You Should Know:
OP’s account is only 2 hours old and the claim they have made on ‘YouShouldKnow’ is wrong.
This post should be removed for misinformation.

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-supermajority-vote-in-us-government-3322045
When Is a Supermajority Vote Required?
By far, most measures considered by the U.S. Congress as part of the legislative process require only a simple majority vote for passage. However, some actions, like impeaching presidents or amending the Constitution, are considered so important that they require a supermajority vote.

• Impeaching
• Expelling a Member of Congress
• Overriding a Veto
• Suspending the Rules
• Ending a Filibuster
• Amending the Constitution
• Calling a Constitutional Convention
• Ratifying an Amendment
• Ratifying a Treaty
• Postponing a Treaty
• Repatriating Rebels
• Removing a President from Office

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_United_States
Government shutdowns in the United States
The US Government has shut down 11 times in the past 45 years for a total of 132 days.
Seven times for six days or less.
Once for 21 days under Bill Clinton in 1995-96 (total of 27 days under Clinton).
Once for 16 days under Barack Obama in 2013.
Three times for a total of 79 days under Donal Trump (so far).

https://www.britannica.com/science/US-abortion-rights-by-state-2236312
U.S. Abortion Rights by State
Legal with no gestation limit or Legal before viability: 23 states
Full ban: 13 states

A lot has been written about “ai”, decades and generations ago. I’m not sure if anyone considered the impact on human emotions in a manner that’s toxic and widespread. I’m just thinking of a future story where a portion of the population are so traumatized by conversations with machines that they escape their realities in various ways. People talking with computers as if they’re human seems very dystopian from the start. The next ten yers is going to be wild.

But also, this is a damn good start to the Thought Police. Imagine if a government gained access to these logs. Actually, I’d be surprised if the US govt didn’t already have access to twitter. They’re already cracking down on free speech that criticizes them / him.

Not to discount this helpful and important information but, for the people you’re trying to direct this to, I genuinely don’t think it matters. This administration has thrown out habeas corpus and due process. And they have done this because a substantial portion of the population voted in favor of kicking people out who don’t look like them. It’s called Nationalism. And with that comes Fascism.

The core identity of the United States is disintegrating by public opinion. The one thing that brought pride to generations of Americans is being driven out and replaced with the same reasons people had left other countries in favor of the US. It’s gut-wrenching.

So, yeah, get your papers but don’t let it fool you into believing it protects you.

Hah - also funny to look at “only about 50% of US citizens have a passport” to understand exactly why we’ve turned into Nationalists.

Big Tech doesn’t run social media. It runs algorithmic advertising platforms.

The majority of people using algorithmic advertising platforms are not content creators, they’re consumers (if you’re reading this, you’re probably not in the majority). They have no interest is active participation in “social media”. They’re in it for the entertainment, the distraction, the memes, the algorithm telling them what they should care about. You can’t remove this feature and expect these users to find content for themselves.

You can argue the pros and cons all you want, your reasoning may be factual and altruistic, but you will not get a substantial portion of content consumers to migrate to platforms that require more effort. They know what they’re signing up for. They have no interest in “reclaiming social media”.

Bluesky and Mastodon are fantastic platforms that, in my opinion, revive some of the core tenants of social microblogging. But this is like comparing a bulletin board system (BBS) to the Yahoo! homepage. Some people want to be involved, some people want to be told.

One of these platforms offers a greater profit making opportunity than the other. If one allows people to make money and another does not, what’s the motivation for the most influential of creators to embrace the latter? And then what’s the motivation of the consumers to embrace a platform that lacks the most influential creators? (Again, if you’re reading this, you likely aren’t a member of the majority.)

This is not Microsoft. I haven’t updated my plex software in over six months and it runs fine. Still, yes, I would expect updates to any software I purchase as new patches are needed for OS updates, etc. That shouldn’t be more than two updates a year for a given OS - if at all.

Selling a product, generating revenue, using revenue to improve products or create new products is how we used to run businesses.

If they’re unable to maintain software updates with the revenue they get, then they should discontinue support of less popular products.

