No I’m not shilling. Germany literally just recently shut them all down, and now are complaining about rising energy costs sending them into a recession. A problematic move that was predicted by just about everybody, even most germans thought it was a bad idea.

And now we have this article. Pro nuclear or not, axing a huge chunk of your country’s power production in an age of exponentially growing power demands, is definitely not a good idea.

Germany: shuts down all their nuclear power plants.

Also Germany: why is power so expensive?

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Ask him if he would like to take a trip to Ireland to celebrate his graduation. I’m sure he won’t be starting work immediately, but if he already has a job it’s an easy excuse for at least a 2 week vacation. You could offer to show him around where you live and all the cool spots. Introduce him to your friends and do some of the things you all usually do for fun. Then you can take a trip to the touristy spots, which is conveniently a great excuse to get a room for night in the city, ya know, to make sure you have enough time to see everything and not worry about the travel time and such. Then for the end of the trip, just spend the time relaxing, and hanging out together. Give yourselves the time to get comfortable doing the day to day routine, give him a chance to experience what regular life in Ireland might be if he were to stay a bit longer.

I think we’re all confused by the question.

Right?! It looks just a little off, like the thumbs, or something. Can’t pinpoint exactly what it is, but this picture is written ng somehow.

I do hate on LGBTQIA+. It sucks! The acronym is too damn long, and a pain to type out. Can’t it be something easy to say and type? Like WIE - We Include Everybody, PAB - People Against Biggots, NBE - Non Binary Equality, or something like that.

I really love the little touch of the march leaving peewee hockey games unscreamed at.

Same. What tipped me off was when one of the supposed leaders of the Million March’s original name was the “Million March for Why Won’t Queer People All Go Away.” Hilarious.

In other news, Scientists have done extensive studies and found that water is in fact wet. More at 11.

Move to Mars? I doubt that’s likely. If we can’t unfuck our own mostly functional atmosphere, what makes you think we can fix Mars’s

Now whatcha gon’ do with it!?

If we were neighbors, I would be trying my best to make small talk, and think of something interesting to talk about with you when we see each other, while trying not to stare too much, but probably failing at times.

Oh, I didn’t realize you being my gf was a possibility.

If it were a family BBQ, wouldn’t that make you a relative?

No I understand the word. What I’m saying is that as the fediverse grows, and large communities develop, there will be large corps will want a piece of the action. They operate with money, they down build or create, they buy. What would you do, you living you life as you are now, but decide to take up running an instance. Assume that instance grows very large and starts getting worldwide recognition, and some corporate affiliated executive invites you to meet and they give you a very real offer of $84,000,000,000 to give the instance to them. They promise to add the features you’ve wanted to implement but was struggling to, offer a team of people to help with your bot and spam issues. Would you turn that down? Idk about you, but I could definitely use 84 million dollars. I hate corps with a passion, I believe they ruin everything they touch, but I could do the things I want with that kind of money.

And so what do the community’s of thousands upon thousands members do when their admin sells out? Do they move? Can the entire community just up and move to another instance and keep the same engagement? Would they even want to? The corpo’s just implemented the features they’ve been asking for for years, they can’t be that bad right? Besides we like it here. I’m sure it’ll be fine, right? Besides, Amazon already ownes one of the other largeest instance, and we’re def not moving to the one meta runs, what’s one more?

And of course once the large corps have thrown all their money at the newest popular thing, they repeat the process. All of them Switch from growth focus to monetization focus and everything turns to shit.

There are other options, there are smaller instances that people could move to, and that probably will happen, but the effect will be similar. People who were all gathered in once place, enjoying one thing, get splintered into lots of other smaller groups, with a newer differenter thing. And it starts over again.

I mean I am excited for the potential the fediverse has, but I do wonder how long until it becomes enshitified too. Every great new invention that serves the needs of the people always goes downhill at some point. Remember that television networks used to be an amazing platform for all our needs.

So it was in like 2013 or 14 so it was a long time ago and I might be remembering it wrong, but I remember it being reported that the firmware that was installed with Questionable functionality was found to be collecting and sending personal usage data back to Lenovo, specifically the Chinese branch based on the IP. I’m. Im not 100% sure if it was specifically keylogging, but it was definitely data that they had no business collecting so I might have remembered it as such.

You mean the Chinese company that put keyloggers into their firmware, said sorry we didn’t mean to when they were called out for it, but still didn’t remove it?

Yeah… I’m gonna go with not much better.

Yes, but also no. But as in, not as much. 18-19 year olds in college have a lot of the same inexperience, but at least they are starting to get their first real taste of freedom. Where they are making decisions that actively shape their life, instead of it being decided for them. And a lot of 18-19 year olds go right to work after highschool, and are starting to see what it’s like to try and make a life for themselves. Dealing with jobs, banks, application processes, bills, and otherwise dealing with the systems that are affected by those they would be voting for.

If I think back to my first time voting after highschool, there was a lot I was kinda just going with the few things I knew, which wasn’t much. I didn’t like this guy because what he said, I like this guy because my family seems to like him. (I voted for Bush, because he seemed to do good on his first term and that John Kerry guy seemed shifty. That was literally it.) but I had at least started working and paying bills, and had at least the understanding that the ideas I held in highschool were a bit short sighted.

I think the main issue is that if you reduce the voting age to 16 you get a much larger pool of voters that can be easily convinced to vote based on targeted campaigning. And because the easily swayed, emotionally charged collection of 16-20 year olds is way more votes than the easily swayed emotionally charged 18-20 group is, a politician running a campaign targeted towards that group using extremist ideals, could really gain more traction and sway elections.

So I would be worried about seeing our very limited 2 party system start leaning even more towards the extreme sides than it already is.

yeah not a big fan of that idea. I remember my political ideas when I was 16. I used to believe that social darwinism would be the best policy, to just rod the world of the weak, and the strong would prevail making the world better. I was convinced of this by my other 16 and 17 year old friends, who likely heard about it in one of their classes in highschool. in fact a lot of us believed this, as 16 year olds are really easily convinced of ideas that sounds good when spoken. It didn’t take me long once I got out of highschool and started getting my first adult experience to realize how stupid that idea is.

The problem is high schoolers mainly experience the struggle of navigating social groups and are just trying to figuring out how to fit in with those around them. They are surrounded by peer pressure by those who also don’t fully understand the complexity of social relationships. They are bound to have strong opinions based on little real world experience.

Not only that, it is easy to manipulate large groups of young highschoolers to believe what you want them to. Does anyone remember “The Wave” experiment where a highschool teacher was able to convert almost the entire student body into fascist beliefs before dropping it on them what he had done? I worry that if highschoolers are able to vote, that our already corrupt politicians will absolutely abuse that susceptibility to their own agendas.