There’s another comment further up about a statistic showing that people who pirate content are more likely to spend more money on content as well compared to people who don’t pirate content. It seems that there’s a correlation between people who pirate things and people who care about the ethical treatment of creators. Stuff like people who pirate music from Spotify and then spend money to buy the music from the band on Bandcamp.

In that context, I have an even harder time caring about people pirating from the megacorps when they’re supporting creators at the same time. That’s closing in on Robin Hood style activities at that point.

Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.

The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.

But no war like the culture war, I guess.

I had a FedEx driver the other day tell me that they separate packages into multiple deliveries sometimes even though they’re all being dropped off all at once for the same reason. Cook the metrics so it looks like they’re making more deliveries in a certain timeframe.

They never said that everybody has a right to drive. The reality is that, at least in the US and similarly planned countries, cars are priced like a luxury and treated like a necessity by the powers that be. Anything that isn’t driving a car is an afterthought.

The trick is to get an entire neighborhood in on it. That way you can schedule shouting matches in the front yards of the houses neighboring the open houses as well.

Because Bluesky is centralised.

You say that like that isn’t exactly what the majority of people want. When I first left Reddit, I was trying to explain Lemmy and federated services to some friends and one of them immediately replied with “why would you want that?” And this was from a guy who owned and operated his own TeamSpeak server just for his friends to use.

The average person wants a service that’s easy to use first and foremost, and that is always going to be easier to do with a big centralized one owned and operated by a large company. They just want to be able to make an account and connect with friends and content. They don’t care about things like privacy until it actively harms them.

Try Etsy. There’s a whole community about making these things, and I bet they’re on Etsy.

Do you have a general practitioner that you see for an annual physical or anything? Ask them about it. I had a weird skin condition thing happening in one specific spot on my body that I asked my doctor about, and he pulled up a big medical directory on the computer and cross-referenced symptoms and stuff through it. Eventually, we were both like, “It’s not cancer or anything, but damned if I know exactly what it is.” And he asked me if I wanted a referral to a specialist to get it checked out. These kinds of things are exactly what they’re here for. They can probably recommend things like what to eat and things to avoid for prostate health, and even order tests to get it checked out if you and they feel it’s necessary.

As others have said, talk to your doctor, but I’m pretty sure that doctors use ultrasonic vibrations to break up that sort of stuff, so I think you’re gonna need something stronger than a vibrator if you’re worried about it.

They also said at one point that these guys were “corrupting the youth with their long hair.”

What I meant by generational line wasn’t genetics, but location and culture. Many European countries wouldn’t make the top 10 list for the biggest states in the US. If you look at a map of the US, Maine is about the same size as Portugal. The distance from Rome to Brussels, for example, is about 100 miles less than Boston to Altanta. So if you live in southern France, and your parents moved there from northern France, that’s like moving from one end of a state to the other. An American visiting family across the country would be like if you went to visit relatives in Latvia or something (in terms of distance). Americans have such a different sense of scale when it comes to distance. And then you add in the amount of immigration that the US has (or at least had historically), and you get very diverse groups that, while they are American, may be first-generation Americans whose grandparents still live across the world in different countries. I myself am 100% American, but like 50% French and 45% Portugese due to my grandparents being immigrants on both sides.

The culture here is weird as well, because it’s both homogeneous and not at the same time, and I think that massive scale of distance plays a part in that. Because you could listen to somebody from Boston, NYC, London, and somebody with a southern drawl, and you’d swear that they’re all from different countries despite everybody speaking English because of the difference in dialect/accent. Oddly enough, I took French in school from a Belgian immigrant, so if I still spoke it, I’d have a bit of a Belgian accent (enough that people picked up on it in Montreal and Paris when I was a kid, at least), and I’d say the difference between Boston English and New York English is about the same as Belgian French to Parisian French, while a Boston accent to a Southern drawl is more like Quebecois French to European French. The distance from Brussels to Paris is less than from Boston to NYC. And the same goes for culture. We all eat Mac and Cheese, but Cajun food is specific to a “small” area of the southern US because the spices and ingredients simply don’t grow in other parts of the US. And then you add in stuff like immigrant owned restaurants, and it gets even more varied. And as you go across the country, you can see stuff like massive architectural differences in the way houses are built. New England houses largely look like houses from the UK (with the occasional Slavic style house popping up here and there in my experience), while the south and the west have very different styles. And the reason that New England wouldn’t look out of place in Europe is because the culture there is very much influenced by those European roots. When people immigrated here, they brought their culture with them, and many settled into little enclaves of fellow immigrants from their country. Everybody speaks English, but you know when you’re in an Italian neighborhood in NYC or an Irish neighborhood in Boston. Many places are starting to put both Spanish and English on things like road signs (especially in the south near Mexico), but I’ve seen cities where roads are marked in both English and Chinese due to the large amount of Chinese immigrants to those cities.

