You can actually fairly easily unload tabs with about:unloads right now, but you have to do it in the order Facebook Firefox thinks they should be done for some reason.

Honestly, I don’t know why, but sidebar tabs have just never worked for me. It makes no sense, but for some reason my brain just doesn’t process them correctly.

But I agree, in general more fine-grained control of tabs would be the thing I would need in order to feel like Firefox was feature-complete.

Edit: Facebook? Wtf?

Fun fact: that was the original idea behind VLC! You could connect to video (and audio) streams. Hence, “VideoLAN.”

Uh, no, they definitely need tab grouping before they get into making CSS theming easier.

No, you can’t. You can pretend to, but I can pretend to trade things with anyone without paying any money. The only thing stored on the Blockchain is a URL to an image which everyone just agrees to pretend that you own; if that server goes down, you have nothing.

No, when beanie babies were new you could play with them. When basketball cards were new you could trade them with your friends. They had inherent value first, and then they gained speculative value on the secondary market. Trump’s grift has no inherent value now or ever.

Do you honestly think that, on the off chance that the Trump family sells out of these things, they won’t immediately mint more? It’s “limited” in the same way Marvel movies are limited.

For now. And Google super mega promises to never rug pull that one.

For me, it was multi-account containers. All Meta properties open in their own independent, sandboxed tabs now. Xwitter opens in a different independent, sandboxed tab. It makes their tracking cookies useless, plus it also lets you be logged into the same service with multiple accounts simultaneously.

Cool. Glad we agree on that, at least. Cheers!

Please clarify.

Nah, honestly, by now the length of this conversation is way out of proportion to my interest in it. I’m not convinced by your argument even a little bit, but I’m really not compelled by talking about it anymore. Have a good one.

Whether or not it will be prosecuted is immaterial to whether or not it is legal.

• Wohl and Burkman were sentenced to community service.

• The charge they pled guilty to was fraud; that they “falsely claimed that mail-in voting would put voters into a database that would be used to collect outstanding debt, track down warrants or enforce mandatory vaccinations.” It doesn’t matter what the outcome was (intimidation or something else), the fraud was the crime.

• Fox is a slightly different case, as they’re technically press and thus have a first amendment protection that automatically makes any case against them harder. But either way, the lack of prosecution is far from evidence that a crime was not committed.

• I already identified exactly which law Musk is breaking and with what action. 52 USC 20511 and 52 USC 30101, if you find it particularly important.

• Xwitter is definitely promoting disinformation, which is election interference and can be committed by American citizens. Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman pled guilty in 2022 to hiring a firm to make calls spreading disinformation during the run-up to the 2020 election.

• Xwitter is providing a measurable, financial benefit to the Trump campaign. That’s soft money, and using soft money to exceed individual campaign contribution limits is against the law.

As far as I can tell (not as an expert), the pitfalls and unforeseen issues are probably pretty much what they’d be for every new battery chemistry: how safe is it? Does it have really bad self-discharge? Is the supply consistent? How does it do at low charging levels? How long/how many cycles does such a cell last? Does it require an unsustainable amount of exotic minerals?

As well as what they are for any new technology: what is the replacement cost? Can they be installed in existing technology via drop-in or with a simple retrofit, or do you have to replace the entire unit? How long before they come to market? Can they maintain supply to match demand?

Probably a lot of those questions are business-related rather than technology-related (i.e. “will the companies developing this stuff put enough into R&D to solve these problems before releasing them?” not “do the laws of the universe allow this?”). I am not an expert, but before I put all my chips on solid-state batteries (something I’m pretty confident will be the norm eventually), I would want those answered.

I’m gonna start checking out Ghost, at this point. This is ridiculous.

And if Ghost doesn’t work, then ClassicPress it is.

I think we understand each other, and disagree. And that’s fine. I don’t need to convince you. Though I would suggest that you start from a more neutral perspective (at least outwardly) when interacting with someone who needs assistance in the future.

Anyway, I don’t think I have anything more to add to the conversation that hasn’t already been said, so I’ll wish you luck.

Thank you for your calm and level-headed discussion. Those are frustratingly rare online. I look forward to talking with you again.

I agree with your conclusion, but as long as they’re offering data up for download to your machine, they really can’t control how you access it or what application you use for it. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, but even if it requires reverse-engineering some website DRM, somebody’s going to do it. And if Chromium remains FOSS, it won’t even be terribly difficult.

