IMO, it should be 16. It should be the earliest age that you can work in a traditional job, or begin service in one’s armed forces. Many right-wing people hate this idea because young people are very left-leaning, but it is unfair to expect someone to contribute to a society that bans them from having a say in its outcome.

The Gordon Ramsay anecdote is actually really good, in that in my experience VC’s get a LOT of say in what your business ultimately becomes.

I worked with someone that was, in all fairness, absolutely clueless about what they wanted, and wanted some VC alongside their rich parents money. The VC took a huge chunk of the business, and ultimately their business launched as something that was completely different to what they thought it would be - because that’s what the VC believed would give them some return. The business went bust in less than a year and launched for maybe 2 months?

Much like how Ramsay says “your Jamaican restaurant is shit, I’ve remade it into an Italian restaurant because there aren’t any nearby”, taking a lot of VC money almost certainly means they’ll want an equivalent say in your business. It’s not free money, and it absolutely fucks a lot of people up when they take that money and realise that their dream isn’t theirs any more.

The point is that some VP probably pushed for the use of AI, and a director and senior manager chasing promotion decided to deliver it, despite there being no clear use for customers.

A lot of people see it as needlessly dragging a conflict on, but NATO (probably) knows what it’s doing, and has had plans for scenarios like this for years. Russian escalation in the region isn’t exactly new, and it’s the sort of campaign that NATO as a group will define its legitimacy on.

I’m sure that if both sides wanted to hurt the other they’d do so, NATO especially so - but to both sides it’s ultimately a game. NATO will flirt with weapons, and Russia will throw citizens at the problem and use grief/loss to restore the “fatherland”. It’s why I don’t see an end to the conflict for as long as Putin is in power.

I am extremely introverted, but working as a software engineer in a consultancy where the owner wanted engineers to be on the end of phones for clients was in many ways a godsend. The secret of calls is that everyone also hates it. The secret of eye contact is that the other person hates it too, so just do it enough to show that you’ve tried and that’s the acceptable norm.

You will never be able to block them from viewing stuff they want to see. They’ll either do it through their friends devices, on other WiFi connections, or at school where networks are hilariously open or easy to bypass.

The best thing, and frankly the only thing you can do as a parent is to be engaged with them. Make them think critically on subjects, and if something they parrot back is nonsense, call them out on it. Cast that seed of doubt in their mind. If they choose to continue to watch stupid shit, that’s their choice, and it’s only worth stepping in if it’s actively dangerous.

Don’t just get a second opinion. Call your doctor and tell them that you do not want to see that doctor any more.

Doctors don’t care if someone gets a second opinion. They do care if someone opts out of their care because their co-workers or doctors elsewhere provide better care.

I put Franks Red Hot on pizza all the time. It’s no problem.

Pizza isn’t owned by the Italians anyway. Many variants are decidedly American anyway, so it would be like a French person complaining about how the British cook a roast dinner.

Another reason is because it’s easier to close/change bus routes as opposed to doing the same on roads, so it’s a bigger job for Google to keep on top of. They struggle enough with roads, so closed bridges, paths, and parks can be a total nightmare - especially when councils or towns “forget” to update.

Chrono Trigger, without question.

One thing I truly miss from the Winamp days of piracy was the live feeds. Anime, porn, music, some great adventures discovered from just browsing. It’s how I discovered Deftones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sindee Coxx.

In my opinion, country-based immigration paired with needs-based works really well.

Ultimately, many of the best parts of the culture of a place are because of what people brought with them years ago. Some of the best restaurants are because someone in India moved to the UK, and then moved to the US and brought the culture of Curry Mile or Brick Lane with them, or because a community of Greek railroad workers decided to set up bakeries using their known recipes that all the locals love.

The same often goes for business. Look at the rise of Aldi and Lidl, and how cheap produce and great workers rights will suddenly make local supermarkets look in bewilderment at how markets they once dominated are being torn away from them.

IMO, if you have skills to offer, you should be welcome. I’m currently in the process of moving to the US on a high-skilled visa, and it is mad how one country will require thousands in legal fees and 24+ month waits while a country next door will say “Shit, you can teach?! Come join us! If you want to stay permanently that’s fine!”

America will never put an ex-president in jail.

I don’t like weed. I’ve tried it throughout my teens, but left it there.

With that said, it’s amazing to me that we’re still having the same conversations around drugs. Decriminalise EVERYTHING! Ensure what is on the market is clean, drive the costs down to remove criminals from the market, and dedicate every police force to protecting those on the bottom rung of the drug ladder.

I read a book from a former officer a while back, where he’d spent two years working on infiltrating a drug network. It was successful, and they not only shut down a major network of drugs, but arrested around 100 people, and removed tons of illegal weapons from the market, and arrested several people in the network known to police for being involved in several murders. They believed that the drug market in the UK during this time had been disrupted “for three hours”. That was all it took for another gang to take over, and apparently it’s those successes that cause a lot of people to leave drug enforcement - after all, what’s the point?

There almost seems to be zero benefit to drug criminalisation, other than “old conservatives hate it”.

Who is still giving this man money?

Japan are not world-class. They’re a solid team, but despite being ranked in the top 20 they’re probably still considered weaker than many of the teams below them.

With that said, I always have a soft spot for countries that push players that play domestic football outside of Europe and in their own country. I’ve been on a Japan kick since Yu Hirakawa joined Bristol City on loan.

Amazing band, and lovely people too. I saw them in Bristol about 5-6 years ago, and met them after their show. I told them that I owe them my Computer Science degree since they’re basically my study playlist, and apparently they get that from fans often.

Numberwang

Be that as it may, the man has influence and it would be incredibly foolish to discount this because he’s a fucking moron. Sadly, the world is full of extremely incompetent billionaires, and they hold a shocking amount of influence over the world, whether it’s through collusion on layoffs, enforcing RTO in tandem, cutting green initiatives within a month of each other, etc.

Several reasons:

• Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
• Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
• The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
• Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.

Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?