Not even in "tech circles". Anecdotally, most of my colleagues -- mostly software engineers -- don't use adblocker at home or at work. It hurts my eye to see their screens. But they don't care.
(The workspace does not disallow adblocker extensions.)
My experience deploying at blockers in the enterprise is the average non tech user feels the Internet is "broken" when it's not covered in ads and will tell helpdesk it needs to be fixed.
It seems to me at its root, that it's a question of available ad attention, and the value thereof.
The classic value prop for ads has been so badly destroyed by bad curation and content invasiveness that the basis value of that attention has dropped trough the floor. The growing prevalence of ad blocking is only a symptom of that.
This has become bad enough it even invades special interest nonprofit rags like the AAA, American Legion, and USPSA newsletters, for example.
I never used adblock because if I don't like ads on a particular website I will simply not visit it anymore. And if I like it enough despite of the ads, I want to support them financially in some way.
Don't forget that ad blockers do more than filtering visible ad banners and other visual annoyances. They also block tracking scripts, fonts, and other cross-site elements that infringe on your privacy.
> I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine.
This is dog slow, you can't even stream Youtube at 4K resolution with that. Downloading a reasonably recent game would also take close to an entire day. Not everyone needs a full symmetric Gbps perhaps, but 100Mbps is kind of a baseline nowadays, and more is better for faster downloads.
> you can't even stream Youtube at 4K resolution with that
Not something I care about.
I don't have a 4K TV. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a 4K TV. I've definitely seen a very high-resolution TV at a friend's house, and it was kind of cool, but not something interesting enough to motivate me to spend $500 or $20/month to acquire one of my own.
I hardly watch TV. My TV has a native resolution of 720p, I think, and 720p videos look really high-quality to me on the occasions when I watch.
> We offer Login with Google and Login with Facebook on our apps.
This has the nefarious side effect of allowing Google or Facebook to track people across the Internet and apps. Webmasters like you are, often for no imperative reason, complicit of this by providing such login options.
App developers have repeatedly stated that offering those options increases user account creation. There is lower friction to using “login with <big tech>” than to create username/password creation flow. My guess is that most of the world hasn’t figured out a password manager workflow that works for them (or they aren’t willing to pay for it).
I work for a university. It came down as a requirement from above because our most important users are older (rich) donors who struggle with even basic login.
This is an issue that regulators need to address. Asking small businesses to forego the significant impact on their business of not implementing common features that users demand is not a good solution to public policy failures.
I don’t know what the exact revenue/growth difference is, but if my paycheque depended upon getting more users to sign up, I don’t think I could justify making it into a political stance when Google isn’t going to notice my tiny boycott.
Run your own email server, and give Google the middle finger. Letting Google own your email, and freely spy on your communications is insane. I think this incident clearly demonstrates that you cannot leave critical infrastructure like this in the hands of a third party.
One could argue that the IRGC, much like Hamas, purposely builds military headquarters and other facilities near hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure precisely to use civilians as human shields.
I don't bother with virtualization, and use the machine at the edge of my network as router, email server, Web server, DNS server, and countless or other things such as hostapd.
An x86 mini PC can run all this without breaking a sweat; using separate appliances seems very wasteful. That being said, I configure everything in DIY mode, and don't rely on GUIs or other similar things that increase the attack surface considerably.
I used to try to combine everything, but now I don't. Separate appliances isolates issues to a subset of services. If everything is on a single PC and that one dies or even just needs a reboot, everything goes down.
I think that you will find that many people think that we ought to solve the 50 year old problem in the Mideast once and for all. Now that the Russians are busy, that Venezuela is down, that Syria has fallen, and that the Chinese are minding their own business is a good time to decapitate Iran. Also Cuba is next.
Permanently disarming Iran, and creating conditions favorable to the fall of the Islamist terrorist regime that has been bullying the Mideast since 1979.
No idea, but it's safe to say that Iran has lost most of their navy and air force already. It's harder to tell how many launchers, missiles, and drones Iran has left however, as it is deliberately hiding and conserving munitions for what they expect will be a protracted conflict.
The other unknown is how far the U.S., Isreal, and potentially other countries are willing to go. Turning the lights off and literally sending Iran back to the stone age wouldn't be so difficult at this stage, but would probably rule out the possibility of a deal that sees Iran disarm and hand over the enriched uranium.
You're basically advocating for war crimes which the US has already started to do.
Iran had already offered to give up the enriched uranium bit that is off the table now. Iran should and will pursue a nuclear weapon in order to protect themselves from American and Israeli imperialism.
I don't see the difference between the US and Iran given what you are suggesting. How would you treat an Iranian attack on the Golden Gate Bridge? Would you call that a cowardly terror attack?
Yeah, does sending them back to the stone age buy us anything good? 90 million starving migrants with an understandable axe to grind with the US? Or are we just going to kill them all and become the monsters we claim to hate?