As I’ve stated on the plex forum, plex is no longer a media management and consumption platform. It’s a video on demand service. That’s their prerogative and that’s fine. The issue is that they’re discontinuing a product that people have purchased and use on a regular basis. I paid money for a product and that product can no longer be used if I change the device I use that product on. They should have left the existing product alone and released something wholly new.

I bought a media management and consumption platform running on my own server using my own clients. For what reason do I need a relay service to watch content in my house on my server?

So what is the move for them?

Plex has a two-pronged VOD service. They have ad-supported “live television” and they have content to rent.

I don’t know if that’s enough to sustain them but I don’t really care. I’ve been a PlexPass owner for over ten years. I have only asked that they resolve bugs and made requests for things like proper organization of classical music (which they’ve explicitly stated they will not consider).

You do bring to light something I hadn’t considered; that they see Plex as a business model. From my perspective, I want to buy a fully developed product with the expectation of bug fixes and security patches etc over time. I genuinely can not think of a single thing the developers have added to the service that I’ve used in the past ten years.

So, what kind of business model charges money to do things that don’t have an apparent impact on the user experience?

Plex has been one of my most used applications in the past decade. However, it has its limitations and they are actively imposing more limitations on the experience in favor of “a sustainable business model”.

The issue is that their sustainable business model is interrupting the users’ sustained use of a platform they’ve already paid for. I’ve had to go through all of my devices and disable all auto-updates to ensure I do not get the “New Plex Experience”.

What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.

Another longtime user here. If you haven’t already, you might want to disable autoupdates on all your devices. The “new experience” is not without its controversies.

…the company had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit “moments of psychological vulnerability” in its users by targeting terms like “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.”

As much as there’s an opportunity for selling a product, there’s an opportunity for extending support. Maybe there’s a sliver of a silver lining in that this surveillance could be used for good. It’s disheartening though that of course this will never happen.

I mean, if you wanted to be the good guy, you’d develop AI chat bots that could reach out to people seemingly in distress.

I’d be interested to hear from the youngest generation (15-20 YO) to hear if they care about this at all.

I’m approaching 50 years old and had been an early adopter most of my adult life. Growing up from the 1980s through 2000s, there was a near-mainstream narrative that we were living in a unique era of emerging technologies. It was exciting and we were anxious for anything new.

It seems to me that nothing is really new and there is nothing exciting, if not interesting, about technology today.

I’ve actually been stripping down the technology from my life as it’s become too distracting to get things done and has prevented personal growth and the formation of memories. For one example, I recently subscribed to a print magazine because I prefer a tangible object that I can associate with in and of itself (and choose to own and collect).

Looking at analog trends like vinyl records and film photography and cassette tapes, it seems like people are at least trying to incorporate tangible objects into a modern lifestyle. Then you have the trend of the dumb phones which indicate people are becoming more aware of the detriments caused by an always connected lifestyle. Thankfully, some car manufacturers are returning buttons to their cars in response to owner feedback about everything being a touch screen.

I mean, I’m not a multi-trillion dollar organization with different departments studying the feasibility of future products but I do wonder if something like AR glasses are already more of our past than our future.

I think there’s a more than reasonable desire for a device to help you through your day - especially in foreign countries. But do you think you want that to be glasses or something else?

Lastly, this reminds me of the prediction from Michio Kaku in Physics of the Future about augmented reality contact lenses. Should we at least accept AR glasses as first step towards contact lenses? Do you think society would accept these 20-40 years in the future?

What I’ve done for home videos and recorded programming is to use the VHS/DVD combo to transfer the video to DVD then rip the DVD to my computer using Handbrake (MacOS). The quality of the transfer is as good as I can hope for.

It’s an easy, almost enjoyable process. I get the option to watch the VHS or I just let it go overnight or while I’m otherwise occupied (doesn’t tie up my computer in realtime). I get an additional, smaller, hard copy of the media. Once I get a handful of DVDs, I can let my computer rip them to my NAS to watch using Plex.

