Not after the first snowfall, they won’t.

LubeLogger

For anyone whose first thought does not reach for vehicles, this is a most unfortunate name. Extremely appropriate, but unfortunate.

There is a legitimate reason for this: it’s the only way to provide content creators with evidence of how many people actually clicked on the link.

The downside is that there is so many ways that a feature like this can be abused by BlueSky in ways that can hurt users.

I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.

Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.

Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.

That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.

Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.

Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.

Don’t have the link, but in America at least, the prevalence of partisanship has been in lockstep with economic inequality.

As in, the greater the economic inequality, the greater that people have voted in Republicans that refused to cooperate with democrats on things like bills and initiatives, and who were further and further to the right. It’s also why those states with the biggest economic gaps between poor and wealthy also have the most batshite-crazy Republican governors and other elected members.

So it’s not resources that are encouraging fascism - it’s a failure to tax the Parasite Class appropriately such that wealth trickles back down to the working class. Because with obscene wealth comes obscene opportunities to tilt the political landscape in ways that encourages corporatism (the original name for fascism) and greases the system towards even more wealth accumulation by the Parasite Class. And now with almost all social services getting dismantled by DOGE, it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse in America.

Yes, ignorance and stupidly account for a majority of Republican voters who are not multi-millionaires many times over. But poor people are too busy surviving to have any energy to think critically. So many of them just reach out for those exceedingly simple answers to complex problems that also promise to solve all of their problems, but never actually do.

You describe capitalism as a finite system

No, I did not. Capitalism demands infinite growth. This planet is a finite system

and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.

I don’t imply. I simply state a known fact. Anyone with even a passing exposure to economics and resource extraction would be very familiar with this fact.

For example, 100 years ago, the energy within a barrel of oil could extract an additional 300 barrels of oil from the ground. These days, despite technology that has made the process massively more efficient, we get barely 10 barrels of oil out of the ground for that same amount of energy expended.

These days same goes for almost every other resource you could possibly shake a stick at, from minerals such as steel and copper, over harvested materials such as fish and wood, and all the way down to agriculture, where the topsoil that almost all of our crops depend on will be completely depleted within the next 60 years, and will be depleted in most agricultural regions within the next 20-40.

Capitalism is a cancer, and it’s killing the planet.

Inside capitalism, people aren’t having children because captialism isn’t giving them the economic capability to do so.

The west’s population boom in the 50s to 80s only occurred because a single wage earner could, with a high school education and a wage just a little over minimum wage, be able to own a decent home, have a non-working SAH spouse, several kids, two cars in the driveway, and still have enough left over for a decent holiday once a year as well as save generously for retirement.

This all got stolen from these latest generations. What 90+% of the population was once capable of achieving is now only (largely) available to less than 20% of GenZ. A large proportion have given up on retirement, home ownership, or children. And this is WITH degrees and extensive career experience.

If you want to solve population crashes, start with income inequality: start taxing the wealthy and bring back a 90+% top tax rate. Get this money back into the hands of people who actually generate that wealth, and families will follow.

Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.

Good news! Trump is not only rolling back environmental regulations, but dismantling them entirely. Which means pretty soon, you will have no legal recourse whatsoever to any toxic waste that leaches onto your property.

And yes, my business would very much be a “light commercial” business.

People should be able to build what they want, where they want

I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.

In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.

But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.

Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.