Perhaps it's unfair to people who want to have kids but can't that IVF is so expensive, but really, there's one thing that affects birth rate more than anything else: cost of housing with decent nearby amenities, infrastructure etc. If housing were cheaper, people would have more kids... Simple.
So if you want to solve the social equity problem, subsidize IVF. If you want the birth rate to increase, knock down the barriers to entry and high costs in the housing market.
Same... Have done for ages now. Don't know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.
I always just turn DRM off and don't subscribe to these things... Now I know I had a better reason than I thought I did.
Speaking as a non-Meta user for the past several years, I just centre my interactions around people who use the various forms of social media (mostly open source and no FB / insta etc) ...
If people fall out of touch because they don't want to move away from Meta, they're not people I want to spend my time talking to. A degree of stubbornness is required, but eventually I've found sufficient interactions are possible on more desirable platforms, and I don't miss Meta at all, nor the people I left behind there.
Doesn't the phrase "wrong ideas" worry you a bit? I don't agree with everything Stallman says, but I think he has a right to say it, just the same as others have the right to say they don't like it and think he's a horrible pig or whatever. This is, of course, very different from acting on beliefs like his, which could certainly end up being harmful.
But when we as a society get to the point where we say an idea is wrong, it provokes the individual to act on the idea rather than talk about it. That's why freedom of speech is so important. Let the idea air and argue with it in a civilised way, and these things will sort themselves out.
Surprised it's not zero already honestly.
This was an utterly terrible idea to begin with and it's still a terrible idea for Android apps as well. Apart from messing with ad blockers, this has the ironically "helpful" feature of allowing malware to be force loaded into your browser. If it ends up in Android, some popular app that uses it will get owned and then every user of the app will also end up getting owned as well.
It's times like these when I'm glad I refused to even log into Google to view YouTube, let alone buy subscriptions. I also refuse to view downloading content (without logging in) that's freely available to be viewed as piracy.
These subscriptions are undoubtedly a rip-off. For those saying creators get a "cut", there's a reason why sites like Patreon exist. It's substantially better for creators if you subscribe to them directly that way and get your videos from Patreon. Same with Nebula etc. If I really had to pay then I'd do that (and do already for some stuff that was never on YouTube anyway).
You can get enough subs for the price of a YT premium to get plenty of content to watch, even if you don't want to subvert Google. So there's zero reason to throw money at them for this. None at all.
Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I've found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren't as good.
I really feel like we'll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.
Some of us remember there was a time when things like Reddit didn't exist, and neither did Facebook, Twitter etc. Lots of people lived just fine without them then. It's completely possible to take a hard line on this stuff and just refuse to use sites/apps/products that don't respect your privacy. Remember, there's always a smaller, friendlier or mechanical version.
The simple fact is that YouTube just isn't good enough to pay the amount of money for that Google wants for it. Accordingly, if other ways to use it besides premium aren't available, I'll stop using it and recover some time in my day.