I have a feeling Bethesda’s executives ordered the development team to make it as un-controversial as possible. “I don’t give a damn if the game is terrible. You will lose your jobs if you compromise this merger.”

I hate the pay for ad-free subscription model. They use people’s personal data to optimize the experience, making their ads as annoying and disorienting as possible.

When Reddit first unveiled their subscription, they began spamming my phone with obnoxious herpes advertisements. The ad just said “Herpes?” in big purple letters. Since this particular subject invoked a sense of fear and anxiety, it made me more likely to pay for their removal.

I think it has to do with the fact that most of them were born in area surrounded by hostile adversaries who would wipe that out of existence given the first opportunity.

Even if they spent the next fifty years being as nice as possible to the people around them, they would be conquered and assimilated if the US ever pulled their funding. They have two options: war or Exodus.

I find it reassuring that the government is at least acting like they can’t identify this user without Reddit’s consent. I wonder why this charade is necessary; are they trying to set a legal precedent?

Aside from the hole in my tooth, I’m fine. I’m speaking as someone who is currently making the transition from a negligent dentist. Since losing a tooth is a cosmetic issue, failing to identify a problem that can be clearly seen on an x-ray for over a year doesn’t meet the standard of harm necessary for consequences. The selective failure of recent filling might have happened regardless.

…at this point, I’d have been less upset if this dude groped me. I’d let Satan work on me if he was a competent dentist.

…the average worker in Africa would need to spend more than a year of wages to buy an Xbox or a PlayStation. Game consoles are in fact luxury goods, we just take them for granted.

It seems that there are multiple accounts set up to downvote anti-Chinese comments, so equilibrium is maintained.

Personally, I’d let my dentist grope me if he had a high enough success rate. I did some research a while ago, and a dentist whose work consistently fails will probably never lose his license. The patient won’t be able to successfully sue them and there probably won’t be an investigation. It’s a “buyer beware” scenario.

Also, somehow preventing adblock would trigger the creation of a corporate competing product. This is a bigger threat to Google than people stealing their bandwidth.

Thanks for this invaluable insight into the epidemiology of horse girls.

I’m pretty sure the vast majority of the people who are anonymous are robots and stealth marketers. Normal people aren’t usually willing to put in the effort to maintain their privacy. They use their “anonymous” social media and AI accounts on devices tied to their verified credentials (Google, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, etc.)

My theory is that these companies want identity verification to prevent swarms of bot farms from clogging up their servers. Up until this point, the drawbacks of identity verification outweighed the positives.

Does anything useful even come in 8K at this point? I saw it as a spec last time I went television shopping, but it seemed like something that wouldn’t be useful for another decade.

… people have a tendency to underestimate how prone they are to manipulation. We should amend our constitutions to include freedom of thought as a fundamental human right.

Good for them. Chrome needs a corporate competitor, and the recent lawsuits that (I think) prevent Google from giving FireFox hundred million dollar bribes might lead to a diminished product.

Prohibition is effective, it’s just that it doesn’t work for easy to manufacture compounds such as alcohol or marijuana. Every known human culture has independently discovered alcohol, and marijuana is a weed that is ready to smoke in its natural form.

As far as social media goes, my country has reached a point where TikTok and Facebook are preinstalled on every phone. If a parent buys their kid a phone and removes them, they will reinstall themselves after an automatic update. When you take into consideration the “streamlined” registration process, one can argue this is a means to target prepubescent children.

…I guess an 8 year old could download a VPN and steal their parents identification, but I feel like some form of prohibition would help.

I still think it’s a step in the right direction. Once you make it illegal for children to use social media, you can start going after the platforms for knowingly manipulating children.

The value of social media lies is in it’s ability to change thoughts, opinions, and long-term behavior. The public underestimates how effective this technology is, especially when it comes to children. In the absence of regulations, these platforms can make people believe just about anything by exploiting perceived peer pressure.

Lol. Although this claim might be technically true, comparing the cost of the first prototype lithium ion battery with a modern mass produced batteries is apples to oranges.

…Reddit is the opposite of Republican. The people there are aggressively far left. It is hard to believe that it’s not an artificially enforced echo chamber.

The problem with echo chambers is that they are politically sterile. By aggressively forcing Republicans and moderates off the platform, we lose the ability to influence their stances and opinions. It becomes a circle jerk.

If we had sustainable practices, at least of 3rd of the people in the United States and Western Europe would have a standard of living similar to the people in 3rd world country. This is assuming we don’t compensate for things by exploiting more vulnerable populations.

I personally think this is a decent trade-off, but the people my country would end up exploiting would probably disagree.