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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I still remember where I was when I saw that things had mathematically tipped past the point of no return for Hillary. It wasn’t a huge shock to me, but that’s mostly cuz I saw the writing on the wall when Hillary’s entire schtick for a while had been “no worries, we’ve got this, it’s not even a problem.” Democrat victories have historically hinged on whether or not they can motivate people to vote, and Hillary’s entire strategy did the exact opposite of that. Every single person independently went “she’s been saying for months that she already has it in the bag, so why bother voting?” And that led to her losing a lot of votes.



  • Just a dude who wants to love his neighbor.

    And the big issue seems to be that the two sides have drastically different definitions of the word “love”. There was a study a while ago, which found that conservatives are more likely to have liberal friends, while liberals are less likely to have conservative friends. It sounds odd on the surface… But the reality is that if a liberal hangs out with conservatives long enough to become friends, those conservatives will eventually get comfortable. Comfortable enough to start using hard slurs, or they will call the liberal “one of the good ones” as if it’s a compliment.

    It’s no wonder that liberals are less likely to report having conservative friends. Liberals have tried, and have been burned by all of the conservatives that they got close to. Meanwhile, the most offensive thing a liberal does around conservatives is just… Exist? Relatively speaking, it’s easy for a conservative to keep liberals around, because the liberal isn’t constantly trying to undermine the conservative’s right to personhood. Whether or not you can own guns isn’t an immediate existential threat to a conservative.



  • If you mean changing which app natively gets used for texting, that’s not something you can do on iOS. You can choose to open a different app, but if I tell Siri to text someone it will always 100% without a doubt no way to circumvent it use the standard Messages app. iOS doesn’t let you change your default for texts.

    Hell, they only allow you to change your default web browser because they were dragged into court kicking and screaming. And even then, all third-party browsers are forced to use Safari’s engine for the backend, and aren’t allowed to use their own engines. Even Chrome, Firefox, and Brave are just reskins of Safari on iOS. And even then, any apps that open an in-app browser will still use Safari even when your default browser is different. For instance, I’m browsing lemmy on Voyager, and it opens all links in a built in Safari browser, (even though my default browser is set to Firefox.)






  • I attended a PETA workshop about a healthy plant-based diet a couple years ago and everybody agreed on that.

    Yeah, PETA wants to be the only ones who kill housepets. If all the cats are dead from vegan diets, there won’t be any left for PETA to kidnap and euthanize.
    /s but not really because PETA habitually steals pets and immediately euthanizes them before the owner can reclaim them.



  • The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.

    It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.





  • This is fine for numbers that only have one separator. But they get difficult to read when they get longer. No reasonable person can read 957245815627 and functionally parse it in their minds. Can you tell at a glance, without counting digits that the number is nine trillion? Ninety billion? Nine hundred billion? You could be off by entire orders of magnitude and not even realize it until you stop and count the individual digits.

    Breaking it up into 957,245,815,627 helps the user visually see the hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions the same way we use them in language. The comma is a stand-in for the place descriptor. 957(billion)245(million)815(thousand)627. So now your brain can easily parse that there are 245 millions in this number, instead of accidentally seeing 724 or 458.


  • Yup, the issue is that it’s sort of like “Christian” in that it describes an extremely wide spectrum of worldviews. Are you a Southern Baptist who thinks everyone will burn in hell, (and makes it their life’s mission to scream that in everyone’s faces)? Or are you a Unitarian who just wants to follow the golden rule while smoking your weed? Both are Christian, but would fundamentally disagree with each other on what the proper definition of a “true Christian” is.

    Many feminists would be better off describing themselves as egalitarians instead. But that’s not as trendy or as widely understood, and may be a little too broad if they’re mostly focused on women’s rights. Meanwhile, there are full blown TERFs who try to pick and choose which women should have rights, or feminists who swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction and land squarely in misandry instead. And if you’re going to counter by saying that those aren’t true feminists, then you have fallen into the exact same problem that the above listed Christians have. Whether or not you agree with them is secondary to the fact that they’re using the same “feminist” title that you are.


  • Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.

    Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.

    Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).

    So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.

    And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.

    Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?


  • If it really boils down to this, how can one fight back?

    Historically? Guillotines in the village square, and/or Molotovs through the front windows of the overlords’ house. The rich learned a long time ago that when no other recourse is left, people will eventually turn to violence. And they learned that keeping the poors placated is a matter of life or death. Because money and fame won’t stop an angry mob, and even trained soldiers will get overwhelmed by sheer crowd size.

    I believe Sun Tsu wrote something applicable in The Art of War, along the lines of “Always leave a surrounded army a way out. Show them a way to life so they will not be compelled to fight to the death. Because even an exhausted army will fight to the death if they have no other option.” So the rich and powerful set up systems that are heavily skewed in the rich’s favor, but at least attempt to appear fair on the surface. They set up a visible “way to life” so that people could at least feel like they had a viable way of fighting back without resorting to violence.

    But recently, the rich and powerful seem to have forgotten that, and have dropped all pretext of fairness. Now it’s just blatant “you’re going to be killed and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Which means that the people are eventually going to be forced to fight to the death, because they’re cornered and see no other option. And I genuinely believe that if things carry on this same trajectory that people will turn to violence as a means of recourse, because it’s quickly becoming the only effective recourse that is within reach.


  • Likely some sort of health insurance initiative. Lots of health insurance companies will give discounts to companies that can prove they have taken steps to improve their employees’ health. So things like mandatory smoking cessation classes, drug tests, gym memberships, etc are all encouraged by insurance companies.

    My former company actually did things backwards; They offered a $20 weekly stipend to anyone who committed to stop smoking via a monthly smoking cessation course. It was basically just a monthly 30 minute video you watched, then answered some questions about… You could do it on company time, so it was an easy $80 per month that you were leaving on the table if you refused. The backwards part is that they didn’t offer the same stipend to people who never smoked in the first place. So all of the non-smokers suddenly signed on as smokers, signed up for the smoking cessation program, and immediately “quit” smoking so they could get that easy extra cash. I even used to keep a pack of menthols in my desk drawer, in case I was ever questioned about whether or not I really smoked. The first month they introduced the program, the company’s insurance must have been screaming, because every single employee suddenly reported as smokers.


  • A girl got killed by a school bus.

    She had been cheating on two different guys, and they found out while on the bus. They started to fight, and the driver pulled over to kick them off. While the driver was pulling away, she decided she wanted to watch the fight. So she forced the doors open on the (now moving) bus, and jumped out. Apparently this was a semi-regular thing for her to do.

    What wasn’t regular is that, upon landing, she tripped and rolled under the bus. The rear wheels ran over her head, and she was killed.

    The school offered a day off of classes and free grief counseling for the students who were affected. Suddenly, everyone who had ever passed her in the halls was her best friend. It also started a “careful that you don’t get hit by a bus” trend among students, where pretty much any activity was countered with some form of “make sure you don’t get hit by a bus!” Going to basketball practice? “Don’t get hit by a bus on your way to the locker rooms!” Need to go to the library? “Make sure you don’t get hit by a bus on your way!”

    It peaked when a student asked a teacher to go to the restroom. She was always a very prim and proper type. She quickly answered “yes, just don’t get hit by a bus on your way.” She quickly realized what she had just said, and looked horrified, which just had us all rolling.