That’s how you end up washing your earphones

Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.

Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.

Fred’s absolutely a setup to have Brent Spiner appear as SOMEONE in some episode.

And given Season 3 of Picard, it might even be Data, with his new hybrid with-bits-of-Lore personality.

But it could be a human Soong too, or another Soong-type android (I absolutely hate they call them “synths”, all I hear is Fallout references.)

Edit: It just really stood out to me there was a line referencing that Fred might have “a family”.

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

I second this. I’m a very light sleeper and earplugs filter out most of the small sounds so I am not awakened by them.

I’m skeptical too.

Lots of software is designed so the delete button just flags an entry so it doesn’t show to low privilege users on the front end, while the data persists in the database where database admins and the like can still access it.

Online it’s wise to assume every website acts like this if you don’t actually run the site yourself with full admin access to the underlying web server and database . Once what you write gets on a site it is permanently out of your control in most cases.

Aren’t there, in blind cave species where there’s no pressure to select for coloring to protect from the sun or to camouflage or display for mates?

Then science better get going on artificial, external wombs. A lot of people would be overjoyed to be able to have kids without the physical risk of pregnancy, and the technology seems like it’d be mandatory for true colonization efforts

That’s a really good point. There were individual trolls and general cruel maladjusted scum, but they hadn’t yet been courted or manipulated by political orgs and fed collective marching orders to sow discord.

See, your assertion rings as false for me, because as an American I’ve definitely run into things with my debit card where the problem was that the transaction was being treated as a check in the background, which meant it takes up to 3 business days to get through the check clearinghouse (even if you paid with your debit card and not a physical check), and during that period, that pending transaction doesn’t even appear on your online statement. (In modern days, Venmo is bad about this, but in the past it was random places that could do it to you.) So if you didn’t keep the mental tally of transactions and didn’t have much money, it was very easy to forget an invisible pending thing and accidentally overdraft.

And, obviously, credit cards don’t do the check clearinghouse thing, that’s a debit card thing.

Given the things fucking up the gears is the check-style old-timey clearinghouse shit going on in the background, I fail to see how making the card/transaction even MORE “debit-y” would fix it.

So you, or me, or perhaps both of us, don’t understand some significant differences in how your country processes debit transactions behind the scenes compared to mine.

Maybe you should elaborate how debit works in your country?

Uh, well…I grew up in a technologically-backward household. So the tech I grew up with was behind the times, even then.

Examples: in the 1980s/1990s, my household didn’t have a basic answering machine, when everyone else did. And our telephone was still the old rented-from-ma-bell rotary phone where you stuck your fingers in the holes and rotated the dial. Modern landline phones in the 90s were NOT rotary, and some were even wireless (the handset talking to the wired receiver on the wall attached to the landline). I think the rotary one we had probably dated to somewhere between the 50s-70s. Everyone else I knew had ordinary buttons on their (landline) phones, we were the only ones I knew with a rotary phone.

We absolutely didn’t have a computer. We didn’t even use the TV we had, it was banned.

My very first exposure to COMPUTERS was therefore at school. School had the big-floppy (that were actually floppy) type, the 5.25" ones OP mentions, and school also had the ones that used the smaller floppy disks.

But my first exposure to computers-for-fun were neighbor’s computers. One neighbor, a grandpa like guy who I think at some point worked trades but was retired (maybe disability), showed me how to make holiday cards on his computer. Like, dot matrix printer type of graphics, very very basic. Thinking back, I vaguely remember the command line, so I think it was a Windows DOS computer we used.

And another friend, a boy 5 years younger than me, had DOS computer at home, so we’d play things like Commander Keen and Lemmings. Since there was no Windows GUI yet, we had to use the command line to launch the game executable. This was like 1993, I think?

I also had a different friend and she had an Apple computer, and I remember King’s Quest.

The town library had computers too, and I played Oregon Trail and the first Sim City on it, before these computers had internet on them.

Later, by middle/high school though, the internet was taking off. And I was an ‘early adopter’ of that because I was a nerd and used it to find other nerds, and I would go to the library and basically do the then-equivalent of social media–individual niche message boards and email groups for my fandoms and interests–before I had a computer of my own. Those were usually Windows 98 or Windows 95 machines. I was even running a message board and website before I had a home computer or my own home internet, using library and the local community college computers to teach myself. It just sucked I couldn’t do it at home.

Oh, and most teens used AOL to chat, although MSN and Yahoo messenger apps also had their crowds. And ICQ existed too and was very popular, although more with the nerdy niche-topic crowd.

Finally, at 18 in 2001, I got my own computer, and that was Windows ME (a SONY VAIO) with one of the early flat-screen LCD monitors which was super fancy for the time. A few years later I upgraded it to Windows XP.