The US is such a weird situation as a country that I don’t think there’s anything you can compare it to. It’s like that 10 year period in Japanese history where they went from feudal fiefdoms to a countrywide rail network, electricity, and an army armed with gatling guns supplied by the US. There’s no real frame of reference to draw parallels to.

On the one hand, as a country of immigrants, there are tons of places where communities settled and brought their culture with them and so have a strong feeling of connection to their ancestry despite their culture today being completely different. The French Quarter of New Orleans comes to mind. On the other hand, we also kinda traded tradition for consumerism. We lack a real sense of history and culture of our own, making it easy to connect more with our hereditary culture than our country’s.

You can also add to this the ease modern technology has brought in communicating with people across the globe. Americans are probably more likely than just about any other country to have distant family connections in other countries that they are in contact with. If you’re French, you probably come from a generational line of French people who lived not far from you (relatively speaking). By comparison, as a kid, me and my parents went on vacation once to spend a week with some distant relatives of ours in Scotland because we have connections to a specific family castle there.

Hostages are taken from their homes or jobs with the express intent to threaten their lives, and exchange them for a political outcome.

While this describes them perfectly.

Ada is the admin of blahaj, not a part of the mod team for 196. She has final say on anything that is on the instance but isn’t directly involved in 196.

The reason for the move hasn’t really been clear. The mods were vague when they announced the move, effective immediately, and the most common theory I saw was about a certain person who uses neopronouns and an event where Ada stepped in to use her power as admin to overrule the mods of 196. The mods of 196 have since clarified with a vague statement about how they don’t like how Ada handles moderation across the instance (banning trolls more on a “vibe check” than hard rules or something? I don’t really know) and praise for .world’s instance level rules regarding things like trolls and harassment.

The community was blindsided by this, as 196 was locked and moved within hours of the announcement; and they largely voiced disagreement with the decision it seems. In response, I believe some member of the community created onehundredninetysix to keep the community on blahaj, and Ada herself is currently the only mod of the community, though she’s looking for people to take it over.

I think Gaijin also causes this with how they “artificially balance” vehicles based on vague or basically made-up sources and ignore direct sources when it pleases them. Look at the current fiasco going on with their new $60 tank that can’t even get smoke grenades for the launcher that’s literally on the model for a perfect example.

Or, that time they refused to buff a WW2 tank and called the Wikipedia article a classified document.

It really depends on where you live and the kinds of bins you have. I keep my bins in my garage because we get snow (used to get snow? Climate change and all that), and there are times when I can smell even just the normal household garbage inside the house. I also live in a duplex, so my entire downstairs is a single large room with a kitchenette off of it, meaning that when the garbage cans stink, they stink up the entire downstairs of the house.

I think the cans the town uses just don’t have a great seal on them, as I’ve heard other people complain about similar issues with the smell, and my parents even have a separate small can they keep outside specifically for their dog poop that they toss into the actual garbage right as they take it out to the curb so it doesn’t stink up their house.

Luckily, I’ve never had the issue of people tossing their poop into my cans, but I’ve heard tons of people complain about it. People not picking up after their dogs at all, however…that’s a different story that’s so bad around my neighborhood that multiple people have installed signs about it.

I surely don’t know what you mean. They’re to keep the raccoons out! That’s why they’re on a piece of velcro, so they’re removable!

Sarcasm aside, absolutely. Even if you wouldn’t get in trouble for people hurting themselves by going into your bins, you could probably get in trouble for messing with town property or something. It’s just the kind of thing I immediately think of after growing up with stories of “Let me take care of that for you” about a guy who’s probably doing 30 to life for prostitution and selling heroin/whatever else the Hell’s Angels get up to.

Oftentimes, these kinds of people don’t bother to check if the bins have already been picked up or not, so you get a bin that smells like dog shit for the next week.

Your friend sounds very creative, I’d personally go for gluing a piece of velcro to the inside lip of the handle with razor blades on it. Of course, I’m also not an engineer, just somebody whose grandfather was friends with the #2 Hell’s Angel for a state who would ask if he wanted him to “take care of” problems like that. The old razor blades and broken glass in the root ball trick worked wonders when somebody was repeatedly stealing the shrubs out of my grandfather’s pots.

Many people do this after the bins have already been emptied, meaning that for the next week, you have to deal with a bin that smells like dog shit.