Agreed that it is a shame the world hasn’t changed for the better, but completely unrelated is the fact that there were a few months there where absolutely nobody knew just how bad it was going to get.

Only easily fooled unreasonable people were convinced one way or another when there was no scientific consensus on if the virus was going to kill 1 million or 1 billion, or somewhere in between.

It’s easy to look back and say ‘well it wasn’t world ending so it was irrational to have that fear’, but when millions are dying, you aren’t allowed to leave your house, and experts are saying that they don’t know how bad this is going to get, I would say that it was reasonable to be worried.

When Covid hit and lockdowns started, it was reasonable to think that the world as we know it might be ending. I was scared for sure and had started making contingency plans to flee to the mountains in a U-Haul full of canned foods and water.

Things are manageable now despite people still dying from Covid. Big corporate has been milking us since, as if their profits today are the last dollars they will ever make, and so it goes that they squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.

It takes a special kind of ignorance to ignore the impacts of Covid which were made worse by the inaction of trump, the fucking idiot, and say something as blitheringly stupid as ‘well I had more money when trump was president ahardy har har’

Get ready to spring steam from your ears people

Nobody wants to take responsibility for this bird

I’m talking about on desktop, although come to think of it, I think on mobile in Firefox focus, the videos auto play on mute… maybe because my phone is on mute, not sure. I am using Firefox for both now. Ditched chrome about a year ago when I noticed edge was actually working better for things, then ditched edge during the YouTube debacle a few months back. Super happy with Firefox + UBlock.

Also maybe my local news sites are shittier than your local news sites. It’s mostly the local news sites that have the shitty auto play, along with some shitty national sites like Fox News. And even though I do avoid fox like the plague, sometimes I like to see how a legitimate story gets spun by the right.

With that said, others have mentioned that on desktop using Firefox, and probably mobile as well, rather than selecting mute tab super quick, there are settings to prevent auto play all together.

I meant when I click on any of the articles curated by Google news… a lot of the sites that Google news aggregates are sites that auto play videos.

Nice that might have been something they fixed.

Google news is my go to… I’m sure someone can tell me why that’s bad and that I’m stupid ):

I am in the habit of right click, open in new tab… then as that tab is loading, right click the tab and ‘mute tab’.

I’m using Firefox but I’m sure the other browsers have a mute tab function.

I seriously just want to read articles. I don’t want some loud bullshit screaming at me every time I open an article.

One drive is the one that really ruffles my feathers.

It turns itself back on randomly, which wouldn’t be too much of a problem except for that it fucking remaps the desktop… a file that was previously located at C:\user\desktop\ is now at C:\user\One Drive\desktop…

Note the space in the path, they didn’t even have the decency to use an underscore… \one_drive\… even though it’s one of their own rules in powershell scripting.

For those of us using powershell to automate stuff this remapping is a nightmare and should be illegal.

Too bad I am in the US and will just have to continue to get support calls from time to time when a users desktop gets remapped behind the scenes.

Maybe there is a way using powershell and windows scheduled tasks to check to see if one drive turned itself back on, then auto turn it off and remap the desktop back to normal.

The absurdity of having windows check to see if windows screwed itself up, then if so have it fix itself is just laughable.

Mostly it’s the Christians that support Israel… they want to bring about the end times and they think that the Jews destroying the Muslims is the only way to make it happen. I really wish I was making this up. They are indeed that stupid.