It doesn’t need to be profitable, let alone have every fraction of a cent squeezed from it.

Exploding head syndrome only a beep? Brains do weird shit.

They’re not uninformed, they’re lying.

They are fully aware that if a politician tried to introduce gun laws that were an exact copy of Switzerland’s, they would be staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, Republicans and the gun lobby that owns them.

They just want to muddy the waters and drag out the conversation forever. The Switzerland excuse is just as bad-faith as when they blamed video games, music or too many doors.

Edit: also, might make the government think twice about fucking with democracy or stepping over the common man.

That’s just a marketing campaign from gun manufacturers. If it actually worked, it would have worked in America.

Instead, they get to choose between a neoliberal and a fascist every few years (if they haven’t been disenfranchised or gerrymandered into irrelevance), which decides whose rich friends and donors get to pocket the most public funds.

There’s demonstrably millions of people who are absolutely fine with being assholes, especially if it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter to them in the slightest.

The browsers solved this long ago.

Any request to open a new page, from either the pages themselves or from the OS, prefers a new tab. If there are multiple windows in which it could open a new tab, it prefers the latest. If you want to split a tab off into a new window, you can.

With Explorer, any OS request for a folder that isn’t already open creates a new window and there doesn’t appear to be any way to prevent that.

But in a weirdly shit way. I will never want more than 1 window but still end up with 5.

Would it change anything besides their technique?

They almost certainly already have vote manipulation tools for reddit that work via browser automation, because someone offered me money to build one 10 years ago.

Those tools and a handful of accounts+vpns would already be borderline undetectable without the access needed to see that 25 accounts always voted the same way.

At least on Lemmy, you have that access. Reddit not only makes zero effort to prevent it, they actively obfuscate the information needed to spot it.

From my own experience, “not bothering” is definitely the better business practice since chances are you won’t make back the development costs.

Maybe Steam Deck and that porting library have improved things but a decade ago it would have been better business to just give Linux users $20 to not play your game.

Unfortunately, protest songs could absolutely be commercialised.

While not exactly protest songs, the grunge movement of the 90s was a reaction to what was seen as shallow, packaged pop music of the late 80s.

Once their snouts smelled profit, the usual middlemen rushed in to wrap that discontent in plastic and sell it to kids at Walmart, chewing up musicians along the way.

I think it’s simply that protest songs are more difficult to wring profit from compared to creating pop music using the formula that sold the most last time.

Inflation happens when rich people find out you’ve got more money and rush to fuck you out of that too.

That’s why any kind of tax break, stimulus or welfare is met with “but inflation!”

Experts in pseudoscience may claim “it encourages people not to horde wealth!” but it’s just another lie that makes rich people richer when it fails to deliver for the 1000th time.

That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.

If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.

But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.

Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.

Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.

The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.

Well this might come as a shock but the techniques used to groom suicide bombers also work on white people too. Prey on their disillusionment, pump them full of hatred for “the enemy” then give them the means to carry out an attack.

But if you’re digging back through history, check out how once upon a time, everyone from the US government to Coca-Cola was awkwardly trying their hand at mind control.

Fortunately, they’ve pinky promised that’s all behind them now, despite having access to millions of people who voluntarily pin their own eyes open and spend the night scrolling through rapid flashes of sex, violence and extremism, in their own DIY Clockwork Orange therapy (only it’s trying to make them worse, not better)

What could go wrong except for everything that’s currently going wrong?

The damage done by giving neoliberals power and the far-right platform is going to take decades to undo, if we survive it at all.

Climate change is progressing at an alarming rate while the oil and gas lobby teach AI how to astroturf, cheered on by every billionaire hoping they can fire their employees and pocket their wages.

If the far-right are given the power they need, they’ll decimate the population searching for whatever magic group they need to genocide that will make their parents love them, their mental illness evaporate and their dicks 14" long. When they finally realize no such group exists, we’ll get to see what happens when you give the nuclear launch codes to wife beaters ane school shooters.

Vote better.