It probably has to do with strict character limits and the habit spreading. Twitter is only, what, 156 characters? I know text messages used to be something similar, and early on, they cost around 3 cents a letter and you had to hit the numbers multiple times to cycle through to the letter or punctuation that you wanted. It’s where stuff like l33t speak came from, at least.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

But according to the story, he was buying at full price. No bulk discount. Jim was demanding more than his regular price. And, depending on when in the day he showed up, the price that Jim demanded fluctuated.

There’s gotta be more to this.

The issue here is that kids are being expected to grow up younger and younger. Get a 40 hour a week job at 14 during the summer, and work after school the rest of the year. If you’re not working, you should be doing something that’ll look good on a college resume, like school sports or volunteer work. There’s no room for teenagers to just be teenagers in capitalism anymore.

I mean, Millennials in the US showed the same stress coping mechanisms in high school as active duty military personnel (our gallows humor being one I specifically remember being cited as similar to the sense of humor of survivors from foxholes), and that was in the late 2000s. I think there’s a lot more to it than just social media access.

From the increased awareness of worldwide events through smartphones (combined with the 24-hour tragedy news cycle) to the increasing downward pressure on kids to grow up at younger and younger ages and the active removal of third places and public spaces where kids can just meet up in person, there’s a lot of things that all make me look at these graphs and go “no shit Sherlock.”

Toxic social media usage is just one, and it’s partly exacerbated by some of the others.

It’s not about what humans “like,” it’s about the human bodies’ internal operating temperature and using that as a reference point, the same way that Celsius is about the states of matter of water . Fahrenheit is useful in medicine for that reason, while Celsius is useful anytime a comparison to water is helpful, and beyond that, it’s really just whatever you grew up with. Using a system based on what water “likes” is equally as useless unless you grew up using it as your reference point for temperature in your daily life. Neither 75 Fahrenheit or 23.8889 Celsius tell me whether or not I’m going to need a jacket today unless I’ve already experienced said temperature and use that scale in my daily life.

And similarly, Fahrenheit seems to be tied to the internal temperature of the human body, with 100 degrees being the maximum that the average person can handle before their organs start to be damaged.

I think it also had to do with the fact that they’re bottom feeders, as most fish spoil fairly quickly without proper care (though some are definitely worse than others - I think shark starts going bad literally as soon as the shark dies).

Like your second point, many bottom feeders are more likely to have parasites and, therefore, probably built up a reputation as being unfit for eating (though lobsters don’t have any parasites that I’m aware of).

I think (I hope) by overnight revolution, they mean the tipping point from civil unrest into actual change. It took a decade of protesting for Civil Rights to get popular support, but the law was drafted, written, and signed in less than a week due to the destruction wrought across the country after MLK was assassinated.

I don’t disagree, but I think the attitude comes from exhaustion at the Democrats spending 50 years meeting Republicans in the middle and telling more left leaning groups that their desires aren’t as important or that they’re at fault for Democrats losing because they scared off some mythical right leaning centrist who would have otherwise voted for the Democrats.

Plus, I’m not convinced that a large part of the not voting bloc that you hear online isn’t actually just a disenfranchisement campaign.

I’m reminded of a comment I saw once where somebody was saying how when they were young, they were told that AI would do the miserable jobs so that people would have more time to make art and poetry, while today the AI makes art and poetry so that we can work longer hours at the miserable jobs.

And the AI bros say that this is just a necessary step towards automating away the crappy jobs, but it’s not like they’ll stop automating everything else if/when AI reaches that point. The AI will still continue to automate away the hyman experience of art and culture for the rich. They’re not going to suddenly decide to implement Luxury Gay Space Communism at that point. They’ll just cram everybody into Kow Loon style ghettos.

If you wanna see more, this guy has a YouTube channel all about his work with lions, cheetahs, hyenas, jaguars, etc. It’s called The Lion Whisperer.

