Obviously you should try to consider all options, but the amount that this is happening is way exaggerated.

Europe in particularly is diverting a lot of funding away from public sector to defense spending due to geopolitical anxieties.

International organisations aren’t safe either, because they rely on funding from the developed countries who are all cutting funding, i.e. US, Europe, etc.

Are u a top or bottom sandwich? 😳

(凸 and 凹 mean top and bottom in Chinese/Japanese)

Any kind of carbon neutral scenario will almost definitely require carbon capture, simply because many processes are extremely difficult to decarbonise, e.g. heavy industry such as cement and steel manufacturing. Even beyond niche industries, fossil fuels still remain a crucial input to so many things; oil for example is required for aviation, road bitumen, and polymers in plastics, resins, and fibers.

As despicable as the petro giants are, the extremely high energy capacity of fossils fuels and their use as raw materials means that replacing entirely them with renewables is unviable for neutrality.

Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire - Cara Daggett, 2018 - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829818775817

That’s the neat part, you can’t, because the companies that run ad networks (e.g. Google and Meta) intentionally make the consumer behaviours market as opaque as possible. As the market maker, they have an economic incentive to withold information from their customers, because any mistakes from market participants due to information assymetries directly translate to profit surplus for the market maker.

We have long since moved on from simple pay per click/view pricing models to pay per “impression,” the definition of which is not clear even to the companies that purchase the ads.

And in a somewhat ironic twist, one of the motivations for such extensive surveillance is the desire to quantify such ROIs. Statistics and analytics such as click through and conversion rates all require tracking user behaviour across vast networks.

Immich users flag Google sites as dangerous

Also not as disparate as memes would have you believe, depending on how you look at it.

The Tokyo Metro Area is very dense at 38 million / 13,000km2, compared to the London Metro Area’s 15 million / 9000km2. But the density of Tokyo rapidly decreases as you go further out, even with the Metro Area.

Even agglomerating up to the entire Kanto Region only gets around 42 million / 32,000km2. London + East + South East Regions gets you 31 million / 50,000km2.

I don’t think comparing comparing Regions is very useful, but this only yields that Kanto is approximately twice as dense as London + surroundings. National level figures have Japan at 330/km2, Vs UK’s 285/km2.

A much more suitable comparison would be the central areas of Tokyo and London, which are the 9 special wards in/around the Yamanote Loop and Inner London (roughly zone 2). This is around 2.2mil / 140km2 or around 15,000/km2 for Tokyo Vs 3.4mil / 320km2 or around 11,000/km2 for London. Again, not nearly the massive discrepancy suggested by memes.

Apologies if my tone is pointed - having lived and commuted in both cities the way the internet thinks of Japan really bothers me. I do think Tokyo is worse for crowdedness, but honestly not by much, especially when London tube lines can be so long they go outside the station.

If you repeat the exercise and focus only on central areas, you will find that most major cities actually have very similar densities.

That’s entire fucking Kanto Region (32,000km2), which is even larger than the Kanto basin (17,000km2), not the Greater Tokyo Area (13,500km2).

Most of the Greater Tokyo Area is farmland already. The Kanto Region is a further agglomeration of seven prefectures.

A better comparison with the UK would be Greater Tokyo Area (13,5000km2) Vs London Metropolitan Area (9000km2, mostly limited by its greenbelt).

If you insist on comparing Regions, then the Kanto Region should be compared with London + East of England + South East, for a total of around 50,000km2 (UK keeps London as it’s own region).

I fear that this does not cleanly apply to Japan because of their somewhat uniquely active doujinshi (fan work) culture. To give an idea of how big a deal doujinshi are, the largest western convention San Diego Comic Con only draws around 130,000 attendants. The largest Doujinshi convention Comiket drew 750,000 attendants before COVID. These works are explicitly distributed and redistributed for commercial profit (though admittedly usually not at any profitable scale).

Japan copyright law has explicit exceptions for doujinshi, having recognised the immense value to the industry. So many successful artists started by creating and selling doujinshi, which are usually explicitly derivative works of IP.

Doujinshi - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doujinshi

Except that as part of its enshittification Spotify has intentionally changed its algo to push people into more and more homogenous “beige”, nothing music. It has become so prolific that Spotifycore has become a term to describe what happens when you let Spotify autoplay.

With the rise of AI, Spotify is now producing and recommending beige music that is produced on an industrial scale, at the expense of actual artists.

Mood Machine go brrr

Mood Machine by Liz Pelly review – a savage indictment of Spotify | Music books | The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/05/mood-machine-by-liz-pelly-review-a-savage-indictment-of-spotify

Not sure of your specific needs, but I feel that self hosting (i.e. setting up a proper server) is unnecessary. Just pick a local first program and use it with syncthing.

The usual trio (which may be overkill) are Obsidian (admittedly not open source), Trillium, and logseq.

The existing Euro does not have a proper system for day to day transactions. Transfers are currently handled by SEPA, which are only suitable for things like bills. This means that a lot of people especially in less developed EU nations end up using an international bank card, i.e. MasterCard/Visa for day to day transactions.

Details are somewhat vague, but the ECB’s website seems to have many good assurances. This even includes strong privacy features, such as offline capabilities and cash-like privacy.

FAQs on a digital euro - https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/faqs/html/ecb.faq_digital_euro.en.html#q1

You joke but pedophiles use Pinterest to stalk and coerce young girls.

Investigation: How Pinterest drives men to little girls’ images - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/pinterest-algorithm-young-girls-videos-grown-men-investigation-rcna72469

r/nolawns

c/nolawns

Sauce?

As suspected, this paper is based upon Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System, better known as micro-expressions.

This controversial literature borderlines on pseudo-science, with Ekman’s work having significant conflicts of interest in the form of undisclosed funding from US defence, police, and border control, who wanted Ekman to create systems that can detect lies based on supposed micro expressions. Subsequent independent meta analyses have found that micro expressions cannot be consistently read, even by Ekman’s own researchers.

Unfortunately, despite this, world governments have poured millions of dollars into private contractors to develop AI systems based on this flawed research for border control.

Munecat’s video essay on debunking body language experts goes into much greater detail:

https://youtu.be/Y0VQyEY-B2I

This separation is inaccurate, because the surveillance capitalism imperatives of big tech requires them to be both.

Social media needs ragebait influencers to attract people in the first place to harvest their data, and simultaneously requires projecting an image of being uncontroversial for advertisers. This dichotomy can be seen with Tiktok, which is infamous for pushing people further down polarising echo chambers, yet is unironically one of the fastest growing e commerce sites.

Simply being or or the other is a failing strategy. Purely uncontroversial platforms are too boring. Purely controversial platforms are too toxic. We can see the shittification of Reddit in its pursuit of becoming financially viable as an IRL example of this.

Any differences between the big tech platforms are at best surface level. Meta is genius in how they managed to give the illusion of Facebook and Instagram being separate, despite them explicitly sharing data as part of a vertically integrated surveillance capitalist enterprise.

Read Shoshana Zuboff

Even browsing existing small to medium sized sites has become such a chore, with all these verifications and rate limiters as part of the anti AI scraper effort.

So many cloudflare verification checkboxes. So many Google sign ins. So many cross site cookies and tracking for even basic functionality.

Care about privacy and restrict browsing data even a little? Captcha hell.

Someone (allegedly) fucked the principal’s dog