queue , 1 day ago

Property damage of this is valid. especially if you can give people water for free next to it.

queue , 1 day ago

In America, tap water is either “Fine, maybe a little odd if you’re used to bottle water, but probably fine.” to “It’s not safe to drink this shit.”

queue , 1 day ago

Here’s a few things that are cheaper!

• Soulseek/Nicotine+
• Usenet Groups
• Libraries (only if your local one has CDs, and often is popular music and no indie stuff) And if you want some album art: MusicBrainz Picard

If you want it on your phone, SD cards are cheaper than ever for big space. Unless you’re on iPhone.

queue , 1 day ago

My Xiaomi phone for $400 supports up to 1 TB SD cards, so that’s pretty sweet.

queue , 6 days ago

Saving these for when someone goes “but no rulers means no one to protect you!!”

queue , 11 days ago

I thought the joke was she became a possum. Nope. Just grouchy.

queue , 13 days ago

According to Mastodon:

The Google AI isn’t hallucinating about glue in pizza, it’s just over indexing an 11 year old Reddit post by a dude named fucksmith.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/384462b2-5390-4b81-b7e9-f7ffcb85b821.png

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/3361fa98-a933-4bba-b7df-c227507a14a0.png

mstdn.social/

queue , 13 days ago

Reddit and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

queue , 22 days ago

It’s really funny how no one really likes liberals but liberals.

Conservatives: “They’re too freedom loving for my tastes! Why can’t they just stay and home and be good corporate stooges like us?”

Auth-Communists: “They claim to like freedom but still willingly use the capitalist forces to oppress who they like. Liberals are okay with personal freedom until it impacts the white moderates. That’s our job!”

Anarchists: “It’s literally weird to call yourself a liberal when all they do is oppose any movement against the status quo. If they can’t convert them to sell away their soul to the state or capitalism, they’re terrorists. They’re more like conservatives than any actual progressives, and even progressives admit 100% capitalism isn’t great.”

Libertarian capitalists: “They claim to be for freedom but constantly require the state to check in on if people are enjoying their freedom like that Nanny’s they never had. I just wanna grill for god’s sake!”

Like it’s just funny to me no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you have a somewhat decent reason to hate liberals (except conservatives are too stupid to tell liberals apart from “commies”).

queue , 22 days ago

Yeah Tankies/AuthComs are just such an odd mixture of accelerationists, “own the libs” and just general stupidity of “a strong man makes strong men” bullshit that they support any fascist if it means maybe someday they might not be on the chopping block.

If Tankies were an actual voting bloc they’d be somewhat impactful for the first time since maybe 1949. That would imply going outside however.

queue , 22 days ago

Conservatives, fascists, and Auth-Communists just disagree on what color the flag should be, and the name of the party in charge handing out the police to dispatch onto the people.

queue , 24 days ago

God forbid women do anything!

queue , 1 month ago

Mate, I hate the genocide and shit, but shut the fuck up with this. The two are unrelated.

queue , 1 month ago

Hard sci-fi is when writers take time to understand current science and understanding how things would work, and then apply it to the future. Arthur C. Clarke is the default example of hard sci-fi.

Basically, “hard” sci-fi uses real world science to figure out how something would work in a future setting. And hard sci-fi really tries to figure out if something is practical outside of a set piece. “Soft” sci-fi is more about social problems of the real world and beyond, like Star Trek. But there isn’t an exact formal definition for where hard starts and soft begins, and vice versa.

And I think 95% of scifi fans would agree that neither is better or worse, it just fits the story as its needed. Personally I love hard scifi as a concept, but my favorite scifi stories are all soft, like Star Trek.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction

queue , 1 month ago

That’s just homeopathy and corporate funded “studies”.

queue , 1 month ago

"But Biden had to sign the Bush era anti-terrorism surveillance state bill! Think of how many of those spies can now be gay or women! REAL Progress is baby steps to where your constitutional rights are violated by minorities and women!!

It’s genuinely amazing how we can’t push for any bills for raising the federal minimum wage, protecting abortion, protecting queer healthcare, but we can ban wearing hoodies on the senate floor, [passing spying bills on par with China, and then bundling a TikTok ban with aid to Ukraine and Israel.

Sure is great living in a democracy. Where there’s only one “valid” option, and he still sucks shit.

queue , 1 month ago

He looks like the “me marrying your dad” comic face. Like a weird smug yet angry look. Handsome Jack looking motherfucker.

queue , 1 month ago

Bro is onto fucking nothing with this one, like what are you even saying with this

queue , 1 month ago

I wish we had a small percent of what France does for its consumer rights in the United States.

queue , 1 month ago

Here’s my attempt at copying the article for readers:

To Fight ‘Shrinkflation,’ France Will Force Retailers to Warn Shoppers

• Merchants will be required to put signs in front of all products that have been reduced in size without a corresponding price cut.