So the way Tumblr works is that your account is basically a blog, with your home page on the site being populated with posts from the accounts that you follow. You can reblog posts onto your own account and comment on them to create individual conversation threads like this one. At one point, there was a bug in the edit post system that let you edit the entirety of a post when you reblogged it, including what other people had said previously, and even the original post. This would only affect your specific reblog of it, of course, but you could edit a post to say something completely different from the original and create a completely unrelated comment chain.

I’m curious how this correlates to things like counties with vacation hotspots and the like, as Cape Cod is marked as less than 10% but I know for a fact that that county has the highest rates of drug addiction and homelessness in the state and I can only conclude that that isn’t really showing because of how much of the county is vacation homes and how the average working poor are outpriced from the area.

The question is whether or not Tumblr users would want such a thing.

I feel like the same thing will happen like when WordPress introduced a (bad) TikTok/streaming clone called Tumblr Live. I think less than 10% of the userbase ever interacted with it, most of the community openly hated it, and the people who did use it largely didn’t use Tumblr themselves.

I could see Tumblr users actively finding a way to defederate their blogs from everything Fediverse related.

This smells to me like WordPress reducing their workload more than anything since they own Tumblr (unless maybe there’s some sort of financial incentive to increasing the number of WordPress blogs?).

But also, considering that at one point in Tumblr’s history, you could edit other people’s posts, maybe it is an improvement.

That’s…literally how hardkill APS works. CIWS takes the same approach but uses a rotary cannon instead. The issue ain’t putting a missile in the path of the other missile. It’s in having enough time to do so. This is why the US concluded that the most effective way to intercept an ICBM is to destroy it before it finishes its acceleration stages. Ballistics is a known quantity.

Still aren’t convincing that you know what the hell you’re talking about.

Tell me you don’t know what you’re talking about without telling me.

You don’t need to hit the bullet with a bullet. You just hit it with a shotgun blast or grenade, either destroying it outright or blowing it off course enough that it loses its energy and becomes ineffective. We literally do this all the time on tanks and humvees. It’s called a hardkill APS. The Russians had one working in the 70s. Modern ones are capable of detecting incoming tank rounds moving between 700-1700m/s, identifying which will hit the vehicle, and blowing them out of the air once they reach 10-15 meters away. All in a span of nanoseconds. It’s standard equipment on Israel’s MBT, and Germany, the US, and the UK have all field tested various systems and are considering making hardkill systems standard for the next generation of tanks and IFVs. Multiple companies across multiple countries make them for upgrade kits. Germany already produces vehicles with standard hardkill APS for their export market.

This isn’t crazy sci-fi technology. It’s just rocket science.

This is an extremist take on a correct conclusion. Just like how “vote with your wallet” and “no ethical consumption under capitalism” can co-exist, so can the idea that there are people in these jobs who simply don’t care about the harm as well as people who do but don’t have the power to do anything about it - even something as simple as changing jobs.

An easy example is the people left at Twitter. When employees started quitting in droves after Musk started tearing the company apart, I saw people quickly theorizing that the people still working there fell into 2 groups: those who were morally bankrupt enough not to care, and those on work visas who couldn’t quit because they risked being deported.

The majority of these companies are based in the US, where workers’ rights and protections are often tenuous at best. Whistleblowers have almost no protections and, more often than not, end up serving years or even lifetime sentences in federal jails for their efforts. In most states, it is completely legal for companies to fire you for whatever reason they feel like, and even if you get severance, it can take years of legal battles to get what you’re owed. Add to that how long it can take to find a new job (the average time in the video game industry is 2 months), and it’s easy to see how that can quickly spiral into putting people into a dangerous financial situation for daring to speak out.

It’s easy to lay the blame at other people’s feet, but just like saying, “Well, just don’t use their products then,” it’s never that simple.

“No ethical consumption under capitalism” is the new “just following orders.” If you can afford the product, you can afford to buy something more ethical.