The existence of cash is probably the least of one’s problems in that scenario. How is food going to be delivered to stores without working gas pumps? How will stores open their electronic doors or process payments without a cash register?
If this is something you are worried about, store enough non-perishable (eg canned) food in your home so you don’t starve in that scenario.
Quite possibly true, it’s just that I haven’t seen this kind of thing from xkcd before.
Is Randall now just retelling YouTube videos from 2013? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eKc5kgPVrA
Probably true. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ was written before most people cared much about this but certainly applies very strongly to it. I am fortunately not directly affected by it either way (I am neither trans nor a woman nor have any desire to pretend to be trans in order to get access to women’s spaces) so it doesn’t get my emotions up much to read any side’s arguments; I can see why that may be different for others.
When I first became active on reddit, I admired how few sitewide rules they had and how much free speech they allowed.
Now they ban debate about one of the most contentious and multifaceted societal issues of the present. What are online discussion forums there for if not to openly and civilly exchange ideas about issues like this?
IRC still exists. Forums are somewhat hard to host nowadays because lots of governments have passed laws imposing more and more regulation, liability and duties of care on operators of web platforms. We would need to start movements to repeal those laws first, I’m certainly in favor of that! But I think the future of forums is nonetheless ActivityPub; it is a lot better to be able to read about all topics that interest me on one website rather than having to click through many different ones.
Flash games: why do you want those back? Flash is a proprietary platform and it’s a good thing we can now do the things we used to do with it directly in the browser with HTML5 and JS. You can still play Flash games with Ruffle, there are still websites out there that host them.
Video sites that aren’t YouTube: nowadays videos can be much more easily hosted elsewhere than YouTube than was the case in the 2000s. Many social media platforms allow direct upload of videos and any website operator can easily directly embed a video without needing either YouTube or something based on Flash Player. So I’m not sure what you’re nostalgic for when it comes to this topic.
I’ve been calling it threadiverse because that is what I saw most other people call it.
Really all it is is “ActivityPub groups” or if that is too technical, “fediverse groups”.