But I didn’t like that it was a propitiatory type that wasn’t easy to upgrade. I was trying to play WoW with friends and doing Wrath-era Naxx would cause my FPS to become utter dogshit because the integrated graphics and the shitty amount of RAM couldn’t handle it. It was a joke in the guild, me disconnecting in fights and my DPS being so spiky. So I eventually did away with that first computer because its poor performance would make me gamer-rage, haha. The first computer I BUILT myself in the early 2000s to replace it had an AMD cpu. I don’t remember what video card I chose, but ANYTHING was an upgrade over the previous computer, lol. And I got a lot more RAM, upgraded from MBs to GBs.

But anyway, since then I’ve mainly had desktops I’ve built myself, although recently I got a backup laptop. It came in unexpectedly useful when I broke my foot and couldn’t sit at my desktop without it swelling to high heaven, so while I still prefer a desktop, I give that laptop some grudging respect, lol. It saved my sanity.

The rate of improvement in computers has massively slowed down, it’s stabilized, so I’m not as interested in continually upgrading as I used to be. Phones and tablets are the thing that took over in the “rapidly changing” niche…but I have something of a phone-phobia, and as a writer can’t write effectively on a tablet, so I’m not much interested in phones and tablets from a tech perspective. They’re underpowered and/or expose me to phone convos which I hate and avoid whenever possible.

Utility locators.

Everytime someone digs a hole, whether to install a fence post or dig a basement, existing utilities have to be located so they don’t get hit. Its needed literally everywhere rural or city, and very understaffed.

But its long hours and outdoors. Less taxing than other trades though, and women can do it as it doesn’t require much physical strength.

As far as I’m given to understand from folks who are Russian (but got out of Russia) or Ukrainian, this fellow would more be a change from one strongman to another if he replaced Putin. Apparently his Livejournal has him saying some nasty stuff he hasn’t repudiated. (Unfortunately, I don’t speak or read Russian so I can’t examine the sources myself very well, and machine translation doesn’t bring cultural nuance or context.) (Also, as funny as it sounds to people who remember Livejournal as the first English-speaking major social media for fandom, Livejournal has been the place for years for Russian intellectuals and politicians to say their bit, so it has a different cultural context in Russia than it does elsewhere where it was mainly used for fandom drama.)

It’s been strangely fascinating watching as western media tries to hold him up as some hope, when as far as I can tell when I stop to listen to actual Ukranians or Russians with better cultural knowledge on how Russia works than most western commentators, there’s basically minimal hope he’ll be anything close to a (good) Western-style leader and if he gets into power. (it gets swept under the rug in the west that Russian culture is NOT western european culture and things that are a “given” in European and other western cultures actually are not necessarily established culturally in Russia.)

As far as I understand it, it’ll just be exchanging one dude who’s done obviously terrible things (Putin) for another who probably’s not going to be all that different, and will just do his own brand of bad things. I think perhaps people just hope he’ll be a stable asshole, as opposed to an unstable one as Putin’s become.

Or maybe they just like a scapegoat narrative–it has been fascinating to me that he voluntarily returned to Russia, and it really reminds me that people who aren’t necessarily good can still show courage, and shape narratives that way in their favor. I suspect his actions have motivations underneath that I don’t understand because I don’t understand Russian strongman culture. And I suspect other people interpret his actions through a western lens, without understanding there’s cultural nuance going on that doesn’t align with how a western viewpoint might interpret something, and that’s why western media keeps talking about him so breathlessly.

Someone I read pointed out that in the real world, people are actually largely ok with monarchies and authoritarian rulers so long as the ruler at the top keeps things stable enough for business to be conducted. Ideals like democracy fall by the wayside in light of pragmatism when a nation state is unstable–people crave stability over all, over democracy even, regardless of what method of governance brings it. They will flock to authoritarianism if it promises stability.

And in Russia, the early 90s in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR brought a great deal of instability and hardship along with its “democracy”, so there’s not necessarily a positive feeling towards it as there is in more-functional western nations where it’s been working more or less for decades, as people who lived through the 90s in Russia associate the concept with hardship, not stability. Basically, a good concept implemented like crap can poison the concept in people’s minds for the rest of their life.

So I suspect if Putin is ever ousted, whoever replaces him (whether this guy or another) will be there because people think he can bring stability, not because the successor will actually be a good leader (from a western perspective).

But it’s all operating on a lower level of the “hierarchy of needs” than most people in western countries understand–more concern with base survival, less with being able to flower and thrive. So things might stabilize, but it might still be very bad for people, especially minorities, in Russia, and bad for smaller states if this guy gets into power but also turns his eye to conquering or dominating them in order to garner support.

Anyway. I find it interesting this guy hasn’t yet been executed. Instead they (supposedly) shuffle him off elsewhere. If you were Putin, why not kill him? Must be things going on behind the scenes that we don’t see, or understand, things concerning enough that Putin thinks executing him will be more trouble than it solves.

If Navalny ever comes to power, I don’t have any particular hope he’ll be a “good” leader.

