This reminds me of a story about a French ship that landed someplace, and a native of the area walked down the beach and greeted them, saying “Bonjour.” Shocked that the locals spoke perfect French, the sailors asked “Parlez-vous francais??” and the local, confusedly asked “what did you say?” in the local language.
As it turns out, both the local language and French had apparently arrived at more or less the exact same word for a greeting by pure coincidence.
Don’t worry, they want to replace your hardware with a “cloud based computing solution” as well.
When did that absurdity come back? I thought we killed the cloud computer nonsense a decade ago.
“If God truly does exist, then he more so loves the atheist who questions the world around him than the Christian who blindly follows.” -Thomas Jefferson
More than half of the Founding Fathers were atheists or agnostic.
We knew this. Economists were shouting it over and over during COVID, when this productivity boom started as much of the world began working from home.
Microsoft said that people working from home would never work before COVID, and then they saw a massive boost in performance when people did. To the point where they eventually had to openly admit it. Before demanding people return to the offices as soon as they could.
The only people who refuse to listen are C Suite execs, middle managers, and people with a stake in commercial property.
By 2003, I believe EA and Microsoft had also implemented CD Keys with a limited number of uses, usually 5 or so. If they hadn’t by then, it would be by 2010 at the absolute latest.
The war on secondhand sales of games and software had been going on since CD Keys themselves were introduced in the 90s, and probably in some other format in the 80s that I’m not aware of. Digital marketplaces were just the next logical step in the fight and the carrot of convenience for people to sacrifice their sense of ownership.
I think this is why Steam is well-loved today and why people say that they keep winning by doing nothing. When Steam came out, everybody hated it. You gave up ownership of your games and the online aspect was obnoxious with early 2000s internet. But they continued to add features of convenience - friends lists, achievements, stable servers for all kinds of games (like indie games), modding support and tools, the ability to download patches in the background, a user score/review system, frequent sales, etc. And now, Steam has so many features that it’s become a positive feature for a game in people’s minds while so much of the competition only has the lack of ownership and forcing people to download their launcher to offer.
Part of the issue for industry in the US as well is that we also generally lack a lot of important manufacturing resources. We get something like 65% of our aluminum from Canada. When the tariffs were first going into effect and Trump was throwing a tantrum about Canada, the auto industry declared that they would be shutting down factories within a couple of months if the tariffs went into effect because they wouldn’t be able to afford the aluminum to continue production in the country.
This is making some heavy assumptions about what the average MAGAT knows about Jesus. As far as most of them are concerned, Jesus’ favorite gun would be an AR-15.
For them, the Bible is merely a thick paper tweet to be used to smack anybody who disagrees with them like a cartoon character smacking a dog with the newspaper.
When was the last time an American was held responsible for a war crime?
In my lifetime, we’ve been doing them since Bush Jr was in office, and I’ve never heard of a single one.
This got me thinking: How is this any different from the ending of the books?
Harry becomes a magic-cop and goes on to uphold the draconian institutions that enforce goblin slavery and Muggle oppression/classism.
Por qué no los dos?
Opt out on one account, use another as poison. If you’re gonna do this, I’d say move all your code to a new account and use the older account to poison - that way they can’t filter the bad out by account age.
You did say that it wasn’t useless if you and your kid both use the same system, so my first thought for how it could be useful in any capacity outside of adhering to a law, which in the US at least (I’m not as well versed in the Brazilian, UK, or other variations) has in some versions very explicitly stated that the intent is for the OS to provide said age information to any app that requests it, was for group permissions on the different accounts on your system, which can just as easily be set up using other settings already available to you. I would consider that “protecting kids.” If you meant that it was useful in some other way where you and your kid are using the same system, by all means, tell me.
As I said, I brought up the rest because that is the explicitly stated or easily inferred (in the case of increased fingerprinting of users for increased revenue) intent of the US versions of the law and “protect the children” is the tired old excuse being used by Facebook and the politicians in their employ.
Obviously, the data field equivalent of clicking the “I am 18 years or older” button is as non-invasive as you can really get, but it’s blatantly obvious that this is merely the first step in what the corporations and governments actually want out of this, and adhering to it before the laws are even out merely sets the stage for them to refine their language and push further. Something this easy could be rolled out at any time. There’s no need to comply before they have a leg to stand on. They won’t be satisfied by this, and they certainly won’t stop here.
Don’t forget the personalized ads! 🫠
And how is it useful then? Parental controls have existed for decades and you never had to give your age to Facebook, who is the main proponent of these laws in the US and has poured millions of dollars into their creation.
This isn’t about protecting kids. It’s about adding an additional fingerprint companies and governments can use to track and identify you and what you do with your system.
It would be weird for the Marxist instance to have entire communities dedicated to saying how bad socialists are, that’s what Hexbear is for.
But, that’s also why memes.ml is here, right? When people aren’t making fun of liberals (rightly so) or calling all Americans Nazis or something, you gotta make fun of the wrong kinds of socialists for not seeing the truth. Otherwise, what kind of content would be left?
This is the sort of behavior that I’m talking about, but with the term “liberals” being thrown at any leftists whose flavor of socialism you personally disagree with. Like a bunch of Christian denominations all claiming that they speak the truth and all the others are heretics and liars.
It’s all too common in leftist spaces because we can’t get over the minor (and not so minor) differences in our theory/philosophy to stay focused on our shared opposition of fascism long enough to act on it, while fascists naturally cooperate because it’s easy to do when you don’t believe in anything other than hate and whatever you’re told to believe.
I didn’t mean that as a literal quote but as sarcastic air quotes to evoke the exact imagery that you came up with. Although, I have actually seen a Hexbear or (what’s the other one, Beehaw?) user use that phrase. Of course, they also said that only capitalist pigs die in China, so it’s hard to tell if they were serious or if it was full commitment to the bit. That part of Lemmy is fairly indistinguishable from a leftist version of 4chan.
Like I said in another comment, ML has an issue common to many leftist communities in that old saying of “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” And that can manifest as behaving like more moderate leftists (not liberals - actual leftists) may as well be centrists or conservatives, or treating Europe as being just as bad as Trump’s regime. Purity tests and trolling rather than the mutual cooperation that Cowbee posted.
I guess? I don’t think I’ve ever really stayed in a memes community where that’s the case, though on Reddit I was largely in places like egg_irl and traaa, where everything was focused around a shared experience of a minority group.
Besides, it’s not just the memes community, the memes is just where it appears the most blatantly and loudly. As the person above me said, it’s an instance wide thing. ML is nowhere near as bad as Hexbear (or I have yet to see any targeted harassment campaigns against an instance for failing a purity vibe check come from ML, at least) but, as they say, “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” Leftist spaces tend to have a bit of an undercurrent of only being welcoming to the “right kind of leftist.” I used “decadent West” up there very purposefully. There’s a bit of a vibe to ML that’s less “uniting various leftist groups” and more “preaching The Good Word to those poor ignorants” proselytizing.
Every time I see Cowbee in a thread like this, it’s like I walked into a restaurant to see someone trying to explain to somebody else why their friend who just spat in their food is actually a cool dude doing great solidarity because the owners of the restaurant treat their employees poorly.
ML in my experience has very little to do with engaging with leftists and more to do with bashing the “decadent West.” Anytime I see memes.ml pop up in my feed, it’s a 50/50 shot between me finding something funny or something that makes me debate blocking the instance as much as I can at an account level.
TIL, I thought it was intentional from the start.
Don’t forget the number of places named Springfield. A quick search pulls up an article that puts the number at at least 30 different places in the US.