• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: December 4th, 2023
  • inverted_deflector@startrek.websitetoPolitics@beehaw.org•Why Opening Grocery Stores Alone Doesn’t Solve Food Deserts
    7·
    4 months ago

    This is an unfortunate situation when large scale suppliers dont play ball with smaller stores and when predatory chains like dollar general play the price wars game to drive away better options.

    Unfortunately the kinds of people who live in food deserts tend to be the most price conscious and they will take the longer trip if they need to in order to stretch their dollar out more.

    As an aside I think the article focusing on Cairo, IL of all places was such an unusual choice and I wonder how much of the problems that they had were unique to their location. Cairo is a town who’s population has been declining and whos buildings have been abandoning for the better part of the last hundred years. This is a trend that a lot of rust belt cities share, but Cairo was a small city of under 20,000 that has shrunk to under 1,000. What few people remaining there got a further kick in the rear by the fact that the area has gotten some bad flooding as well.

    Cairo is a relatively remote town that is being steadily abandoned, and has a propensity for flooding(which accelerated the slow process). That isnt to say that they arent a food desert, or that the remaining people there who likely cant afford to move dont deserve better, but I feel like they are an example of a town who’s got more stacked against them than what we usually think of when we think of food deserts (like a poor neighborhood in a city). Honestly I think its not unrealistic to believe the town as a whole will be abandoned in the coming decade.

  • inverted_deflector@startrek.websitetoPolitics@beehaw.org•Doxxing and callouts on Beehaw politics
    0·
    9 months ago

    I dont know if its because I originally just had a beehaw account before migrating to check out some other instances so maybe it was always this way and I was shielded by the de-federating, but holy cow are there a bunch of abrasive sniveling dorks in a lot of discussions. All the while bragging about how much smarter they are than those who left reddit, and yet when I check my old niche reddit subs it’s quite a bit more civil.

  • inverted_deflector@startrek.websitetoTechnology@beehaw.org•What’s next for Mozilla?
    4·
    1 year ago

    Yeah and AI is pretty useful for doing certain things. For example my pixel can turn on subtitles for any video or audio playing and even translate it for me on the fly. AI isnt blockchain and it isnt all chatgtp or making images with too many fingers. People are talking about improving web standards as if whatever ai stuff google,MS, and apple are cooking up wont be used in order to enhance various web features.

    Likewise firefox is currently a good browser and does keep up for the most part. I’d understand the criticisms if firefox was suck in 2009, but modern day firefox is fast and works well and they will likely continue keeping up with standards while an independent team works on the open source AI stuff

  • inverted_deflector@startrek.websitetoTechnology@beehaw.org•*Permananently Deleted*
    5·
    1 year ago

    people have been asking for imessage on android for years now and i really don’t know what the issue is.

    Apple wont until somebody makes them.

    The default text messaging app on ios is also stealthily a fully featured chat app that means that less tech savvy iOS users just think their texting is better.

    The blue bubble green bubble issue isnt because ios users hate android users and the color green as much as it’s bad, it’s because big group MMS chains are TERRIBLE. I remember having a friendgroup in the 2010s that had a big mms group chat before we switched to groupme and then eventually telegram(we would have done google messages if google hadnt abandoned it began its not infamous chat sabotage). It was bad. Low quality media, the protocol updated in batches so sending and receiving wasnt as smooth as a chat app, and also you technically could just leave. We eventually switched to a platorm agnostic solution because we had diverse devices.

    Now in the US iphone ownership is like 60 percent. I imagine the ratio is even worse for younger users. So for these users they use default messenger with most people and get feature rich multimedia chat app without even looking for an alternative provider. In some cases I imagine there are users young enough to not even realize what actual text messaging is or if they do there are chunks that think apple just texts better. It gives a perception of quality.

    Then they invite Johnny Android and suddenly the chat degrades back to 2005 flip phone quality SMS/MMS. Now this is entirely apple’s fault and the inability to chat with android users is technically their problem. Or it would be if iphones werent so popular. From their perspective they were having a good time using their default cell phone messanger and the android user broke it. Likewise unless Johnny android is particularly popular or charismatic it’s likely they wont switch to telegram/signal/whatsap/line/etc. They might just leave Johnny Android out of group chats because his presence isnt just green it makes chatting clunkier and worse.

    Johnny android might feel left out even if he isnt being outright bullied and may want to switch to an apple device. Likewise the iphone users may not want to leave the ecosystem and then not be able to easily communicate with their friends.

    SMS fallback I believe started more or less as a way to deal with inconsistent data in the early smartphone days but the unintended consequence of killing off the appeal of third party chat apps on their platform and creating a weird social bubble was a happy accident and apple is never going to give that up.

    Kids beg their parents to buy them iPhones and parents do it so their kids dont get left out or bullied. Even adults are pressured into this and it can be a factor when online dating.