In Australia all coffee is pretty good. I visited Sydney fora week a couple years ago for business and the lattes and espressos blew my mind. I have had good coffee but that is a whole different level. After I have always been picky about coffee (mostly espresso drinks) and now I am even more pickier thanks to the amazing coffee I had there.

A vast majority of wheelchair users in the US are car users.

Exactly. The very existence of these apps and websites is based on such “user hostile” behavior. Same with the cat and mouse game between YouTube ads and ad blockers and third party YouTube apps. If the side wanting to completely stop Youtube ads becomes successful, YouTube will cease to exist (as a free app).

I am not arguing for this model, my feed is getting more useless every day, but the only other model is subscription based like you say. And for Facebook, Meta and the like, I don’t think the subscription revenue will be anywhere close due to economies of scale on the free model.

YouTube offers an ad-free subscription called YouTube premium. It's reasonably priced and includes access to YouTube Music.

I like the hybrid approach of being able to be ad-supported or paid with no ads. I would like to see more of it.

What I don't like is a paid service like Amazon Prime that also includes ads. They include ads in their search results and they include tons of ads in their video library.

FWIW: Hulu offers paid access to content with ads but offers an upgrade to get rid of most of the ads, so there seems to be a whole lot of testing what works in this area going on right now, which I see as a good thing, I just hope that once everything settles the predominant model will be fair and respect user privacy.

YouTube is a good example here, because at least in the EU, you can disable any tracking. You then don't get front-page recommendations, which would normally use that tracking information, but otherwise you can use YouTube just fine.

You are ignoring that people give away things for free all them time if the cost to them is small enough. But currently those genuinely free options have to compete with ad-funded services for attention and getting that attention requires more effort than just providing the service so this happens less than it otherwise would.

Or to put it another way, most of the content on the internet is already unpaid with the creator not receiving any compensation. What's left is the hosting/distribution and we can find many different ways to (collectively) pay for that besides ads and user subscriptions.

tbf facebook is the only (mainstream) social media i know that offers a subscription in the first place

actually i forgot about youtube

This is funny. So the captchas to detect scrips vs humans are so complex for a human to solve but are easy for a program?

It's never been about making things that actually work. It's always been about ticking the box (ironic) that says you've implemented the thing.

Until recently a rando app could prevent a Mac from shutting down or logging out. I think it was changed in Sonoma.

I think there is something more than that. India is fairly homogeneous. Was high trust decades (5+) ago. Trust getting lower today. Similar practices (trusting a stranger with your child) would have been conceivable in the same timeframe as mailing kids but not today. I think the other sister comment makes sense: protecting children had a very different definition back then than it is today.

Indeed, high trust requires more than homogeneity.

I think there is something more than that. India is fairly homogeneous. Was high trust decades (5+) ago. Trust getting lower today. Similar practices (trusting a stranger with your child) would have been conceivable in the same timeframe as mailing kids but not today.

I have used Affinity photo and it is a really powerful alternative to photoshop. Have not used any other products but have been very impressed with Affinity photo.

> I have never seen milk or cheese in my limited exposure to Indian cuisine.

Indian cuisine is diary oriented to a point that while vegetarian food is super common, it is very difficult to find vegan food (especially North Indian food which is more common in the west). As a fun exercise try finding a local Indian restaurant and see how many of the dishes are vegetarian vs vegan. If you live in an area with a large Indian population, you may find Indian vegetarian restaurants locally - check their menu for vegan items. Milk consumption both directly or in tea is extremely common. Butter and ghee (clarified butter) is omnipresent in Indian cooking. Yogurt (locally called curd) and buttermilk (watery yogurt) is also widely consumed. Paneer, which is a kind of cheese made from curdling milk (very similar to tofu) is very common in North Indian dishes.

That comment flabbergasted me, lol. One of the few things popularly known about Hindus is many of them consider cows sacred. Although, technically, many in India will choose to use ox milk instead of cow milk since it is much richer/fattier (and I assume cheaper too).

Pop culture and mainstream politics affect people’s opinions in a weird way. Only in the USA and some part of the western world, people see wind turbines as “ugly”. Coming from another part where wind turbines are picking up very fast, the words I have heard are “amazing” and “elegant”.

Until you're living near one of them, and constantly hear the low thump, thump, thump their blades make when passing lowest point, and as such their very own mast, by necessity.

At varying speeds.

Indeed. I regard wind turbines as striking kinetic sculptures in the landscape.