studied Media and Culture studies in Düsseldorf, finishing his university career with a master's thesis titled "The Aesthetics of Tech YouTube Channels: Production of Proximity and Authenticity." His background gives him a unique perspective on the ever-evolving world of technology and its implications on society. He isn't shy to dig into technical backgrounds and the nitty-gritty developer details, either.

So he's a marketing guy with possibly zero tech background beyond watching YouTube videos, who isn't afraid to discuss "nitty-gritty developer details" despite apparently not actually understanding them.

I was being a bit sarcastic, because season 1 was fantastic, but season 2 was (IMHO) absolutely terrible. I couldn't finish it.

altered carbon was a disaster

Personally, I loved it. I just wish they'd make a second season.

Someone complains about one specific thing not being free. You:

I don’t know why people expect to get **everything **for free

Since you've started down the road of what people are and are not allowed to do: you are not allowed to participate in discussions if you can't avoid making shitty logical fallacies in your very first response.

That's correct. The indicator light was pretty obvious.

I always found it fascinating how upset people get about the idea of a novel device recording them without permission, but it is a complete non-issue that a familiar device (the common smart phone) could also record them without permission with less of a chance of them noticing.

Do you understand how much effort you're putting into being "right" rather than having an actual discussion?

For context, you started with "EV is bad because it uses coal", implying that it is worse than ICE vehicles (somehow).

Then you had to change it to "EV is bad because it uses non-renewable energy."

Then you had to change it to "EV is bad because it uses non-renewable energy and renewable energy, but not really much renewable energy."

Then you had to change it to "EV is bad because outside of California, which doesn't count (for some reason), it uses non-renewable energy and renewable energy, but not really much renewable energy."

Now that someone is pointing out that other places besides California use significant amounts of renewable energy, your argument has become "I only will accept arguments that provide citations, even though my own various, shifting arguments, have provided none."

This is in no way a good look for you.

The real problem here is that Twitter/X user’s data can be easily revealed by organizations.

The publicly posted data being easily revealed by organizations is a problem?

No, your comment was clear: anyone who doesn't make whatever level of effort it takes to never shop at Amazon infuriates you. Furthermore, you assume that there are always other choices besides Amazon and Walmart. What you obviously still aren't getting is that those other choices besides Amazon and Walmart may not be practical for everyone.

Amazon is bad. No one is disagreeing. But if I need a left-handed monkey wrench and my choices are either buy from Amazon or drive 2 hours to the closest major city, go to a big box store that let's be honest, isn't really much better than Amazon in terms of economic impact, and then drive 2 hours back, you being infuriated by my choosing to not waste half a day to choose the slightly-lesser-of-two-evils is a lovely demonstration of privilege.

So did you just skip the first half of my comment, or did you not understand the words?

Newsflash: not everyone in America lives in a major urban area where a wide variety of shops are available, let alone small independent shops. I live 30 minutes from the nearest city, which is a small city. There's a huge amount of products that are not available in either my immediate area or even in the closes city. I don't mind paying extra to avoid major chains, and I typically look elsewhere before resorting to Amazon, but paying extra and spending 2+ hours in a car to avoid Amazon is not a viable alternative.

If you're going to talk about the "natural state of things", then I assume you simply go out into the nearest forest, cut down a tree, and build whatever you need using the assortment of stone tools you've hand crafted?

So do you just assume everyone lives within convenient travel distance of a wide variety of shops that would supply everything that they could possibly want, or are you claiming moral superiority because you shop at Walmart instead of online at Amazon?