No, you’re absolutely right. Discord is incredibly impermanent. Besides the lack of being able to search for things or split conversations into separate threads for every topic because it’s a chat tool, not a forum, as soon as a server disappears, everything hosted on that server goes as well (as far as end users are concerned. I’m sure Discord can pull stuff from their backend).
We need a return of niche forum communities and the like for the sake of the preservation of information.
You’re thinking of Gandalf Big Naturals. Easy mistake to make.
Here’s a fun one: Anemoia - nostalgia for a time you never experienced (from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
Air quality is getting worse everywhere thanks to wildfires and the like, but my point was that you don’t look at a city like NYC or Boston and see an orange haze from the smog and leaded gasoline emissions anymore.
The biggest issues with cities largely come down to cars, and having grown up in a summer beach hotspot, I can tell you that it can be just as bad out in the countryside. From noise pollution to emissions to traffic, you can largely thank cars for all of it. Road noise is actually one of the loudest things in a city. In places that have limited access to cars, you can immediately tell the difference.
The homelessness epidemic is a problem everywhere in the US. You just notice it in cities because of the population density.
Cape Cod, the famous summer vacation hotspot south of Boston, has the highest rates of drug addiction and homelessness in the entire state. The same is largely true of any vacation area, actually. They often have the highest rates in their state due to high CoL and poor job opportunities outside of low wage jobs in the tourism industry (all of which are seasonal jobs as well, meaning they close when the tourists leave).
But out of sight, out of mind.
Smog hasn’t been a problem in US cities since like the 60s…
The King James version was also written to specifically reword the Bible to include as many references to a monarchy as possible in the hopes of propagandizing the population during a time when kings were losing their heads at an alarming rate in Europe.
“If God truly does exist, he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.”
Thomas Jefferson
50% of the Founding Fathers were agnostic or atheist. My question is: why does she hate America?
In the end, possibly the one good thing to come out of Overwatch.
The whole reason that the steam engine took off was because they did the opposite. It’s the same reason that you don’t hear people complaining about the AI used to spot cancer or find stars. They changed workflow, but they didn’t negatively disrupt it. They made it easier to do more.
People hate AI the same way that they hate touch screens in cars. They actively make things more difficult. Not only are car manufacturers being required by law to bring back physical controls for things like the A/C because the lack of a physical knob or dial means that you have to take your eyes off the road to change something on a screen, the last time I was buying a car I was talking to the guy at the dealership about how I was limiting the model years I wanted to look at to those before the 16+ inch screens became common, and he said that the vast majority of people coming in had similar sentiments - the screens are just generally unpopular, especially because of how big they’ve become. They’re unwieldy, unintuitive, and require too much concentration to use when actually driving.
Google’s AI has been found to be wrong 60% of the time - even frequently making up “facts” that directly contradict the works that it cites as sources. They hate that trying to find an accurate picture of a penguin or whatever has become so difficult because image search tools are filled with AI generated images that range from slightly off to completely inaccurate. They hate that refrigerators now come with an AI assistant in them. Something like 80% of users in a study either actively disliked the AI features on their phones or said they find them useless.
The current AI trend is a Dutch Tulip bubble, or more accurately, a solution to the problem of people being paid that investors and c suites want crammed into everything in order to justify the money spent.
Medical malpractice is a huge issue for LGBT people - especially trans people who require specific care and are therefore much easier to spot. It’s honestly a big issue in the sciences in general, and it’s definitely not a new issue, but more likely against specific groups. Women are much more likely to have to be their own advocates to get proper care, often being denied pain medication, told that they’re just making up their symptoms, or having their agency denied or choice of treatment being deferred to their husbands (generally when it comes to things that might affect sex, such as surgeries to constrict the vagina after giving birth or having their uterus removed due to medical issues).
