Also Sweden’s population is about the size of Los Angeles county. Every time I see Scandinavia held up as something to aspire to folks should remember how small and historically homogenous these countries are.
Comparing the US to the EU as a whole is a much more accurate way to look at things, with us states being akin to eu member countries.
The weird thing is rebellious shock-jock type folks like this would have rebelled against conservatives a generation ago, but these days “the system” is perceived as the left. Something to keep in mind when trying to make sense of the world.
People here trying to make this about masking bad business decisions etc don’t live in Oakland. I live here, it’s really bad right now.
I was joking with a friend that a lot of Oakland feels like a bad 80s dystopia film…like you know those scenes with hobos warming themselves around a burning oil drum, stripped and burned out cars everywhere, piles of trash, drug addicts and prostitutes wandering around, etc? That’s literally real life in a large part of east Oakland. Like I’ve swear to god seen a half dozen girls at one intersection twerking in the middle of the street on the yellow lines, and one block over is a 5 block long encampment (16th and international/ 12th st).
Like this shit is on Google street view! It’s not hard to find. Follow this road all the way down to Fruitvale ave, it’s like a solid mile of a 3rd world refugee camp.
I even went to the trouble of putting mine in a mini snes style case with functional power and reset buttons. Still have it ready to go…in the garage 😅
My take on this is not that this is the default early adopter demographic (bereal, TikTok, etc…cmon old dudes don’t act like we are “leading the charge”). But, there’s a good chunk of older tech oriented folks that see a glimmer of hope in the fediverse bringing back some bits of the “old web” imo.
While most of the people like me don’t love meta or Twitter it was kinda good enough, but Reddit was kind of a last straw. I was there when all these companies were born and at the time we were all teen and 20-something early adopters (believe it or not even Facebook used to be cool!) and we’ve watched them all slowly degrade. Very young folks prob don’t care as they don’t really use any of these services, but us old nerds want to avoid the pitfalls of the Web 2.0 era.
Web3 and the crypto-decentralization efforts were really ham fisted…I think most experienced techies saw through all the BS and recognized how wildly inefficient it all was, not to mention outright scammy in many cases. Fediverse is unproven but I think it has potential, and I think many of us older techies feel that way.
I feel reasonably confident that there are just as many languages spoken in just Los Angeles county, if there are any parallels to NYC:
https://untappedcities.com/2019/12/06/fun-maps-nyc-is-most-linguistically-diverse-urban-area-in-the-world/