For months, the shelves of Carrefour, France’s biggest supermarket chain, have been dotted with bright orange signs placed in front of Pepsi bottles, Lays potato chips and a variety of other foods whose packages are suspiciously smaller than they used to be.

“Shrinkflation,” the signs say. “This product has seen its volume decrease and the price charged by our supplier increase.”

On Friday, the French government took steps to require every food retailer in the country to follow suit. By July 1, stores will have to plaster warnings in front of all products that have been reduced in size without a corresponding price cut, in a bid to combat the consumer scourge known as shrinkflation.

“The practice of shrinkflation is a scam,” Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, said in a statement. “We are putting an end to it.”

The government is also encouraging shoppers to act as informers, urging those “who have doubts about the price per unit of measurement displayed on the shelves” to flag it to the authorities via France’s consumer reporting app.

The fight against the practice of downsizing products without also downsizing their prices has picked up in the United States, where President Biden has shamed food companies for raising prices even as inflation cooled.

Shrinkflation has become a point of outrage for shoppers in France, and a political issue for President Emmanuel Macron as consumers continue to grapple with a cost-of-living crisis. Although inflation has recently come down in Europe from the record highs of a year ago, the prices of many food products remain elevated.

Inflation in the eurozone fell to a new two-year low in March, the result of an aggressive campaign of interest rate increases by the European Central Bank. European governments had also worked to ease prices for energy and food, through subsidies for electric bills and by negotiating with food manufacturers to force prices down.

In France, inflation has fallen now more than a third from a year earlier, but higher food prices have been persistent. A typical basket of food basics that includes items such as pasta and yogurt is 3 to 5 percent higher than it was a year ago, after a 16 percent surge for 2023.

Mr. Macron had promised to wrestle food costs down further this year. The government moved up annual price negotiations between suppliers and retailers in February, and put pressure on companies to limit increases.

The shrinkflation campaign is the latest weapon. Stores will have to display signs for two months after downsized products have been put on their shelves, according to the government decree issued Friday. The signs will appear near a variety of goods made by food companies, as well as for the supermarket’s private-label brands, from snacks and soda to bags of rice and laundry detergent. Prepackaged foods, like shrink-wrapped deli cold cuts or foods sold in bulk, will be exempt.

Many global consumer goods companies have raised prices by double-digit percentages in the past year, attributing the increases to higher costs of ingredients and labor. Even so, many of those companies have reported expanding profits as they sell fewer items at higher prices.

The issue came to a head in France last year when Carrefour announced that it would no longer sell PepsiCo products because the prices were “unacceptably” high for consumers, escalating a showdown by French retailers to name and shame brands that were not reducing prices as inflation eases.

As part of its campaign, Carrefour also put up shrinkflation posters next to products like Lipton tea warning shoppers that they were paying a higher price for a product whose volume had shrunk.

France has submitted a proposal to the European Union that would force food retailers throughout Europe to carry out a shrinkflation labeling campaign.

queue , 1 month ago

South Park would probably be on the side of Google and other corporations, Matt and Trey are diehard libertarian capitalists.

queue , 1 month ago

I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn’t give the creators any money.

Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn’t want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.

Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a “Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company” as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn’t fully understand the process of uploading videos.

Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go “I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads.” I don’t give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?

queue , 1 month ago

They are one and the same. If you knew where to look, they provided means.

Tools are agnostic to their use. Tools do not have a preference how they are used. Hammers that are used are agnostic to if they are hammering a nail into a wall or caving in a skull. Yuzu would work exactly the same if you dumped your own carts. Same for emulators for Genesis and Atari 2600 and PlayStation.

What’s wrong with Twitter? You could also just google this and find the information yourself, don’t know why I have to provide what should be common knowledge on this subject.

If you make a claim, you need to provide the evidence. That’s how these things work. You say a claim, you give us the proof. And I can say on Twitter “Yuzu was 100000% legal and Nintendo actually is the real illegal operation”. Now that’s a valid source too, right?

