The problem I've had with Mastodon, assuming it's representative of fediverse microblogging, is that its search relies almost completely on hashtags. Full-text search is opt-in per post, and very few users have bothered to hunt for the switch to opt in and turn it on. Posts made before the introduction can't be found at all except through tags. And the users of Mastodon think that's a good thing because it protects vulnerable members of marginalized groups from abusive bigots searching for them.

This leaves users like me to play "guess the hashtag" all the time. I search for what I think is the right tag for a topic, and all the posts I find are my own. Or I write a post and nobody else engages with it because nobody else is searching for the tags I used. What am I supposed to do to get my posts seen?

That and we need to accept that nothing will bring Kurt Cobain back. Cutting pollution now buys us time to cut pollution further later.

Or alternatively, and stop me if you think this is crazy, whether someone you don't know chooses to die or not is none of your goddamned business, and if they are unable to carry it out in a way that causes as little suffering at all, and seek out professional medical assistance then again, providing they are of sound mind, it's none of your goddamned business.

... and yet, sporks are used only rarely, mostly by campers or at picnics, both of which are specialized niche use-cases where minimizing the amount of gear to transport justifies the necessary compromises in usability.

So, his analogy is exactly right. Most people don't want to use a spork, and will only use one in situations where access to a separate spoon and a fork isn't an easy option.

I can think of one reason -- supporting that would at least double the amount of QA they needed to do to validate each new release of either MacOS or iOS. That would be a pretty significant amount of overhead to support a configuration that most people didn't ask for and don't want.

OTOH if macOS was informally "ported" to the iPad by some non-Apple group, Apple might just look the other way and say "that's not supported by us, if you do it, no warranty, YMMV, good luck".

Don't forget the second-order effects of overruling your engineers' better judgement: your best talent gets frustrated with their work being sabotaged, and quit your company to work for one of your competitors instead.... leaving you with the less-talented engineers who are still willing/forced to put up with your bad ideas. Now you have bad ideas, implemented badly.

The alternative to diesel and petrol doesn't have to produce zero pollution. It can produce substantially less pollution. It's a lot easier to scrub a handful of power plants than to scrub millions of tailpipes. Not to mention that if the USA still had electric light rail in this century, a lot of it would run on wind and solar.

Think back to 1940, just before the United States got dragged into World War II. Chevron and Phillips Petroleum were among the investors in an joint venture to put the electric streetcars of California out of business in favor of fossil-powered buses. Others included Firestone Tire and Mack Trucks.

"I wanted to use public transportation to avoid the pollution of using a personal car, but public transportation was made unavailable to me in part because of the actions of defendants." Compare defendant Chevron's role in the present case to the role of Chevron (then called Standard Oil of California) and Phillips Petroleum in the demise of streetcars in transit systems in California.

That's not why they are called extrernalities. They are called externalities because they are the external consequences of actions. They are very much in our control, and if you are going to price any commodity fairly, to make it reflect true market and societal costs, then you have to price those in. Otherwise what you're really doing is subsidizing an industry.

Meh. Boeing's recent safety record is worse than Airbus's, but flying with either of them is still significantly safer than driving a car, which nobody thinks twice about doing.

The argument only makes sense if you completely discount externalities. Once you factor them in, the costs of fossil fuels are absolutely monumental.

I mean, a bullet to the head cures cancer, but I'm not exactly seeing this being proposed as a medical solution.

Ah yes, reductio ad absurdum.

Twelve Angry Men must have driven you insane

You know, I don't have a panic attack if Macbeth is set in 1920, or if they recast Hamlet as a woman. I'll complain if the acting is shitty, but if the actors, whatever their gender or skin color, can pull off a good King Lear, then that's the only thing that counts.