Indeed, I think the entire idea that needs focus is distributing away from a handful of large corps, although I don’t see streaming going in that direction largely due to IP rights for content, not necessarily bandwidth and resources. Many streaming platforms as I understand already have their content distributed through CDNs that are geographically dispersed as to ease network load, though they retain control over that hardware. I’m proposing providing more options for your average joe website than on something controlled by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
Realistically, more people need to self-host, or at the very least we need more mon-and-pop style datacenters. The foundational protocols of the Internet inherently make the web decentralized, but most would rather offload hardware costs and, more importantly, security, to those more knowledgeable. Not that I blame them, as running one’s own hardware is extremely time intensive, nevermind power and equipment costs, but it’s no wonder that conglomerates have stepped up to fill that role (nevermind economies of scale). Yet, this is how we’ve fallen into the situation we are in now.
Might just be a subconscious response to still-active societal social pressures, and your mind reminding you why it’s not a good idea. Perhaps on some low level you may still want a certain amount of relation with your peers that’s reminiscent of those younger days that you no longer have, but your brain is fighting back to that base instinct.
I think it’s important to highlight the obsessive portion of it. Many people care about others perception of them, whereas narcissists literally obsess over it, to the point where every though and action is permeated by the crafting their image and boosting their other’s perception, to the point where it becomes the narcissist’s only goal. It’s highly connected to ego, and a narcissist only ever does anything to chase a sense of superiority.
No doubt there’s a major push globally to descend into authoritarianism, arguably under the auspice that people are fed up with capitalism and voting for something different. But it’s hard to convince billions of people that the real root is a handful of billionaires playing Pinky and the Brain. We’ll just have to see, unfortunately.
Sounds about right. My wife has friends abroad that have been calling and asking if everything is alright, then start the questions of how we let this happen, why don’t we do anything about it, etc. And I’ll be honest, I do feel pretty helpless at the moment and very uneasy about the next period of time. I’ve been reading quite a bit about WWII and how Germany got into their situation, and almost too much if it parallels. Most of the population was sick of the status quo and wanted change, those who spoke up and tried pointing certain things out were labeled as worrying lunatics, and most of society was too ignorant to care until it was too late. I mean, what the hell is an individual to do? I could grab my rifle and take to the streets, and immediately get gunned down by cops, or start writing letters that will pretty just get me added to a list at this point.
I have such low standards for media these days that it doesn’t really phase me, and I get to be pleasantly surprised when something is good. I don’t really watch much TV outside of a few select shows that I throw on in the background, I’ve never been much of a gamer so I’m kinda glad I’m not really clued in to how bad it’s gotten, and with movies I’ll wait for a recommendation or just work through my server library of old and new. I think I’ve just kind of accepted media enshittification at this point and there’s already several lifetimes of great movies and books I’ve yet to experience that it’s no big loss, and anything truly awesome that comes along in the interim is a welcome light.
What we consider reality, is a synthesis our brain is presenting to us, it is an approximation…
It’s also a coordinated synthesis from all of your input senses (sight, hearing, smell, etc). It also explains why those who have a certain sense stunted (aka blindness, deaf, etc) report having all their other senses heightened. And it’s up to the individual’s brain to assemble those sensory inputs into a complete picture of the world around them, what we dub “reality.” Which then brings into question the nature of common reality, and what defines it. Trippy shit.
I live in a ski town that caters to the Los Angeles crowd, and I feel you on all that. 4 wheel drive does not mean 4 wheel stop lol. We are lucky in that we don’t get that permafrost y’all get up north, usually the roads dry out a few days after a snow storm so snow tires aren’t mandatory up here. But the number of overconfident goofballs in the winter is way too high.
The big one I can think of are snow rated tires, most people have plain old radials that don’t do squat in snow. And then you have people that don’t know which axle is their drive axle and that’s always fun to watch. Thankfully I have a two door wrangler with all terrains that is a breeze to drive in snow, very rarely do I have to chain up.
What does guitar center do?