I am in the same boat with you on the number of tabs, but I love the new redesign. I am not sure how this is enough of an issue for anybody to jump browsers.

Spam filters worked plenty fine over email.

You say this while half the country believes random people on Youtube and Facebook, refuse to wear masks in a pandemic that is killing people by the thousands.

I was young and believer in open internet once (and still am mostly) but the society as a whole has underestimated how much people are susceptible to being deceived and the cost differential between spreading and refuting false information.

I don't see this as anything other than an extension of anti-spam over email efforts of early 2000s.

Marketing works and that means propaganda works. Constant messaging can and will influence people's behavior.

Consumer Reports studies consumer products, product marketing claims, and real-world use. That enables consumers to make more educated purchase decisions. Is there anything like that for political news or news in general? If news is a form of entertainment which is a product, then it deserves some level of critique to measure its accuracy.

So if that is the mental state of half the country - is democracy worth defending? Why not just ban wrong-think and come out and admit that authoritarianism is the best, since too many people are too stupid to make the right decisions?

Because we are faulty creatures with faulty institutions. Let us work with what we have. Authoritarianism is mostly never better than democracy. Absolute democracy isn't always better than authoritarianism. And in this case it is largely irrelevant because the government is not the one censoring people.

The arguments about if and when companies can exercise these rights are good to have otherwise we may end up in one of the extremes.

That quote would work with "the entire population".

Instead, now he's not alone, the other half of the population supports him and holds the opposite opinion and I'm quite sure the first half the grand parent comment mentions (Covid denying crowd) has lost its grasp on reality. Or they have other motives to deny it... Which makes things worse.

Yes but its cheaper and battery life is great and the user doesnt have to worry about upgrades.

If you want to get a Linux based laptop for casual users and dont want to maintain it, just get them a chromebook.

It is also a good everyday machine I can use to ssh into my desktop for real work.

In my experience, I haven't had to worry about updates or maintenance of Ubuntu installations for casual users.

"Free" doesnt always mean "Free beer",

"Free Software" has a specific (and different meaning) than Open source.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

I think this is what OP meant not wanting their software to be available at no cost.

I use keepass + dropbox for syncing. You can replace dropbox with another syncing mechanism of choice, but this works out great.

I originally got youtube premium because I was already paying for Google music.

But I'd say 90% of my youtube consumption is on TV.

I think this can potentially affect startups who may want to hire H1bs at a lower than prevailing wage for their area(even if they are paying their American colleagues the same amount).

Other than that, the biggest issue might be to IT consulting companies (mostly based in India) that tend to have their employees work at a lower rate than tech companies.

I am on H1B (bay area last 4 years, Atlanta 6 years) and my total compensation is significantly higher than that.

This is idiotic.If this was true, Humans wouldnt share 90%+ genetic similarity with great apes (depending on which genes you count) which would go against every scientific consesus.

And you are claiming humans share no genes each other over a span less than 100K years.