Making more money back than they paid.

It amazes me how every time a for-profit company that provided a free service goes mask-off and starts aggressively monetizing it so many people put on a shocked Pikachu face.

This is exactly how this works, people! The free shit is always bait to draw you in and get you invested. The trap was designed from the start to snap shut once there was enough of you in it. They fully intend to not just extract value from you to run the service, but also to retroactively pay for all the free shit they gave you. It was always a loan. An investment.

Oh, sure, you can always be sly by taking the free shit and ditching once monetization comes over the horizon. But do so knowing that every time you need to do this is the rule, not the exception. Companies aren’t suddenly slighting you one by one out of the blue, it was always the strategy from the beginning for all of them.

Factorio now, and I’ll save my second one for Factorio Space Age when it releases.

I don’t understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.

Lots of reasons:

• It’s bigger and less fragmented. More content, more diversity, more activity, and it’s all in one easy place.
• No extra conceptual hurdles to overcome like “what is an instance” or “which instance do I join”.
• Network effect. See point 1. Unless you are some kind of FOSS enthusiast or a refugee of every other social media platform due to your vulgar, sexual, illegal, and/or politically extreme interests, your friends, followed creators, and other people of interest have a far higher chance of being on BlueSky than the Fediverse.
• An actual algorithm. Many people who jump to the Fediverse hate it, but a silent majority of casual users actively want it. Meticulously curating your own feed is not a boon to them, it is a chore.

A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.

Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.

It’s one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It’s another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.

I appreciate the gusto, but I find rally posts like this to be extremely irritating.

Do you really think the people who are saying he’ll just get away with it all don’t think all of these things? Do you think people dropped their morals on the issue and now think “this is fine” because it’s the status quo?

Pray tell – what can I do, today, as a drop in the fucking ocean, to ensure this specific white collar criminal gets summarily apprehended, convicted, and meaningfully punished for his crimes on a reasonable timescale? What reasonable, concrete action am I supposed to take that will do a damn thing about it that I’m not already doing by dutifully casting my ballots and boycotting support for people and causes I don’t believe in at every opportunity?

I am convinced there is no such action. The dominos that matter in this specific case were already set long ago. All we can do at this point is make logical predictions about how they will fall. And from my point of view, “Donald Trump will not be meaningfully punished” is looking inevitable. I have no faith in the current stacking of the judicial system to declare an outcome I’d be content with. I and others like me are not happy about it. But we aren’t deluding ourselves either. The train for proles like us doing anything about this now is long gone.

Now, I don’t think it’s hopeless on the grand scale. We can and should work to claw progress on the general form of this issue over time. There’s lots we can still do about that. Activism, protesting, dragging people to polls, etc. But that will likely be a “plant a tree whose shade you will never sit in” kind of thing.

Regarding this specific man today, I think we are powerless to meaningfully affect the trajectories of these cases. Anything short of rioting in the streets, casting aside legal process, and marching on the courthouse demanding his head on a pike (in other words, stooping to the level of Jan 6th insurrectionists) is too slow and/or only theoretical. And I am very tired of cheerleaders trying to tell me otherwise when they offer no substantive plan of action.

Meanwhile, over at the grand exchange (Amazon), someone is offering, “gold armor trimming, 10k”

Imagine one of those combined Pizza Hut/KFC stores from the 90’s, except it’s just one big combined buffet of pizza and fried chicken, and the whole place is cowboy themed.