Why smoking remains so prevalent. I'm sure it's not a majority that smokes, but it is massively more common anywhere I've been in Europe than here in the US. I live in a fairly large city and I will go many days in a row without seeing a single person smoking.
I just don't really get it. It's gross, it smells, it ruins your teeth and your lungs, and it's expensive. Why do it?
Valve is a private company. Microsoft can't just buy Valve, Valve would have to agree to that. Considering Valve has (for a company their size) effectively unlimited resources already, and considering that Valve's founder and leader is a known detractor of Microsoft, this is a nothing story. Microsoft will not buy Valve. This is baseless musing, like how I sometimes daydream with my wife about what we'd do if we won the lottery (which we don't play).
Of course Microsoft would love to buy Valve. Just like they would love to buy Nintendo. I'd like to buy a Lamborghini. All these things are about equivalently likely, zero likely.
$10M??
I'd take $10. Seriously. I mean I guess unless the meal was fully paid for and pretty fancy. But with either of these two donuts that feels like hardly a given.
$10 is a sure bet.
Not sure what country you're in, but at least in the US there is some precedent for a dying declaration being used to secure a warrant for search.
Considering how long ago this was and the fact that there is zero actual evidence I think you face a pretty extreme uphill battle in anything being done about this. It also sounds like, given your story, local authorities could be in on it. Makes it even harder.
Without directly pursuing this yourself using your own resources, potentially legally grey area tactics, and likely endangering yourself I have a hard time believing much can or will be done about this. But it's definitely a compelling story and I agree with the other poster that publicizing it may be your best bet.
Oh no! Anyway...
Yeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn't even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I'm really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
Talk radio or television broadcasts the same stuff to everyone. It's damaging, absolutely. But social media literally tailors the shit to be exactly what will force someone farther down the rabbit hole. It's actively, aggressively damaging and sends people on a downward spiral way faster while preventing them from encountering diverse viewpoints.
Mathematicians and racists hate this one trick!
This is good advice in general.
But the answer to this question is extremely well known across the internet and every thread that comes up will eventually boil down to the same two responses: Toyota and Honda as 1 and 1a.
There isn't some secret answer to find, those are just the answers. People will definitely come up with anecdotes supporting various other cars, but as these threads hit a certain mass of replies they invariably boil down to those two choices.
They are not the flashiest cars, nor the most feature rich, nor the most efficient or most powerful. But if you want to buy a car that will just keep on running after years of minimal maintenance, often even after being abused during that time, a Toyota or Honda is what you should buy.
If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don't call them the "search engine guys", that's not what they are about. They are the "mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys". Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.
All those other things didn't exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being "free" with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.
In a vacuum, sure. Biden is way older than I'd like to have in the white house. We desperately need younger politicians with fresher ideas.
But like. Let's be serious. It is just as important at this moment in history that Trump not win, and Biden has already shown he can beat Trump. That's the only important thing right now. We can figure out who runs to replace Biden after term two.
I think colloquially people have begun expanding use of the word to include anything where features or product are removed but the price stays the same.
Maybe there's a better word for that, but I understand the parallel.
Is it wrong to buy my kids "read banned books" shirts?
Joking, but only sort of. I'm so irritated that this is the world they are growing up in. That I'm going to have to have conversations with them about why people are trying to restrict what they can learn based on bigotry and why that is wrong. There are so many other things they could be worrying about, I hate that we have this as an additional and completely unnecessary distraction.
Completely understand Scholastic's move here. It's unfortunate in a vacuum but on the other hand I'm very glad they aren't simply dropping these titles entirely.
The internet.
And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.
We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".
It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.
I was never a direct manager, but I've been in on the hiring process for many candidates. Great advice, top to bottom.
When we interviewed we also liked to hear people say they'd Google it. It seems stupid but I want someone with the initiative to find the solution to a problem they've never seen.
Also the thing about ownership is key, and for us was always an indicator of someone who might want to move up later. Help desk folks who want to move up do everything they can feasibly do and offer their take on what they think the next level needs to do before escalating. If it truly needs to be handed off then it's because of permissions. But the best help desk people try to hang on to the ticket as long as they can so they can provide the most consistency to the end user.
Treatment. The word they are looking for is treatment.
I swear to god these research firms absolutely need to get ahead of how they refer to this shit publicly. People are way too dumb to just speak literally.
I think there's also something to the idea that it takes someone who is a little..."off" for them to be able to cut other people open for their job. You have to be able to dehumanize them to a certain extent.
I worked in a hospital for a few years, and the folks working in the ORs were definitely the most interesting and often most intimidating crowd, and you did NOT fuck with the surgeons, they were the kings and queens of the floor.
Things are very heated right now certainly. But there are still a lot of people (a LOT) of people who just want to live their lives and are not going to literally wage war on people in their own country.
It's not a zero percent chance but it's near zero.
This is the killer for all this shit right now as far as I'm concerned. All of it lives squarely in "huh...neat" territory. I have yet to see anything I felt was truly necessary. Until that happens, paying is a non starter for me.
Wisconsinite here.
Not having the drop boxes has been super annoying.
My wife and I both work full time, and we have little kids. Having the ability to both fill out our absentee ballots and then one of us drop it off was really really helpful for getting our ballots to a place we knew it would be counted.
