I feel like that depends on the specific issue and social dynamic between the individuals. e.g. two people can talk each other into getting really fucking drunk or do a stupid dare. People might pretend to know more than they do, refuse to back down on a point because of pride, reach a compromise that’s worse than what either of the two think/do would do on their own.

If they can mostly avoid these, they can absolutely become smarter than either of them alone by combining their knowledge, thinking things through that they otherwise wouldn’t etc.

Personally, when it comes to artistic endeavors, I work way more efficiently when I’m working with others instead of alone. Similar dynamic can emerge when you’re discussing some kind of issue.

Sounds rapey, which is probably a big reason of why that kind of content is hard to find. I bet dollars to dimes that there’s like 80s porn movies with that kind of plot, though.

Any children’s TV show, anyone who still watches My Little Pony as an adult is seen either as childish or as a creep (if male).

then we get labour again and its just blue tories

I think you mixed up Labour with USA’s DNC. Tories are already blue, Labour is red.

Why are older Brits not moving way the fuck to the left of whatever the fuck the Labour party is doing?

You can do that, but fediverse and threadiverse (Mastodon and Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin) are very different kinds of websites and it will lead to unexpected weirdness. Best to make a separate account for each type of thing (i.e. one for the twitter-like experience, one for the reddit-like, one for the instagram-like etc.).

Whether you use the same identity (e.g. same username on Mastodon and Piefed, linking your Mastodon profile in your Piefed profile etc.) for the whole fediverse is a matter of taste.

I think a ban on displaying ads in public spaces, especially big billboards, would be a really good start. A ban on online ads would be more difficult, because AFAIK ad targeting isn’t actually that good; you’d think that would be their bread and butter, what all the data collection is actually about, but at least a couple of years ago it was actually really difficult to buy online ads that only get shown to people in one city (e.g. if you’re a political party and want to advertise in a local election). Seems like the ad syndicalists just do whatever and then lie about it. If true, they’d need to overhaul their tech to adhere to a local-level ad ban.

Some media is also primarily paid by ads, like radio and local newspapers. Might need to subsidize those, and IDK how you’d even deal with radio and newspaper from outside of the local area - radio especially is built on the idea that access is unrestricted, and one radio antenna can service an area the size of a small country.

Local newspapers are already closing en masse even with ads, and many of the ones left barely count as newspapers anymore. We need to solve this issue separately. Maybe start rolling out straight-up subsidies? That would open up local newspapers to government censorship, but that’s not necessarily worse than newspapers ruled by adspace buyers, and generally better than no local newspaper at all.

I fear that the only thing that reaching out to the artist/label would do is paint a target on my back … if it was a smaller artist, maybe, but it’s a big contemporary artist on a major label and I’m pretty much a beginner.

This community in particular doesn’t seem like one where you’re supposed to share your stuff, but considering how few posts there are we could change that.

You will! But it’s pretty hard to actually do lasting damage. If your install breaks, just reinstall - can be annoying, but it’s also a great excuse to try another distro or desktop!

I think Linux has a peculiar learning curve. If someone else installs it for you and does basic tech support once in a while, and installs a beginner-friendly distro, and the users only use very basic stuff like word processors and browser-based social media, it’s really easy, even easier than Windows. For people who know just about enough to install new software and reinstall Windows, Linux can be fairly difficult since a lot of the system plumbing just works quite differently, and these users are also tempted to install more difficult-to-use-and-maintain distros. Then once you’re very tech-savvy, Linux becomes easier than Windows again because it mostly does what you want and doesn’t fight you like Windows, and it’s often a first class citizen when it comes to software development.

I’d argue that quantum physics is genuinely difficult, but also not very applicable to most people’s daily life. The stuff that computer illiterate people struggle with tends to be both relatively easy and very applicable to daily life, and many of these people aren’t as dumb about all other parts of their lives.

Somehow, most changes I’ve seen in the last ~10 years seem to be enshittification …

It’s hard to motivate yourself to make an effort when the hot new tech is stuff like LLMs.

Being completely uncritical of it. This ties into being unwilling to learn, if they’re introduced to word processors via MS Word, many people are completely unwilling to move to something else like LibreOffice Writer, even if it’s not actually that different.

Back to the first sentence, too many people just aren’t willing to consider the ramifications of living in a walled garden made and maintained by foreign far-right groups, or if they are generally aware and critical of it, it usually still not enough to actually do something against it. That includes people who are generally tech savy, most of my millenial-or-younger friends and relatives aren’t on Signal, including one who is a software developer and vocally critical of Trump and US tech companies. Meanwhile my parents and grandparents have no issue using Signal.

And what makes so many people so willing to look at ads? I know way too many people who could easily use adblockers if they wanted, but just don’t.

Hm. If I was just using some heavily altered samples, I wouldn’t even have asked, but what I’m currently working on is more along the lines of taking the isolated vocals of a relatively recent song as-is and putting it to a harder instrumental.

Damn, I wouldn’t have thought that Soundcloud was the platform that checks for proper licensing nowadays, rather than YouTube or Spotify. At least your yt-video is nearly two years old and you haven’t been taken down or sued yet.

Seems like I’ll have to pick up some basic video editing skills, YouTube seems like the best platform out of the ones you use that has some discoverability (but still very little).

There’s probably topics that politico is more obviously biased about (e.g. Israel?), so we could remove those.

Can you set up a comment bot and pin its comment under every politico post?

Is there any option between banning and doing nothing? I do get the impression that some of their articles are decent, and I would agree that they’re not that right wing in general (in contrast to Bild and Welt).

We do actually restrict many of those. And that’s not really an issue, because you either buy those in a physical store that has to check your ID in person if there’s any doubt that it’s legal to sell it to you, or you buy it on an online platform that already has all the info for payment processing. Can’t run hyperviolent content on daytime TV (in my country, anyway) etc.

Nevermind single parenting, in many families both parents work to be able to support their standard of living (and if they’re both working low-paying jobs, this isn’t just luxury). Add to that that modern society pretty much expects people to move away from their hometown to wherever they can get a job, especially if they’re somewhat well-educated, which takes the grandparents out of the picture for childcare.