Say tray deefee seal.

2023 has been the hardest and worst year of my life, followed by 2022. 2020 and 2021 were some of my best years ever. It’s hard to handle that whiplash and I really regret not seeing the hard times ahead back then with the inevitable economic crisis on the horizon.

I always thought it was funny while studying for my Cisco certification that their operating system was also called IOS. I had no idea there was actual drama behind it!

The only way that could conceivably work out is if everyone collectively protested their student loans together since it’s such a massive problem for so many people. Even then, the government would probably buckle down and try to destroy half the country’s financial viability before they caved and admitted this toxic industry preyed on kids that didn’t know what that debt meant when they signed up for it.

The most effective ads I’ve seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don’t remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry’s Razors for all I’ve heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.

Lmao, unfortunately not. Thanks for catching the typo.

isn’t**

Oh it definitely happens. I’m a young millennial and I have a friend my age who deals with mental issues because he ate lead paint leftover in their old house as a child. Lead was so prevalent at one point that getting rid of it all isn’t as simple as flipping a switch.

Edit: [wasn’t -> isn’t] There does not in fact exist a switch that we can now flip to remove lead. Thanks @Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works.

I think it’s easier to understand net neutrality as something ISP’s can’t do rather than something they must do, since we’ve never seen them really act on it before. It just means they can’t speed up or slow down your internet based on what websites you’re visiting. Under net neutrality, there can never be a deal with Google to give people faster speeds using Google searches than Bing or DuckDuckGo searches.

How a person reacts to being asked about the version of these things most close to them is telling. If they get defensive and deny the event happened, I would hesitate to trust their opinion on other things. Clearly that person bases their opinions on what they want to be true rather than reality. That’s the kind of person whose ideology would likely lead to another event to be ashamed of. If, on the other hand, they admit it was a horrible thing and agree that people should be educated on it and that steps should be taken to prevent it from ever happening again, then I’m more likely to take their opinion seriously and believe that they can be part of the conversations we need to happen to create a better world.

If the contractual details of malt distribution were going to affect the quality of beers you were getting then you absolutely would care. Unity’s pay scheme will lead to studios shutting down if there isn’t pushback. Studios switching to a different engine like Godot will make their games feel different for better or for worse and efforts to help fund these alternate engines will help tip the scale towards that being “for better”.

But most importantly of all, this is a company using toxic and predatory practices. Regardless of the industry (yes, malt distributors too), if we don’t push back against toxic business practices, then companies in many different industries will see avenues they can take advantage of to make extra money. These ideas don’t hang in isolation. If Unity’s scheme works, other businesses will learn from it. This is the reality of capitalism. Whatever methods can turn a profit without generating negative attention will be employed. It’s in the hands of consumers, competing businesses, and the government to keep those toxic practices in check. I mean, why the fuck are we on Lemmy? Ultimately Reddit’s actions are not going to affect the majority of users on their platform. Most of us came here to protest shitty business practices.

No worries. You’re right that it’s absurd that we need to fight so much for our government to protect us from blatant corporate for-profit schemes. There was a time when even the US government at least did us the honor of pretending to not take bribes like this. The Intuit tax return money machine is such an obviously fixable problem. All my 20-something friends in the US know that this problem only exists because of lobbying. It’s disgusting to watch elected representatives become so comfortable with their positions that they feel safe enacting policies that hurt their constituents like this.

For context, the reason I’m hating on Intuit and H&R Block and encouraging people to use FreeTaxUSA is because the first two are the main culprits behind the extensive lobbying that has led to the US government continuing to require people to file their own taxes rather than modernizing and making this process free and easy. My “gushing” is in pursuit of changing the broken system you’re pointing out.

I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I’ve used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I’m also a bit of an urban design nerd and there’s a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.

Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.

What I don’t like about this argument is it feels like the government trying to pass off their own responsibility to someone else. Like, if guns are so dangerous in purpose that manufacturers should be fined for shootings, then government officials should just be regulating gun ownership to begin with. Like, imagine if instead of criminalizing tobacco because of its dangerous health effects, the government said that anytime a person is caught smoking it tobacco companies get fined. At that point you may as well just outlaw the company itself. Which is fine. I have no problem outlawing gun manufacturing. But this is just an unnecessarily roundabout way of doing that. What are we actually accomplishing if we allow people to be shot and then take action and milk money out of the situation? A responsible government isn’t trying to point fingers after a tragedy like a mass shooting and they certainly aren’t trying to make money off of it. No, a good government takes the necessary direct steps to prevent those tragedies from happening again, especially if it’s a common occurrence. No need to dance around a solution instead of tackling it head on.

My brain is powered by memes. Memory? More like memery.

I am not a taxidermist (IANAT?), but if I had to guess dead animals look nothing like their living counterparts when given a few days to decay. Taxidermists probably do a ton of work reconstructing things like their faces and that requires knowing what the original face looked like for the model to be accurate. In the works of fiction where I’ve encountered taxidermy it tends to be treated as something of a morbid art.

From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it’s actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they’re circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we’re going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren’t available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that’s going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.

When I agreed to go $60k into debt, I was a stupid high schooler under the age of 18 who had never had a real job and didn’t know what money was worth. Colleges were spamming misinformation at me to get me to give them my money. I was misled on the ease at which I could get a solid job out of college. I trusted that the system wouldn’t charge me more than the value of my education. 6 years out of college now, still $45k in debt. The system fucked me over royally when I was still a kid.

I did some digging and the two words have different etymologies. So it’s a coincidence. English has many words that share the same spelling but have different meanings/etymologies as well. “Fan” for example. For “tour”, the “tower” usage comes from the Latin “turrem” which also means “tower”, and the “tour” usage comes from the Latin “tournāre” which means “to turn”.