Remember, they tried to defeat ad blockers on YouTube, and they gave up because it wasn’t worth it. uBO was updating to block their attempts within hours. They’ve tested inserting the ads in the video stream, but that’s probably also not going to last for long.

They’re trying to assert an ownership over the Web; and yes, the best way to defeat it is to build a strong and united resistance against it. But even if we don’t, there are ways to quietly refuse to comply.

A plugin could very easily have Firefox claim to support WebUSB, but return no devices or junk devices. Some of the anti-fingerprinting add-ons already do, iirc.

You certainly can. They don’t know what you’re doing.

[2/2]

I lost my job at the start of COVID right after my daughter was born (she was born in March, 2020, so we saw lockdowns come into effect while we were in the hospital).

Again, same. Though for me, it was December of 2019 and a son, and I was laid off in late January. Wild times.

But what I did have was 6-12 months expenses in cash.

We had carved away at our cash reserves building a house that our larger family could actually fit in, and they hadn’t built back up yet. It was a calculated risk to do that rather than buy, and I wouldn’t have changed the calculation in hindsight, but the one-two-three-four punch of house-child-layoff-pandemic within the span of a few months isn’t really something you expect when you’re doing the numbers.

That set us back a couple of years, but we were already ahead because we were living below our means. Fast-forward to today and we’re back to being ahead because we continued to live below our means.

I’m glad for you. And also: your situation is not normative.

Here’s an interesting article about household debt over time, which goes back to 1995 (so almost 30 years). […] debt got cheaper, so people got more debt.

A couple of things to note:

1. Those numbers end in 2010, which means that they’re actually almost as far away from today as the beginning of that study is from the end of that study. A lot has happened in the last 14 years.

2. Those numbers also end right as the country was digging its way out of the 2008 financial crisis, which was largely caused (as I’m sure you recall) by debt mismanagement (specifically subprime mortgages). Those numbers, in and of themselves, are signposts of the very institutional and systemic changes I’m taking about.

3. It’s impossible to disentangle the chicken and the egg here. Were people in more debt in 2010 because rates were low? Or were rates low because the economy was burning, largely because more people were in bad debt situations?

So people are in more debt today, but they’re paying about the same to service that debt. So people are spending more than they used to, but they’re able to do that because borrowing rates are lower.

Actually, the data suggests that private per capita spending in the US has tracked more or less with inflation since at least 1960.

In my experience, people largely paid for things w/ cash 30 years ago, whereas today paying with credit is a lot more common.

My parents used credit in the 90s. We had car payments and a mortgage (and their mortgage rate was in the double digits, no less—but it was still a smaller percentage of their single monthly income than my 2.8% mortgage is today, in a better field, with a second income.

People don’t save up to buy things as much, and instead buy now pay later.

Again, the chicken and the egg: do people not save up because they don’t want to? Or because they can’t? If our car dies, I can’t save up to buy another. I have to buy now and pay later.

So the real issue here is discipline, at least for those in the middle class and above.

With your caveat, I’m amenable to entertaining your argument for a significant portion of the population. I just don’t recognize it in practice.

being irresponsible with money is easier, which I think encourages more people to do it.

I just don’t see the numbers bearing that out. And anecdotally, it might be easier to sign up for a credit card online, but I was getting junk mail about credit cards on the day I turned 18, in 2003. One of my first jobs included trying to pitch a private label grocery store credit card to everyone who walked in. When I got to college (also in 2003), a credit card company had a booth there and was offering students free pizza if you signed up for a credit card. I didn’t bite, but there was a substantial line at that booth. So it might be quicker now, but I haven’t received a mailer for a credit card in years.

So I do think younger generations (including my own, I’m a millennial)

Me too. I think we might be the same person. This is honestly kind of weirding me out.

[…] are more irresponsible with money and have higher expectations of what that money can buy than previous generations. Over the last 30+ years, real wages have increased consistently (i.e. after taking inflation into account), and we’re back to the peak of the early 70s before the stagflation of the 80s. Yet people claim we’re getting poorer, so I have to take that as people having unrealistic expectations instead of an income problem.

Housing costs as a factor of monthly income are back up to 2008 Financial Crisis levels, though; and over the last two decades that growth you’re talking about has been concentrated largely at the top. The numbers support peoples’ assertion that we’re getting poorer.

Thanks for chatting with me about this. It’s a really interesting topic.