And it’s not just that trans people often have to understand HRT at a doctorate level in order to fight for their right to the proper care and treatment that they deserve. I have read plenty of stories of trans people being denied care by bigoted healthcare workers - even a case of a woman in New York who only found out she had an aggressive form of cancer after the technician who diagnosed her tests called her to ask her how her chemo was going. Her doctor simply never told her the diagnosis and the only reason that she’s still alive is because of that technician who made sure that she got proper treatment after the shock of hearing that she didn’t even know that she had cancer.
Bias affects medicine all the way up the chain, from how nurses treat you to what gets taught in schools and even what fields get research funding. I taught my therapist pretty much everything he knows about transgender people, for example - because he’s older and they didn’t teach about trans people. And I have no qualifications in the field other than being trans and therefore having to teach myself to ensure I get proper care. Many doctors don’t know about trans specific medical care despite HRT starting to be researched in the 1920s in Germany (and only reappearing at the end of the 20th century after the Nazis burnt all the research). The medical field is taught based on the white body of a specific weight, which leaves out the differences in care that black people and people above or below that weight require. We only really started looking into what exactly female ejaculate is in the past 30 years or so. AIDS research was denied funding by the US government for at least a year while roughly 120 Americans died of AIDS every day, during which time all bottled medication was pulled from stores and the safety seal was developed and implemented over the course of 3 months because somebody poisoned a couple of bottles of Advil with cyanide.
It’s not a new issue, but it’s become more prevalent in recent years as people like the student above have become emboldened by recent events - like the rulings that say that doctors don’t have to treat certain people if it would “violate their religious beliefs.”
Call it what it is: nationalism. I’ve been weirded out by it since I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in elementary school.
Fun fact: the pledge was created as part of a campaign to sell more flags to schools.
Here’s the version I have that I think is more accurate
That was the implication. Somebody’s getting a blow job on my 65th birthday, and it sure as hell isn’t gonna be me.
The average lifespan in the US has fallen 3 years in a row and is the same as the part of the UK with the worst average lifespan. With the destruction of the CDC and the removal of food safety inspections they keep attempting, I don’t think many of us will have to worry about it.
Besides, Berretas are cheap.
His speech patterns and dialogue match up surprisingly well with Jim Jones of the famous Jonestown Massacre. Once somebody like that has a following, it doesn’t matter how crazy he gets, the diehard believers will literally die hard for the guy.
The first campaign drew the cult together from a cult that was already there (a groomed voter base who will vote Republican no matter who) and the first term bonded them together against an enemy (everybody with common sense) while the Republican party and the entire media insulated them from how bad he is. There were some people who saw what he did and turned away - he got less votes this time around than he did last time, and that’s even with the questions of election interference that keep cropping up - but that just means that the people left are the crazies who would defend him even if he personally started shooting up schools.
American politics is so screwed up that most people have little clue of what exactly happens in this country. A coworker of mine just the other day was effectively saying that daddy Trump had to hurt us because big-meanie Biden ruined the government deficit.
I mean, I’d personally rather see an anime girl themed desktop than those weird statues rich people sometimes have in places like on their coffee table that are stuff like a woman in the boob + butt out pose with no limbs or head. That shit is just creepy looking. I know it’s supposed to be reminiscent of broken Greek and Roman statues, but why do they always have to be posed and objectified like porn stars? At least with the anime girl, I know that I’m talking to an otaku rather than Hannibal Lecter.
Fox News legally can’t call themselves a news station anymore because of how little of their programming is actually news. It’s always been an opinion broadcast, at best.
While true, with hand drawn animation it’s slightly different as not every frame is drawn (usually). Disney films looked so good because they were done “on the two’s” instead of the industry standard of “on the three’s” - meaning that Disney films had a drawn frame for every 2 fps instead of every 3, or 12 drawn frames per second instead of the normal 8. Your brain interpolates the rest of the between frames, but this is why Disney looks so much more smooth.
Another great example is Akira, which was done on the 1’s and 2’s. That it has 12 to 24 hand drawn frames per second makes the visual quality difference really visible when compared to other movies.