They were not a legal emulator, full stop, sorry.

www.eff.org/issues/…/reverse-engineering-faq

Sorry but that biggest technology legal experts and defenders of the little guys who get sued by the big companies you polish the boots with your tongue strongly prove you wrong.

queue , 2 months ago

“He was on our radar.”

queue , 2 months ago

Yeah they’re just the loudest and proudest people who wear crosses around their neck and only vote for other people who are loud and proud of their Christian love wanting to ban anything remotely “sinful.” Everyone knows that Christians are the most oppressed in the West! Truly no one knows how hard it is to be a follower of the majority belief, and never need to defend it from the state.

Also here’s a brief list of things Christians tried to cancel in the United States: Comic books, rock and roll, jazz, dungeons and dragons, magic the gathering, radio, television, other forms of Christianity, anything remotely queer, Italians, Irish, Chinese, Jews, abolitionists, civil rights marchers, feminists…

And here’s the entire list of times Christians were oppressed by laws pushed by non-Christian groups/state actors in the United States and the West in general:

queue , 2 months ago

• Attend Churches where pastors and preachers proselytize about anything "Sinful"
• Call themselves Christian proudly
• Wears crosses
• Says its forbidden by God to do something that the Bible says is bad
• Uses the words of Saint Paul to expand on those words

Damn that sounds like they are Christian, but you know, I guess they’re “not true Christians” because they happen to do everything on Saturday instead of Sunday, or don’t wash the feet of the poor, or something else that caused a schism 200 years ago.

queue , 2 months ago

Maybe before, but not these days. They take donations claiming to help abortion rights, but also quietly admit they can’t defend them. jezebel.com/satanic-temple-abortion-rights-religi… queersatanic.com/the-satanic-temple-cannot-help-y…

Plus the Temple was sued for harassment of it’s members/advocates. The people were linking publicly accessible info about the Temple’s internal issues and then sued for libel and defamation. newsweek.com/orgies-harassment-fraud-satanic-temp…

Then when Newsweek covered the lawsuit, they themselves were sued for libel, when they literally showed that a lawsuit for telling the truth was being made in courts. law.justia.com/cases/federal/…/27/ casetext.com/…/the-satanic-temple-inc-v-newsweek-…

TL;DR: The Satanic Temple sues you for telling publicly known truths about itself, and then takes money that could go to actual help for abortion rights.

queue , 2 months ago

That is impressive! Sometimes you need a right figure to improve messaging.

queue , 2 months ago

Large scale wise, Doctors without Borders, World Health Organization, and the organizations that help fight for/track sex trafficked people to liberate them.

And within the US (I’m sure there’s others, I’m a yank so my understanding of how things in Germany/Canada/China/South Africa go is often poor) there’s the Electric Frontier Foundation, Meals on Wheels, Planned Parenthood, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and a lot more that help most citizens and biological beings get the right to, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that isn’t actually given by any government.

Also Child’s Play and Make a Wish Foundation are pretty good for sick children to get some levity in a harsh childhood. I usually chip in some online donations/sale credits to Child’s Play and EFF so that they have entertainment when stuck in a hospital, and more digital rights for when they get out of it.

queue , 2 months ago

Even if it was, using media to explain ideas of politics isn’t new nor is it bad. Like how is using Star Trek or Star Wars or any other piece of media that the public is familiar with on a cultural level inherently a “Gotcha!” to an argument/debate?

“Hey this book that was taught in classrooms has some parallels to current events.” “Wow, you’re using your understandings of the world around you to make commentary? Weirdo.”

queue , 2 months ago

That just sounds like you think people who can critically analyze media and the world suck. You must be a very boring person to have a conversation with, I can tell from this brief interaction.

queue , 2 months ago

I wish I could go back to a Lemmy thread showing how Mastodon and other Fediverse instances were blocking Meta ahead of it’s integration, where people went “Oh you’re just being paranoid, why would they do that?” And when given examples of companies taking open standards and either making themselves the biggest source of users or killing it (Microsoft, Google, Apple) they either went “Well that happened in 2006, it’s 2023!”

I know the bootlickers wouldn’t actually change their mind, but jesus christ. It’s frustrating for groups of advocates to be ignored and proven right each time. Cassandra syndrome is real.

queue , 2 months ago

I recall hearing how Russia had dozens of them, and the ROI of a 40 million dollar missile taking out a 400 million ship was great. And then Ukraine got worse and nothing happened, with zero of them ever found or used.

And North Korea thinks it can even attempt that. I guess we need a “new” geopolitical boogieman to pander for increasing military budgets, since Russia is losing and China does it usual “we will take over Taiwan, unlike last year!” every year.

queue , 2 months ago

Interesting, thank you. No one in the circles I’m in who were hyping up Russian hypersonic missiles as the next ICBM mentioned this.

queue , 2 months ago

My main reason is I’m an American, China (probably) can’t do shit to me. But here I’m subject to so much shit America can do legally and illegally, with zero repercussions.

