The problem is you cannot donate to Firefox directly - only to the Mozilla Foundation. If they let people vote with their (donation) dollars, it would be much more clear to them where people want them to expend their efforts.

As an optional (or even promoted) extension, Pocket was a great idea. Integrating it into the browser was pretty dumb. Fakespot as a website is pretty cool and I used it a number of times over the years. Mozilla buying it was incredibly stupid.

If I knew my donation had been wasted on either of these, I'd be pissed enough to never donate again.

Agreed that 4000 is a bonkers number and definitely a "you" problem and not an issue with the browser.

However I do tend to find myself with ~50 tabs open (thank god for vertical tabs) because I find it much easier to use open tabs instead of bookmarks as a reminder or to-do list since the tabs are a constant visible reminder. This is especially true for work where I have multiple projects/topics in-flight. Most of them are unloaded so they don't really use any resources.

I wish there was something between bookmarks and tabs to fill this use case. I've tried some addons like Reading List to handle it, but it didn't really work for me. A tab group might work since it's also easily seen (acting as a reminder) and accessible (easily acted on).

I admit this probably says more about my organization and discipline, but I've used tabs this way for over a decade.

My god, what is it like to go through life this stupid? Are you aware of it, or blissfully ignorant? Do you sometimes get a glimpse and wonder what's wrong, like a parrot occasionally seeing themselves in a mirror and being unsure if it's another bird or not?

I imagine being the putty in the soft, warm, sweaty hands of conservative pundits must be comforting though. Any time you start to become unsure of what to think, you can rely on being told exactly what to believe, even if it's directly contradictory to what you were told the night before.

Ignorance truly is strength.

What is it with that? I thought I was just unlucky when the two different physical therapy offices around here I've been to were both showing Fox news constantly on ceiling-mounted TVs. I've never had to bite my tongue harder than when the staff or therapist starts talking about culture war bullshit or asking me "So are you doing okay in this terrible Biden economy?"

Also, jesus, Fox News daytime ads are really something else. It (almost) makes me pity the poor fucks stuck home watching that shit every day.

I've used Firefox Beta exclusively on my Android phone for several years and just don't see this. Yes, there's the rare occasion that a site doesn't work correctly because, as you say, it was created with only Chrome in mind, but that's hardly Firefox's fault.

There's room for improvement and change seems to come slower to Firefox on mobile, but I think it does a very good job. And the fact that you can use addons with it, including ad-blockers, is a huge boon.

You're being snarky (I think) but that's actually worryingly accurate.

Before WW2, there was a general understanding that war was a good way to deal with excess or unwanted population - especially from the lower economic class - as well as the mounting social malaise caused by inequality, poverty, and internal sectarianism. After total war and atomic bombs scared us straight, the last 80 years or so of unprecedented peacetime are something of an experiment to see if we can come up with alternative ways of dealing with these problems.

Finding something meaningful for people to do with their lives (especially younger men) is a genuine challenge. College used to be an easy early option for large numbers of them, while (I think) also smoothing some of the edges off and preparing both men and women for adulthood, but that option has become less alluring due to the increasingly obscene money required and distrust in higher education as a reliable means to a reliable future. Something else will need to take its place.

Personally I think it's tragic that the US didn't see this coming almost 20 years ago after the 2008 meltdown and start programs for creating new non-profit community vocational schools across the country. The rewards of government investments in such publicly-supported schools would vastly outstrip the costs -- the country will *always* need mechanics, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc, and these should be reliable, financially stable jobs -- supporting new adults as well as being a potential social safety net for older people who find themselves out of work and without other options.

When people vote for and elect an incompetent narcissist with delusions of despotic authoritarianism, they don't get to be surprised by anything on your list. You might argue that you didn't expect those things, but if you put a stupid person who intentionally surrounds themselves with other stupid people into power, any expectations you had are invalidated. Unless you expected "stupid things", in which case I guess you got exactly what you were looking for.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Hah! Won't lie - hearing "The thing happened two score and seven years ago" on the news would be pretty great. Certainly better than "almost five decades".

lol, well for what it's worth I thought your original post was great. No mod points today though, so it was taking the AC bait instead.

Are you really this dense? Let's work together and see if we can figure it out.

First, Trump tanks the market by putting intentionally stupid tariffs in place.
Second, they wait a few days for stocks to sink 10% or so - hoping for enough to make a bunch of money but not enough to really break things (see the bond market).
Finally, Trump insiders and rich buddies get told that the tariffs will be lifted at date and time X, so they can buy beforehand.

For fucks sake, Trump literally posted it on his shitty Twitter clone a few hours beforehand, I guess to throw a bone to his "orange man god" rubes.

Sure, but guess who is responsible for finding these people? The SEC. Who gutted the staff and authority of the SEC? Trump and Musk. And who is running the castrated SEC? Oh yeah, the inmates. And who is responsible for prosecuting them? The AG and judiciary. And who's running that? The same group of fucks.

God, I love when Trumpers use this and think it's a witty jab. Like Big Lead saying "Just raging because 'lead in brain bad'" or Big Tobacco saying "Just raging because 'lung cancer bad'" and thought it was a real burn. Yes, the "orange man" is bad, and stating it like it's an absurdity doesn't actually invalidate it.

Trump really does has a lock on the bottom half of the IQ distribution.

While we're on this tangent, the current trend to always use "decades" in news and media when "years" is both more clear and more accurate has become a real pet peeve. I can only imagine that the writer thinks it makes them sound smarter or their data point more impressive, but to me it's clunky and kinda crass.

FFS, just say "The thing happened forty-seven years ago." It reads better, is more informative, and actually sounds more impressive.

Great post. I've never understood why some conservatives seem to think the "but the Dems used to be Southern Slavers!" is such a slam-dunk gotchya. The idea that groups of people and ideologies have never or should never change over time has real "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" vibes and simply isn't how humans work over time periods measured in generations.

The political shifts in US history are really interesting and important if you want to have any idea how to understand the current state.

I bought some Flavacol a few years ago based on some comments I read saying how great it was. Really, it's pretty meh - mildly buttery flavored yellow salt - but I didn't think it replicated movie theater popcorn flavor very well. Maybe it did in the 70's? Also it comes in a huge container. Mine is still like 95% full and is free to anyone who wants to come pick it up.

If you really want to have movie theater popcorn at home, it's about buttery-flavored oil. Cook your corn in coil, top it off with more salty butter flavor goop, maybe throw on some MSG. Then "enjoy" it, I guess?

Directions unclear, accidentally banged the couch instead.

-JDV