but suddenly there is very little that connects both continents.

I think the Nazis would disagree with you.

Communism, brown skin, religions other than Christianity are still public enemy number one.

Mains electricity is highly regulated because it can and regularly does kill people and start house fires.

I love Linux. I use it wherever I can. I don’t use Linux on my primary gaming workstation, for the simple reason that the display drivers, specifically mixed extended desktop and screen mirroring is just straight up ass.

Such an LLM would have the “knowledge” of almost every

Most human knowledge is not written down. Your premise is flawed to the core.

The amortization length affects proportion of principle paid down, but it doesn’t eliminate it entirely. At the same interest rate, you end up having paid more in interest at maturity of a longer amortization, yes. In practice, this can be mostly mitigated by negotiating a lower rate, or negotiating and exercising prepayment privileges.

More importantly, with a mortgage, ownership of the property is yours entirely, from day one, not the lenders’. What you owe is cash, not the property. The property is merely collateral in the event of default of payment.

BTW, multi generational loan agreements are not new. They are somewhat common historically and in other places of the world. For the same reason that multigenerational housing is the historical norm.

Broadly speaking this is probably true. In a smaller context, though, there are tons of counter examples. The internet for example, from just 10 years ago, was unquestionably better. AI slop, bots, enshitification, social media and browser monoculture…

The anti science trend of MAGA over the last few years…

Etc. Regression does happen, and we should not take things for granted.

I hear they are a solution to the problem of increasing mileage/efficiency. I am no fan of Tesla, but we have to admit, there is some merit to that argument, however debatable the efficiency benefits are.

That’s not to say safety isn’t a serious issue. The biggest problem is the reliance on electronics. Now if someone can reinvent the design with a highly reliable mechanical system, with multiple redundancy.

Define “never”. Never in as in never in the history of 21st century America? Pretty tame assertion. Never in the anthropological sense? That would be completely farcical.

Why stop at appliances? By that logic, humans are nothing more than self-propelled heaters. The whole universe is nothing but shifting pockets of heat like the ripples of a pond bouncing back and forth until they all disappear.

Such nihilism.

The plastic (including polyester fabrics) in your car was most likely derived from petroleum. The car parts were most likely shipped around during manufacturing using combustion engine vehicles. The energy to cast those car parts, probably some of it comes from non renewables. The labour to build the car almost surely comes from other people who consume gas (for example to drive to the EV factory)

That “100%” renewable energy? The installation and maintenance of it was/is almost certainly done with large industrial equipment and vehicles burning fossil fuels. (Similar issue with production of parts).

Look, I’m not saying you aren’t making positive choices by choosing renewable options. What I am saying is, while they are more renewable, they aren’t truly 100% renewable when you factor everything involved in it. Fossil fuels are so pervasive in society, it’s virtually impossible to both function in a modern society and not contribute to the consumption of fossil fuels.

IMO, setting it up at home is not the bar for decentralization. I don’t think it’s even practical to run your own self-hosted fediverse server.

I think we can get just about all the same benefits of decentralization at the scale of the city.

No, this is the capitalist trying to convince customers (investors) that they have more capital than the other capitalists. Nothing about this has anything to do with workers.

Hear me out: what if repealing section 230 would end up killing our social media monoculture, since it would be impossible for these platforms to operate. Instead, what if people had to host their content themselves, you know, like we did back in the day, when the Internet was fun.

No one else uses the term “cloud” like that.

That part of this comic really stuck out like a sore thumb. I can’t tell if it’s an oversight, a comment about the challenges of self-hosting, or subtle mockery of self-hosting hypocrisy.