If China fucked me in particular over, odds are it would at least spark debate here. If America spied on my messages and stopped me from protesting something, that’s just a Tuesday afternoon here.

The only reason why Congress wants to ban it, is due to pressure from news agencies and the government, because TikTok can’t be controlled by the CIA. You can’t manufacture consent of the people if the content comes from someone else you don’t control.

www.npr.org/2024/03/13/…/house-vote-tiktok-ban

They’ll ban tiktok but won’t punish overly aggressive police.

They’ll ban tiktok but won’t make food or rent affordable.

They’ll ban tiktok but won’t denounce Israel’s bullshit.

They’ll ban tiktok but won’t cancel student loans.

They’ll ban tiktok but won’t take Covid seriously.

queue , 2 months ago

www.npr.org/2024/03/13/…/house-vote-tiktok-ban

Advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have called the bill “censorship plain and simple,” arguing that “jeopardizing access to the platform jeopardizes access to free expression.”

At 27 years old, Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost is the youngest member of Congress, and he opposes the bill.

“I think that it is a violation of people’s First Amendment rights,” he said. “TikTok is a place for people to express ideas. I have many small businesses in my district and content creators in my district, and I think it’s going to drastically impact them too.”

The fact that Republicans started it is enough for me to be at least suspicious of why its even being considered.

EDIT: Also lol at “strong first amendment rights” when redneck states ban any books with queer or black characters. And lmao at “Strong first amendment rights” when people get fired for talking about forming a union, let alone even trying to make one.

queue , 2 months ago

Just another reminder that sports are segregated by gender because men got upset at women beating them, not because of “muh muscle mass” or “muh bone density”.

It’s why Chess is fucking segregated by gender. The most “giga brained chess grandmasters” didn’t like being beaten by women.

queue , 2 months ago

If you’re talking about Lemmy’s 196, it’s not a rule and never was for us. “Post before you leave” is a “rule” but titling it rule is not. It’s just an injoke.

queue , 2 months ago

We actually made INGSOC from 1984 do it for us, we’re very evil that way.

queue , 2 months ago

It’s not a rule for us, just an injoke. The “rule” is post before you leave, not “every post must have rule”. We also can’t/don’t ban people for not posting before you leave. We literally don’t have that power at all, so we can’t use it.

queue , 2 months ago

I can’t find you in the Modlog for any actions but maybe I’m missing something, if you feel something happened feel free to email the mod team.

queue , 2 months ago

Maybe, I just wanted to see if you were and why, so maybe there was a chance on resolving it or not. Take care!

queue , 2 months ago

I was slightly okay with Audible’s DRM when the credits you got each month stacked with the older ones, so you could have 4 over the months as you still listened to the books you already had, and then exchange them for newer books of the series and what not.

And then my brother and I stopped paying, and the credits were there for a month. Check back later, 0 credits. The books are still there, but the credits we paid money for are gone. So that sucks. Fuck em.

queue , 2 months ago

I meant exchanging the credits for the books, not books for books. Apologies if that came off as unclear.

And a lot of the online ads on podcasts and shows constantly state “it’s all yours to keep as long as you want” so my brother and I, both thought it was to all, not just the books. It’s why we were okay with paying for another month to allow more credits to stack up, as not every book was 1 credit.

queue , 2 months ago

That would imply Biden/democrats have any fucking balls. I would actually love it if Biden’s team just went “Full immunity? Fuck it, we ball.” and just go full hog wild and just push for wild things to actually help people and punish the literal fucking nazis.

But it would be cool.

queue , 2 months ago

King Solomon says no.

queue , 3 months ago

The fact that the Moog is inherently able to make sounds without power, but no other electrical ones get that is what really leans me to that. I know a Casio f-91W will last a long time, but the laser pointer and dab pen won’t.

I am personally leaning towards the motorcycle and Moog. The motorcycle could be (poorly) fueled with distilled grain alcohol. Not fit for human consumption, but it could make it work. Eventually something will break on both, and you can’t fix it. But you can be a form of traveling bard.

Plus if you keep the Moog, you can put it into a place that is safe, then have your later kin give it to some scientists in the 1800’s. “Hey Maxwell, here’s a literal magic device. See how it works. Figure out how it does this and what it can and can’t do.”

queue , 3 months ago

More or less that the idea of how the country that got Humans into space first eventually collapsed, but “modern capitalism solves all problems” can’t do the same tasks as well was 1950’s USSR, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t like the USSR in general.