Professional Lurker

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • I am more surprised than I should be at how quickly the Fedi pitch went from “we want a future where everything is interoperable everywhere” to “we don’t want any interaction with for profit companies”.

    A non-zero number of these companies are opportunists looking to fediwash their profile (just like ecowashing, pridewashing and so forth. Hell even Blueksy, the media darling of “we’re fedi we promise!” is already engaging in Blue Checks™ and ads in streams. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

    Specifically, what is Tumblr really worth without all it’s advertising and web controls to limit content viewing without forcing an account? (hello, Instagram) Adding bidirectional ActivityPub to Tumblr would basically render the site useless, who would subject themselves to that trash heap of a website when they could get the actual content from, say, a Lemmy instance? s/Tumblr/Reddit == samesame

    For profit companies who have built walled gardens and wish to stay that way (reddit, tumblr, meta, linkedin, etc.) are at ethical odds with the ActivityPub world, insofar as people are trying vehemently to get away from these companies. But you’ll notice for profit companies who are within the ideals of Fedipeople (for example Nitro, or Tuta, or Proton, or Mullvad) do not get griefed due to alignment of values and morals of the communities in question.




  • Cost might be prohibitive to do that now but in time

    I was being subtle in addressing this, but it’s spot on - the lawn maintenance working crews in question are all folks out trying to hustle and earn a living, these are not “outfits” with disposable income to invest in the electric future. Quite often the gear is bought/sold in pawn shops all over town, tools are probably the #1 item in any given pawn shop around here (followed by the usual jewelry, guns, etc disposable income items).

    Tangent: I lived in CA (SF) for ~18yrs and recognize a lot of the names of the cities and what they’re generally like. “Rich”, “white” (light-skinned any race/culture), “affluent” are the words that came to mind. I dare say that many of these enacted bans are based on “those brown folks making too much noise in my pretty neighborhood.” $0.02


  • Playing devil’s advocate here (I use a battery one that’s lasted almost 15 years and works fine on modern Lithium instead of NiCad - Black & Decker came with a weedwhacker too). Electric is fine as a single home consumer, but not for working crews. Modern Li batteries last pretty long for a single user doing basic tasks. (The real racket is in weedwhacker spools, they’re like $10ea now. I digress.)

    I live in the deep south of Texas (the muggy, humid greenish part not the desert) - it’s very common to have “working crews” of lawn maintenance out and about all the time. Generally speaking they just drive a truck + trailer full of gear around and look for opportunities. More common than an ice cream truck or FedEx driver after a flood rain like we get, get a deal for $20 fast & clean.

    These working crews use gas powered gear simply because electric cannot keep up with the duration and use patterns required by their team without investing in a lot of batteries ($$) and a way to recharge them on the go (generator == gasoline, maybe natural gas if lucky). I haven’t looked into the CA ban from this article to find out if they’ve carved out an exception or not for working crews, licensed or not.

    Regarding the linked Texas law - read it, it actually prohibits any local (non state, non Fed) municipality from banning any device based on it’s power source. This includes… surprise… solar panels on your roof! There are communities who think they’re “ugly” and ban solar roof panels, it’s real. The law does not prohibit any ordinances or regulation therein of said energy source (for example noise laws, quiet time laws, etc.) but they cannot supersede state/federal laws. This article flippantly wants you to believe it was enacted just to preserve gas lawn blowers using lazy wordsmithing for clicks.