Joined the Mayqueeze.

  • 4 Posts
  • 320 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • We live in a world where screens have taken over. Our children’s are showing early sign of anxiety, depression, eye issues , wearing glasses at young age because of being exposed to screens for long time.

    I have a problem with this paragraph. You present this as fact and I don’t think it is. Anxiety and depression are not caused by screens. More known cases can also be attributed to people caring about this more than ever. More kids with glasses may be more due to improvements in medical care. We’ve been getting more short sighted as a species ever since looking out for the sabertooth tiger wasn’t a survival issue any more. If you want to get people onboard the arguments need to work and these don’t do it for me. 80s kids didn’t get squared eyes from watching too much TV, 90s kids didn’t all turn into homicidal maniacs due to video games - this strikes me as arguments along the same oversimplified lines.

    I’m not opposed to regulating screen time for children. What I don’t think works is a government mandated restriction. How would you even enforce that within a family home? An unintended side effect will be the need to ID every user, taking away the opportunity to use the web anonymously, and risking the leak of personalized information from giant data bases. The risks outweigh the usefulness for me.


  • I understand your rage. Has being enraged made this situation better? Management brushed you off. You could try calling the cops but I wouldn’t pin any hope on that. What else are you going to do? Keep in mind that if you’re the party that keeps playing loud music at odd hours you will probably end up the subject of a complaint by your direct neighbors.

    We live in a society. Society includes among other things dicks and injustices. You have come across the former and suffer the latter. I understand why you’re pissed off. Every action you take that isn’t the measured response of an adult will decrease your chances of solving this problem. Not having gotten in touch directly with your neighbor - that should have been step one, which you have missed. Petty retaliation - as much as I get the urge - is another misstep.

    As far as I can see it, you have three choices:

    (1) Continue escalation, which will feel good in the moment but has only a very low chance of succes.

    (2) Move apartments.

    (3) Follow the advise by a golden_zealot@lemmy.ml in this thread. Keep in mind that your position in that is strengthened by being a flawless, rule-abiding victim.

    There is no point in telling me how they are weird hermits or about whatever assholery they also get up to on the reg. I don’t care if they also eat puppies for dinner. You already have my sympathy here. You need to calm the fuck down for a second to realize that (3) is your best strategy if you’re not willing to move. And if you cannot resist the urge to argue with me about this in all caps, then I wish you all the best.





  • Neighborly disputes will most likely no be solved by this provocation meets counter provocation strategy. I would strongly suggest you deescalate. So he drops his weights loudly, then you play loud music, then he lights a turd in a paper bag on your doormat, and then you … This won’t end well. You still have to live there and all you’re doing is making a bad situation worse. You’re just retaliating because you feel powerless to stop what’s bugging you. And with this sort of dispute statistics are not on your side in terms of success.

    Did you ever talk with him directly? Or put a kindly phrased note under the door?

    30-60min twice per day - could you not just hide under some headphones for that time?






  • The problem with the VPN solution is that the BBC has gotten smart about that. It’s a game of whack a mole. Every time a service has installed a new server with new IPs, iPlayer finds out about it and blocks it. So you don’t even get to the part where you could fraudulently claim to be paying for the license.

    Where in France are you? In Calais you might still get terrestrial signal (although I don’t know if the signal standards differ) or it could be available on cable.

    A third option is not perfectly legal but more so than torrenting. There are online services that record the terrestrial signal and allow you to download the recordings after the fact. Google BBC online HDR or DVR and see if one of these services might be for you.






  • The Anerican political theater has twice as many viable parties as North Korea. Contrast that with virtually any other democracy where there are at least a handful of parties fighting to be in charge. That doesn’t mean though that you don’t have enough different opinions to fill a party-political spectrum like that in the US. The dominance of the two parties just forces most people under one of the big tent roofs. So you have more conservative Democrats (and there used to be more liberal Republicans) in the party that are bigger in relative numbers compared to what you’ll find in the social democrats in Germany (or among the conservatives in France). The Democrats are nominally the more left leaning party. But if you compared the party programs they would align more with the conservative parties of Scandinavia. Everything is further to the right in the US thanks largely to gun laws and lack of social security. And that explains why you have non-lefty people in the nominally lefty party. And while bigotry and hatred are certainly not a new thing, there is a culture that permeates down from the political leadership. And if name calling and pouring oil into the fire of social issues are the new MO, and admissions and convictions respectively of sexual assault don’t keep candidates out of office, many people feel they are now also allowed to say the quiet part out loud.


  • You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn’t so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We’re playing a long game that we don’t even want to win.


  • Let’s be realistic and not console ourselves with rosy fantasies.

    Let’s take the most pessimistic view instead and project we’ll all get plugged into the Matrix.

    It’s not a foregone conclusion that so-called AI and automation will replace all of those jobs. It’s also not a foregone conclusion that all these people will be destitute because they cannot be put in other positions. This is not the first time we as humanity have faced this big a structural change. We have largely gotten pretty good and are not dealing with a lot of bloodshed and poverty in the wake of such a big change. This transition will probably not be great for everybody but it won’t be a big human tragedy of the proportions you imagined. Worry more about our climate. The bigger threat of mass destitution will come from that clusterfuck.