But he has an interesting story, to be sure, and you can’t say he hasn’t been through quite a bit of hardship.

I find that I keep listening for hints of Inon Zur’s music in this, and keep being disappointed (he’s not listed as a composer for the television show anywhere I can find–a damn shame).

Like, the games definitely have the retro songs, and that was used here too, but in between the retro songs, Inon Zur’s style in the games was so beautiful that I REALLY want his work to show up in this and I guess it doesn’t. And it really affects the feeling of the trailer for me, so much of Fallout’s “feel” for me was the distinctive music.

Whoever they used as a composer in this trailer is so…“ordinary”?..that it sticks out like a sore thumb for me.

That’s a really well-written article, the complete opposite of a fluff piece.

I encourage folks to go read it.

I’ve never been a huge fan of “adult animation”, or really animation in general. So I had to get over that hill of bias. But once I did, I found I enjoyed this show. Those Old Scientists on Strange New Worlds is actually what made me go back and give Lower Decks a second try.

Anyway, I’m excited to see where season 5 goes. I also kinda want another live-action crossover.

Your account has 4 posts over a few months and one comment. Maybe you have actually been using Lemmy for longer on another account, but we can’t see that.

I’m an Elder Millennial, used to admin/mod a fandom forum around 1999-2002ish. A small percentage of active users essentially carrying the content of small niche communities on their back until ignition happens has ALWAYS been how communities work. It’s like that in real life, and it’s like that online. It was like that when niche message boards and forums reigned in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was like that on usenet, in IRC, on email groups. It was like that on World of Warcraft, when you tried to get a guild off the ground for raiding or something. It’s like that here on Lemmy, because Lemmy is a social platform too.

The only real solution to grow a community is to jump in and create content yourself, to help communities along until one or two ignite and take off. You have to participate yourself to change the culture, not just bitch in a post that it’s “changed” and that you’re going to stomp off if it doesn’t “change back”. (Although, that type of post is, admittedly, also a tradition as old as time.)

Anyway. Communities starting small and needing people to grow is just…a thing. This is how volunteer organizations work in real life–why do you think they’re constantly pleading for other people to get involved? Because you need people who actually pull on their adult pants and get in and do the work of organizing things, doing things, instead of sitting about like a lump consuming it.

You can move back to reddit of course, if you want. That’s similar to moving from a small town to a big city for the night life, which people do. Maybe you don’t have the time or energy to essentially “volunteer” your time on a small community to help it grow.

But the thing you’re complaining about is…just part of how communities work. Communities have always revolved around a few people contributing most of the content until the community takes off (or doesn’t).

So, rationally, what’s the next step? Stepping up your own contributions, or going off somewhere else?

Only you can decide because only you know your IRL time commitments. But one action is going to be more useful to helping niche subs get off the ground than the other.

(Here’s something interesting: The Frugal sub has a shit-load of people subscribed who eagerly jump in feet-first if you start a relevant topic. Why doesn’t someone here with an interest in that sub go over there and start a post?)

We might need to define “unhealthy” here. Mine is going to be different from other people’s.

Regarding food, I believe the pop definition of “unhealthy” is wrong. As far as I can tell, after having worked in the food industry on the regulatory side, and after having tried to understand nutrition from a truly scientific standpoint, the biggest goof people make is portion size, and, less commonly, having too “small” a pool of foods they’ll eat so certain vitamins/minerals are lacking. The rest of it with added sugars or fat or this or that ingredient being “bad” is smoke and mirrors. Portion size is really, really, really fucking important.

You can be healthy eating just about anything (even McDonald’s) as long as the portions are appropriate for your size and amount of exercise, and so long as your diet is varied enough overall to bring in enough vitamins and minerals. So, eating 3 super-sized meals at McDonald’s might screw you up because the calories are too much for your level of activity, but if you scale it back to 1 a day and keep the meal size “small”, or even eat a happy meal as an adult, you’ll be ok.

Regarding vitamins and minerals…in the modern day, people tend to be deficient in vitamin D because they don’t get enough sun, so that sometimes needs to be supplemented. And individuals will sometimes be deficient in iron or vitamin C. I supplement with C because I tend not to eat many foods with it, and D because I’m a vampire-like nerd that stays away from the sun.

Anyway. To get back to the question, I basically eat what I want, without regard for whether pop culture thinks it’s bad or not, but I pay attention to portion size and I do not snack. I’ve sometimes fallen into keto behaviors or one-meal-a-day but I don’t follow either with any dedication, my natural patterns just fall close to those.

Do I sometimes buy and eat things that are unhealthy for me? Well, by MY standards…not really. I understand nutrition, and I understand portion sizes, and it’s not all that hard for me to eat appropriately for my size without worrying about whatever the latest health food fads are blabbing on about. And because I understand what I’m doing, and I have control of it, I don’t feel guilt.