Why would anyone blame Obamacare and not their employer for not offering health insurance?

How about blaming our horrible system of employer sponsored health insurance?

If you're part-time and making $15 an hour don't you qualify for an Obamacare subsidy? That would limit the cost to 10% of your income.

The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.

Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.

Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.

Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.

Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.

They'll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.

Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations... Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.

Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.

On the one hand I don't like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it's damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.

Is there anything more disgusting than carpeted areas around a tub or toilet?

Like what the fuck were they thinking?

All of the other 70s and '80s trends - like the really dark wood paneling, ugly orange colors, that's just aesthetics. Maybe we'll go back to liking wood paneling at some point.

Carpet in a bathroom is not aesthetics or fashion It is fucking disgusting and unsanitary.

Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.

About half the population already owns a home so they're immune to this problem.

The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.

Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.

If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we're in a depression.

The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.

When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.

Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.

The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?

What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That's why they switched to Chromium.

Oh... so to answer your question no one is "allowing" a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You're free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you'll do it you'll probably just use Chromium.

There's two problems...

1. There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)

2. Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn't matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don't give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.

Now that you're pretty wealthy has your family decided to become your best buddy now?

I'd be willing to bet that 80% of the people that have a very intense emotional reaction to the small town song live in the suburbs less than 20 to 30 minutes away from whatever city they work in.

Actual small towns like that have less than a couple thousand people suck ass. There's nothing to do there and no jobs and that's why people leave.

I have a picture with Joel McHale.

If Joel McHale turned out to run an international child sex trafficking ring would my picture with him indicate that I was part of the ring?

I HATE Elon, but this whole...

"See see see! There is a picture of them both at the NYC 9/11 Firefighters Fundraiser event in 2009!!! must also be a Satan worshipping child rapist/murderer."

Thing is fucking stupid.

The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.

We didn't get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc...

But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It's a camera, it's camcorder, it's a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald's ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can't do.

You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.

The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.