You realize that Iran will retaliate by attacking their neighbors' power and desalinization plants? Do you want most of the ME to go dark and lacking water?
Even Netenyahu has said you can't do regime change without some sort of boots on the ground. Iran is much bigger and more mountainous than Iraq. The IRGC has a couple hundred thousand active personell.
North Korea was able to get nuclear weapons because we didn't want the carnage of artillery bombardment to Seoul that would have been the retaliation, had we stopped them.
Iran was close to achieving that same thing with ballistic missile bombardment of Europe.
The problem is that Iran, unlike NK, is run by a fanatical death cult with stated goal of attacking United States and history of running proxy militias in every nearby failed state, in a neighborhood that has no shortage of failed states.
The US defense secretary (excuse me, War secretary) is almost covered with tattoos and mottoes celebrating the Crusades [1]. I wouldn't go around accusing other countries of being run by "death cults" if I were you. We have a nuclear-armed death cult called Christian Dominionism here at home.
What makes you think the Iranian regime wants a destroyed country as opposed to setting up strong opposition to the West in the region? "Fanatical Death Cult" just sounds like propaganda for justifying war with them as opposed to diplomatic solutions. North Korea and Russia saber-rattle plenty. It's a tactic.
Their idea of "martyrdom" is killing people who disagree with them. Not, "it can be ok to kill people who disagree with you once it reaches the point of war," but, "these people's forebears didn't listen to our god, so we must always hunt them, and also the jews."
IF(highest sacrifice in your cult is dying while trying to kill those who disagree with you because of same) THEN (you are in a death cult)
> it can be ok to kill people who disagree with you once it reaches the point of war
How does this work out when we are the ones that decided to start the war? Does saying the word "war" suddenly absolve us of the crimes we commit in that war?
> Their idea of "martyrdom" is killing people who disagree with them. Not, "it can be ok to kill people who disagree with you once it reaches the point of war," but, "these people's forebears didn't listen to our god, so we must always hunt them, and also the jews."
You know the one about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?
>You know the one about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?
I will give you the benefit of the doubt on asking for these claims, but you should consider what burden of proof you are asking for: constant political slogans advocating attacks? Or do you need the leader to explicitly state that that's not just a slogan? Forthright statements in their religious texts advocating the same?
And would you expect that level of specificity and forthrightness of other comparable claims?
No need for any benefits of the doubt, let me make myself perfectly clear. I think that you're throwing wild claims, relying on the general ignorance and media conditioning of the average American (largely the audience on this forum) in order to provide "familiar vibes" as the foundations of your claims in the minds of that audience.
Now, specifically, you said that: "Their idea of "martyrdom" is killing people who disagree with them". Are "they" Iranians? Shia? Muslims in general? People of the middle east in general? After having settled the question of who "they" are, you are then claiming that if they kill those who merely disagree with them, they consider those doing the killing to be martyrs? That would disagree with the common understanding of what a martyr is worldwide, and hence my comment about your claim being quite extraordinary.
I challenge you to not try to steer the topic away from my questions, or make additional claims without being specific and providing evidence for those either. I am not interested in widening the scope of the conversation into endless arguing.
Ok, I'll be clear too. I think your questions are meant not to seek answers, but as aspersions, and I am skeptical that any evidence, overwhelming though it might be in other cases, would satisfy you in this instance. Iran is exceptional in providing so much evidence of the leadership's ill intentions, and by your generalizations I doubt you are aware of them.
More playing to vibes. For the passive reader, given that no evidence whatsoever was provided (let alone of the extraordinary kind) despite having been given ample opportunity to do so, please consider the extraordinary claims to be effectively retracted.
The military advantage of colonial powers, and the political weakness of the pawn countries is reduced making the great game harder. Venezuela and Syria fell because internally they were divided and the US could find traitors willing to sell out. That didn't happen in Iran, and Cuba will defend themselves if they are united.
> Oil is still underpriced wrt to its environmental cost.
This may well be true, but we still haven't found a better fuel. Sure, we have electric cars, but they are still too expensive for the masses, or impractical, e.g. for apartment dwellers. Besides, oil has countless other uses besides as fuel for vehicles.
Yes, and, the world would be better off if the price of oil were higher. We would produce less plastic crap and take fewer frivolous airplane trips and take more public transit. Our petroleum consumption is based on underpriced oil.
This could be an argument for investing in more reliable/higher capacity public transit systems though. Which would also likely result in a fair increase in public health from moving a bit more and possibly less polluted air going in an out of the lungs of the populace.
> This could be an argument for investing in more reliable/higher capacity public transit systems though.
Public transit is impractical outside of big urban centers. And even there, it's nearly always a nasty experience. This is why people who can afford it still drive or use taxis in cities.
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