Instead our options now are to mail it (which is fine but as pointed out by OP, this is not maybe the most reliable or dependable since there is not a guarantee it gets there in time or at all), or to physically bring our ballots to city hall (which we have to each find time to do separately during business hours).
I would love to have the drop boxes back.
I didn't visit reddit on purpose for two full months. I still don't have the app installed.
I have to admit though I am visiting for game threads now that the NFL has started up. Sports is non-existent on Lemmy. I'm participating in the communities for my teams, but there's like half a dozen of us in each one. It just isn't the same thing and I realized that dicking around in comment sections is a big part of how I enjoy sports these days.
They're still not getting content from me, I'm not going to use their app. But it's hard to keep completely away when there is simply nothing even closer on lemmy or anywhere else.
I happily subscribe to the New York Times. I feel it's important to support a major source of actual quality journalism and content.
Valve? Profitable at all costs? The same Valve that refuses to give sequels to games for their own IPs because they can't come up with ideas they feel are innovative enough, even though they know they would sell tens of millions of copies regardless of the quality?
The same Valve who literally gave Proton to the Linux gaming community?
That valve?
I don't know why this keeps having to be said, but companies need to defend their IP in court or they risk losing their trademarks. This does not mean companies are evil.
As for not listening to TF2 players, I'm pretty sure the game is still pretty popular so they must be doing something right.
I'm not a valve apologist. I hate that they've shifted their focus from developing games to developing their platform for many years. It's frustrating. But they did just release Alyx. And they are objectively doing some great things for the PC gaming community with the steam deck.
Last report I saw had traffic numbers to their ad space still down about 20%. That's definitely an amount they notice, though I'm sure they hope and believe it'll go back up.
I definitely do not think they are calling any of us back per se, but on he other hand the way spez talks is definitely like someone who is in denial about being dumped.
I wish to unread this
I hope you are asking that rhetorically.
But if the question is serious, its because very many people grew up with google and got really good at using it. Got dependent on the certain idiosyncrasies of how Google presents its results. Got entangled in multiple other google services that make results more relevant.
I have my entire career because I was (and am) better than a lot of people at googling things. I hate what Google has become and I do have DDG as my primary search tool on my phone now. But it's really difficult to completely jettison google search and I do still use it fairly regularly. Even though they seem insistent on making their results as trash as possible.
If anything its at least pushed me to start thinking of search engines as tools, and that regularly using more than one might be a good thing.
And they won't, because that level of precision is stupid for this application, and not required. They can't even come close to matching the quality and precision of larger auto makers, how and why would they require levels many times what those manufacturers have deemed necessary?
Classic example of an exec understanding on a high level that they have fit and finish issues with parts, and pulling a completely inane statement out of his ass to make it sound like he has any real understanding or power whatsoever to address the issue.
It's Musk, so everyone immediately knows he's full of shit. But it's a good reminder to not entirely trust CEOs when they make statements related to specific technical details because the fact of the matter is they are not engineers and for large companies they are nowhere near close enough to the design and manufacturing process to be able to make statements like this that are actually informed. It's just PR bullshit.
Solely responsible? Lol
When did we start blaming one private company for inflation? Games should cost $100 or more right now if they were increasing linearly over time.
What are you on about
A lot of things around the world were better before the Internet. And they were definitely better before smart phones reached ubiquity.
My grade school stopped allowing kids to go up for second helpings of hot lunch because of me. In 8th grade I recruited the help of quite a few classmates and managed to take down 50 chicken nuggets, 2 milks, a pile of veggies, and two dessert cakes at one lunch hour.
This performance became somewhat infamous, and I learned from a friend that they banned second helpings for the next school year in part because of that occurrence.
Still kind of proud of that one. And not sure I could manage 50 nuggets now as an adult.
Lemmy needs both content generators and content consumers. Not everyone needs to do both if that isn't what motivates them to come to the site.
I don't really love comparing to reddit because what reddit became isn't what I hope for lemmy, but to make the point... What percentage of people do you think made content on reddit? I'd guess it was a fraction of a single percent.
I'm excited for BG3 but I guess I struggle to see why it needs to be compared to TotK at all. Feels like that is selling both games a bit short. They aren't really that similar.
What is this, a Zelda side quest? Lol. I'd love to help you find the princess but I'm just so broken up over this missing F-35. If you can help me find it, I think I'll be able to remember where I saw her last. There might also be 20 rupees in it for ya. Thanks!
I'm hesitant to spin valid concerns about alcohol into de-vilification of smoking. They are both vices, both unhealthy, both dangerous to the user and those around them for different reasons.
So yeah, it's valid to say we ignore the dangers of alcohol. But also yes, we should "think of the children" when it comes to tobacco.
This was satisfying to read.
Hard to settle on just one. In no order:
Isn't there something to be said about parents just not doing cruel things to their kids? Like, this isn't even funny it's just mean. I have kids. Why would I do this to them?
I honestly don't know how much of a concern salmonella is from this. In the US at least, eggs are required to be thoroughly washed to be sold in stores. Bruising from literally hitting your kid seems like a real concern though. And the person your kid should be able to trust the most humiliating them on the Internet is absolutely a core memory forming event.
Just all around stupid.
Unless you're Waukesha, Wisconsin, where they specifically voted to stop giving kids handouts (i.e. free lunch). Because, you know, kids should work for their food or something instead of using their energy to learn.