Plenty of sub-$100 VHS/DVD combos on eBay.

Caveat: Purchased movies may have copyright protections. I have the original Star Wars VHS tapes but couldn’t transfer them.

Back in the early 2000s I used (I think) an El Gato EyeTV Video to Firewire peripheral to rip to my Power Mac G5. I was never super crazy about the quality of the transfer. The video always looked like, “I used my computer to transfer this”. I have to assume things are better these days. I feel like this process depends more on your computer and your software where as the VHS > DVD method is a bit more “aligned”. I could be wrong. I mean, the adapters are like $10-$20. They seem too cheap to be trust worthy.

Category View introduces a simple way to organize emails by type

It wouldn’t be possible for me to overstate how much I dislike this feature. It’s one thing I can’t stand about Gmail and from what I’ve observed, iCloud has this now too. I’m wondering if people actually find this more useful than a hindrance. I mean, I have spent days with several email addresses creating my own filters so I get not everyone can do that. But the way this is typically implemented just seems like another spam mailbox that no one’s going to check.

I assume they will but if Proton doesn’t have a way to disable this, I am out.

Manage newsletter subscriptions

What would actually be cool is a dedicated newsletter app. I use BigNews as an RSS reader and newsletter reader. They give me an email address just for newsletters. It’s fantastic.

Because, contrary to what you may think you’ve observed over the past ten+ years, copying and republishing anyone’s content without their permission is a US copyright infringement.

So yeah; if you want to get their permission, ensure all their links and such are migrated over, and do all the work for them to mirror content they’ve created without the benefit of making any money on it, have at it.

They’ve released previews of the new UX. While it appears you may still be able to remove the VOD content, it’s significantly more cumbersome to access your own content.

I didn’t think it would be possible to keep using the Plex server and user other apps. If so, that would be nice so as to maintain the meta data I’ve worked so hard on.

I’m going to give this a try for watching movies on my Apple TV. It seems to fall short for everything else.

This is so frustrating.

I was saying to people who were upset about losing TikTok that no one should be so invested in an app or some technology owned by someone else that losing it upends their life. And now here I am waiting for Plex to send out an update to all but exempt me from enjoying my own media.

I am exhausted with these companies making changes to their products. I have cancelled so many subscriptions, deleted so many apps, because someone wants to fuck with the user experience that helped them gain so many users in the first place.

Luidditeville, here I come.

I think you bring up a good point about college and high school classmates. I don’t personally care about this but I imagine millions of others do. IMO, these groups should maintain their own social platforms. If you want to keep in touch with your classmates from Harvard, Harvard (or a private student counsel board) should maintain a forum for you.

Right - you want to post a picture of your kid for family, classmates, friends, coworkers to see all at once. Well, that’s (supposedly) where the fediverse comes in.

The fediverse, of what I know of it, is still lacking a lot of these tools that would be useful to people. People are pushing it really hard but it is not ready for the masses.

Personally, as someone who hasn’t had a FB account for well over five years, it’s super weird to me that you need it to “keep up with family and friends”. You’re using a data harvesting, advertising, and propaganda platform to conduct personal communications. There was a time when this was done using nothing more than the United States Post Office and the telephone. So, we probably have the technology to keep in touch today while excluding Facebook.

In response to your concern with privacy controls: it’s not federated and I can only assume they’re being honest about privacy, you might consider looking at Vero. It has up-front tools to control who sees what.

Still, I would encourage people to minimize their reliance on any platform owned by someone else to maintain relationships. At someone point, something will break, will be hacked, will go out of business. Do you think Facebook will exist for 25 to 50 years from now? When it goes, all your photos and videos and conversations go with it. When someone dies, all the memories they’ve captured are gone. Hashtag: bring back photo albums.

I’ll admit, the buzz around FB Marketplace has tempted me to sign up again. Mostly because ebay fees are insane. I’ve resorted to either putting things out for free pickup or using hobby-specific websites with buy/sell forums. Plus the occasional sidewalk sale. Life existed before Facebook. It was a slower life. So, just have to be more patient sometimes.