snorkbubs

Cost of Attendance, Undergraduate, Brown University: Full Time Off-Campus. $71,412

Yet, they have billions in investment funds.

I’m 110% in favor of higher education, but not at schools that are run like an exploitation racket. Even state schools, that receive loads of Federal funding, are exploiting students financially. It’s insane that it has gotten this bad. Soon, the upper class will be the only ones who will be able to afford an education. In light of everything else, that almost feels intentional.

Apologies for the slight digression here, but institutes of higher education that are overflowing with cash make me see red. You’re a school, that’s not how any of this is supposed to work.

Thank you, democracy fans in the Netherlands!

I don’t think it would be fun to be a serf, and I haven’t idealized it. I made a dumb joke, based on a trope, and a couple of you guys just can’t accept that, and have to leave a smug reply.

I worked in manual labor for decades, in worse conditions than any serf ever experienced, right up until my body fell apart. 20 years ago, I would have traded my life with nearly any serf, in a heartbeat, and I’d be far better off now.

But, I’m sure you could show little old me what hard living really is. If only I knew!

It was meant as a joke. Capitalism isn’t feudalism in new cloths, either, but that gets a pass. I think you just hate ducks.

Besides, serfdom went on for centuries, under hundreds of different lords and rulers, in just as many environments. Your description covers one type, not all types. It’s disingenuous to paint it black and white, just because you have a problem with ducks.

Serfs in Gucci belts.

Ah, who am I kidding? Serfs had a far better work/life balance than most people in the developed world today. They had to use regular belts, though, which is embarrassing.

My answer is probably boring, but it works, and I had fun with my own. Just set up Wordpress. At this point, you can find templates for any site design imaginable, and there are a million plugins for it. It’s an all-around solid platform, that has mountains of documentation. Wordpress was made for blogging, can’t go wrong there, but I’ve used it for all kinds of stuff, including ecommerce. It’s simple and effective enough that I have a hard time going any other direction.

I used to host Wordpress sites on a home LAMP server; it was a fun project that didn’t cause a bunch of headaches, mainly because of the amount of available documentation. Search “wordpress self-host” and you’ll find a whole lot of information.

Good luck with whatever you decide on!

That’s really interesting about the archive; it’s surprisingly small. They must have combined repeated comments, which means there are about a dozen in total, along with some recycled Facebook memes. Now that I think about it, 2TB might be too big! …I’m joking ;)

Just want to note that Voat was a right-wing hellhole by this point, and the vibe here is extremely different. I’d pulled out of Voat within a week, because the writing was on the wall; big wall, big writing. I’m curious what is making you feel that the Fediverse will be like Voat, because I’m not seeing it. I’m still new here, but it was really obvious on Voat, just a week in.

Now you have me worried that Reddit, in recent years, moved my Overton Window so far right that it no longer sticks out. Oh no.

I’ve seen the low-effort meme comments as well; I hated them on Reddit, and I hate them here. This topic had come up on Reddit many times over the years, and there’s not really a way to combat it, from what I could tell. People with nothing to say still want to participate (e.g. earn fake internet points), and that seems to be a favored way do it.

Entomology subs like /r/whatsthisbug had a hard rule against comments like “kill it with fire”, “nope”, and “nuke it from orbit”. It was explained in the sidebar, mods would actively remove the comments, and people would downvote them, but it barely made a dent. Scroll to the bottom of a post and you’d see the same stupid “joke” repeated over and over, verbatim.

These people don’t even look at the other comments, they just drop their canned catchphrase and leave. This is why I like that we have to scroll to the bottom to comment here; at least the numpties have to put in slightly more effort, and hopefully they notice the comment has already been made 30 times. Ah, who am I kidding? Seeing the same comment probably reinforces their desire to post it.

The entire issue is lame as frig, wish there was a way to stop it. I know I’d be a bad moderator, because I’d just ban them.

A concern that I haven’t seen mentioned is Eternal September. Right now, Redditors are the school kids who are barging into someone else’s space and trying to make it their own, without first knowing what the community is like.

The same thing happened on Reddit. I’ve always seen the Obama AMA as triggering Reddit’s Eternal September, though it can be argued that it was happening before that. The influx of users killed the Alot Monster, and forget about anyone helping with grammar; they’d be ridiculed and downvoted into the negative. Then, Reddit got rid of the up/down counter altogether, so nobody coming from Facebook would end up with hurt feelings.

Anyhow, there’s a risk that Redditors are going to ruin the fediverse. I’m new here and can already see it happening. Fingers crossed though, I’m staying optimistic!

Both drive types are physical devices that a person can hold in their hand; you must have meant another word. Platter, maybe? Unless… something has changed drastically and I’m out of the loop. Are the youngsters downloading both RAM and storage drives now?

Agreed. At one point, I just quit all royale-type games, because there was enough stress in my life; especially when I worked on a computer all day. I needed a break from it. The smart move would have been playing an IRL sport of some kind, but I eluded that once again, and instead joined a modded Rust PvE server where I just run around the forest and chase chickens. That worked.