Maybe not at the personal user-end, but most corporations and other organizations are completely reliant on MS365 and/or Windows. Especially, in the education and finance sectors, Microsoft has taken over. COVID lockdowns made things worse as everybody switched to using Teams for corporate communication.

Edit: it might seem really silly that corporations went that heavy into Teams or Office, when there’s free alternatives like Discord and LibreOffice respectively, that have the exact same functionalities and are arguably more reliable. The reason is MS products offer a lot of tools to surveil employees

I’m guessing your company’s server (or whatever other form of central hub you are using) has Edge as the default browser. Alternatively, it could be some admin default setting your IT forgot to switch off for your accounts.

Show me the numbers. Curious how population growth rate in both USSR and China rises unprecendently, after these two came to power.

That’s a pretty vague definition you came up for to dismiss people.

Oh yes, wanting to raise people out of poverty is totally what fascists want.

You don’t know what you are talking about. You are just repeating something someone in authority once told you to believe. Ironic.

Or you can use an ad-blocker. Also youtube is profitable just fine. If it wasn’t Google would have shut it down a long time ago.

And you appear to be an idiot. Downvote, block and move on.

Do you guys even read your own links? From your article:

In the first half of the year, wind and solar farms produced more electricity (560 billion kWh) combined than the country’s hydroelectric dams (450 billion kWh) for the first time.

**China’s energy transition is real and is proceeding rapidly. **

But coal-fired generation and production is still likely to increase for at least the next several years because of the country’s inherited reliance on coal-fired units and the need to meet rapid load growth.

And nowhere in there does it say that they are mining/importing/using record levels of coal. It’s saying they haven’t shut down coal power as much as they would like because of a protracted drought. I am assuming you are not an idiot and understand that droughts are not controlled by the government.

Your article goes out of its way to point out that the high coal usage is NOT a result of Chinese state policy (unlike Europeans, such as Germany recently, and the US, which use fossil fuels over renewable resources as a matter of policy).

Thank you :)

Depends who you ask. If you ask a Marxist, they’ll tell you that in an electoral system where elections are largely determined by who has the most money in order to reach the most ears, is not really a democracy.

A democracy would be a system that gives you the right to actually and directly influence specific policy through voting (e.g. through referrenda), and direct control over representatives (e.g. ability to recall them if they are not doing their jobs).

In Norway and Germany (to use your examples) people might enjoy a lot of personal freedoms and a high standard of living, but both domestic and foreign policy is still functionally determined by corporations and the rich elite.

The economic system of capitalism makes it so governments realistically care more about the interests of business, rather than the interests of the citizens. And that’s an oligarchy. It’s just that some countries are better able to pacify their populace because they happen to have the resources to do so. But we still see that in Norway and Germany (and any other traditionally-regarded “good democracy”) the social welfare systems, that make them such appealing examples, are systematically diminished and destroyed. I do not think it’s the citizens who demand that.

All this, without getting into the fact that we spend 1/3 of our lives in a feudal-like or dictatorial system we call “job”, where we hardly have the power to influence how it operates.

As a Greek speaker who also knows Latin and Ancient Greek, both words mean the same thing and come from the same roots in their respective language (demos = publius = people/community/population). I don’t know why political theorists try so hard to separate them. The only real use of separating them is for easily differentiating the Athenian Democracy from the Roman Republic, for historical purposes, but nowadays both democracies and republics are functionally the same thing (and linguistically should be the same too). The only difference is sometimes the functioning leader’s name (president vs prime minister). Every other difference between them are for the sake of local cultural/historical traditions.

In the classical sense, Parliamentary/Representative Republics/Democracies ARE oligarchies. A true democracy would give voting power not just for electing representatives but also for determining specific policies and laws (i.e. Referendums), which very rarely, if at all in many cases, actually happens.

Sure, but then so is Hitler by that standard. They just used leftist iconography on the surface for propaganda purposes, and did not commit their crimes in the name of any sort of left-wing ideology. Pol Pot in particular was supported by the US military and intelligence mechanisms (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge), and is fair to assume that his movement was used as a psy-op to hurt the communist cause in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Like who?

There hasn’t been.

Yup, if other corporations follow Threads into the fediverse, history will repeat itself. They’ll do to the fediverse what they did to the rest of the internet.

Not to disagree, but I think that’s really unlikely, unless they do a corporate merge.

Honestly, this is the biggest part that’s bugging me about it the most. Meta is probably doing this to ride on the wave of the Reddit exodus, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that other corporations will follow suit if Threads succeeds. And when that happens it’ll be like the internet all over again. Corporations coming in and setting up ad-infested data-gathering fiefdoms that will squeeze everyone else out.

I consider this to be a bad development. I could see Facebook/Meta aggressively growing to become the “default” server, then squashing everybody else. Not to mention all the US intelligence fuckery that will be potentially happening.

We laugh at this now, but in a few months we might have server admins enforcing Meta TOS on their users for fear of being cut out from the biggest part of the Fediverse.

I’d propose that right from the get-go, a bunch of instances should band together and defederate from Threads.

Would be good if it was only 10 minutes. Where I’m from it’s 15 minute ads (with horrible sound usually too), followed by 15 minutes of trailers.

Though we don’t have this bullshit with “convenience fees”.

He’s exchanging money for, adoration, power and control of a narrative. I think he wants to run for president someday