It depends on what substance it is. I wouldn’t try and test this theory on plutonium, but some allergenic stuff can have vaccines made for them.

Everything in moderation as long as it isn’t straight up poisonous.

Yes, it is energy. And you do require it. I said that. It’s the fact that we eat too much of it and not enough of everything else that’s the problem. Cut sugar from your diet for a few weeks and then eat it in moderation alongside other things, and your health and quality of life will skyrocket. You wouldn’t live off of pineapples, would you?

Rich people used to pay the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ride short distances on triplanes just so they could see the ground from above. That’s what this is. Soon, rich people will be going on trips to the Moon, and then middle class people will be able to afford it later. New technologies are always expensive at first but then get cheaper, case in point, the computer you’re using right now.

Also, I doubt a corporate settlement is gonna be any worse than any other settlement considering almost everything the colony actually needs will be produced in the colony itself after the first few years and the corporation can’t do much from all the way over on Earth if the colony decides to do something they don’t like. Colonization schemes have usually been private endeavors that get subsumed by the state anyway, been like that since the Americas. I support anyone who brings us to the stars, including rich people.

As long as you don’t try and serve it to me, all power to you.

Sugar is incredibly addictive, non-nutritious yet high in caloric content, unfilling, causes highs and crashes reminiscent of drugs, and overuse of sugar in modern food is a major promoter of obesity. As with all types of food, sugar is fine in moderation. I consume plenty of sugar. However, if you rely on it too much for your daily calories then you won’t get enough of any other macronutrients such as fat, protein, and fiber, and you’ll get almost no micronutrients like vitamins. Sugar is also converted to energy incredibly quickly by the body, which is a good thing in many cases (like when you need a quick burst of energy at breakfast time, provided you balance it out with things like protein), but also leads you to get hungry quickly after eating it and eat some more, causing you to get fat, and wasting your money. When your body gets used to large amounts of sugar it also starts to crave it like a drug user craves drugs.

Oh ya, it’s also in just about everything these days, especially in America. It’s not even the tasty kind that comes from sugarcane, they just use corn syrup. Thank you, corn lobby!

Life is too short to worry about that shit. Cut out most of the processed crap and cook and eat whole unprocessed foods mostly and you’ll be fine.

Depends on what kind of processing it’s being put through. I wouldn’t drink unpasteurized milk, that’s for sure.

The only reason why I know how to do anything more on a computer than what I needed for school and Roblox is because some of my hobbies require you to mess around with a computer. Even then, the most technical things I’ve done include modding video games (sometimes I go hackerman mode and edit a text file to change a modded hotkey) and downloading specialized software to play ancient Flash games or fix a KSP save. You can get around just fine online these days without even using a computer. Most of Gen Z just uses their phone.

I guess some people just deserve the social media they get

Idk I just heard that apparently knowing how to use file explorer is considered impressive in modern CS classes

gen z, hate that trillion dollar corporations run our social media.

This isn’t even an issue for me so long as those trillion dollar corporations let me use social media the way I want to. I can just download an ad blocker and stay off the more garbage parts of their websites. The reason why I like the Fediverse is not because trillion dollar corporations don’t have a stake in it, because let’s be real, money was always gonna be involved. The reason why I like it is because I will most likely be insulated from the effects of enshittification and corporate incompetence on company-run instances. Even if the instance I’m on gets enshittified, it won’t be that difficult for me to just move to another instance, especially once the Fediverse matures and we get things like account migration, or even account federation, if I wanna keep one foot in both instances. Same for whatever community I’m involved with. Plus the fact that I can just block any community who’s users I don’t like means my experience will be way less toxic than it would be on Twitter, where avoiding toxicity requires a lot of effort. That’s one of the things I liked about Reddit, the structure kept the toxic people in their own little bubble and I was able to ignore their existence if I stayed off mainstream subreddits.

TL;DR: It ain’t about the money (or lack thereof), it’s about the potential for a better service.

it’s byzantine enough to jump in that it dissuades many newcomers who try.

Hard disagree, it was confusing when it was first explained to me, but in practice only a few more clicks were added to the account creation process.

I can confirm. I only came here after Reddit fucked the app I was using. I switched from the official app to Boost years ago because I was tired of the official app being complete garbage, and I refuse to go back. I never really paid attention to the enshittification of Reddit up until they crossed that line, since it didn’t affect anything I was doing.

I’m Gen Z, don’t use Linux, don’t know the first thing about programming (I know how to use file explorer though), and never intend to learn, and I’m here because I don’t wanna use the official Reddit app and because I’m convinced that the Fediverse is likely to become big in the future and I wanna be able to say I was here when it all began.

I could see this becoming a massive issue when the Fediverse becomes popular enough for niche internet microcelebrities. People like u/SirLulzingtonEsquire, who invented a whole new genre of trollface comics on Reddit, could get impersonated on a platform like this. It also seems like it could be an issue for actual celebrities. Remember what happened when Elon started selling blue checkmarks?