17? Many schools have recruiters walking the halls long before that. Plenty of these kids were getting talked up in the hallway at 15 and had recruiters calling their cellphones unprovoked or stalking them to their homes using personal information they got from the schools.
It’s also a clever double entendre because there has been plenty of hating on the French in the US over the years despite them being one of our closest allies since they armed us during the revolutionary war. I noticed it decades before 2001, but it really intensified again for a while during the Iraq war because France refused to get involved. Remember “freedom fries”?
Are you telling me that every Flock camera is equipped with estrogen?
I had heard that Flock cameras were transing the youth with the 5G…
When they go low we go high.
The higher fall lets the guillotine gain more energy before impact.
IMO, they have a similar thing going on as the US does where one of their largest exports is culture.
The veneer is peeling on the American Empire, but Hollywood and American media giants (and credit card companies) still hold massive sway over much of the world’s cultures, and Japan holds similar power with the export of anime and manga, as they are often one of the few things people know Japan through (that, and stuff about feudal era Japan and samurai as the Japanese counterpart to the American cowboy).
PR is one of their biggest products, whether it’s through their media or the reputation of the quality of their consumer goods, etc.
Unfortunately, Elon isn’t the only one. There’s been like a half dozen different times now that people have claimed to solve the self driving car issue by…putting cars on train tracks.
So trains, but worse in every way. Single occupancy, traffic congestion, motors on every pod, traditional rubber car tires, magnetic strips planted into a normal highway for computers to follow, etc. Every time, they’ve found a way to make trains but worse.
The most simple, straightforward, and concise way is my least favorite word in the world: metrics. By using X, you increase the amount of activity on the platform, which the Muskrat takes to advertisers and investors and says “Look how many people use my platform, you should be paying me more money for access to the value they have as consumers/data to harvest.”
This is actually why they made that ad-blocker that clicks on every single ad it blocks that I can never remember the name of. Because it financially hurts both the company serving the ads and the advertisers themselves as well by both messing with their data on you as a consumer (they can’t add your interests to a group to sell to advertisers if you just click on everything) and by hurting their click-through to sales metric. Their click-through rate goes up, but because their purchase rate doesn’t, it makes the metric go down and makes them less willing to spend as much on an advertising spot when they’re less likely to get a return on that money.
There’s also that whole thing where people go where there’s a lot of people and by being part of the group that keeps people there, you’re exposing them to right-wing propaganda and the various disinformation bot campaigns and whatnot, but that’s a lot harder to explain/messier to get into.
My point was that what they’re calling for here already exists natively within the federation framework and this hidden filter that the dev made doesn’t even need to exist as a front-end system that mods/admins can use as a result. And that some of the more egregious instances on this list are already on the defederation list by default and that admins are free to add or remove instances from that list as they please.
In short, that this hidden filter is not only unnecessary but that it also only exists to secretly censor what users on an instance can see on top of what instances are already defederated by the admins and would have no purpose as a publicly available system.
I agree, I’m just saying that it sounds like what they’re talking about is something that’s already natively built into Lemmy and doesn’t need to be built into a front-end. Especially since I believe some of these are already defederated by default and you would need an account on an instance that has gone out of their way to federate with those in order to see/interact with them in the first place.
Don’t forget that MAGA instance on there
First they came for the MAGA, then they came for the commies /s
Doesn’t the software package for running a lemmy instance have a default defederation blacklist that includes some of these same instances? It sounds like they’re talking about exactly that - an editable blacklist instead of hiding it as some kind of software error when you go somewhere the admin doesn’t want you to. To which I say, Lemmy already has that, it’s called defederation or muting an instance yourself.
Romneycare*
Never let Republicans forget that the best socialized healthcare system in the country was copied from a Republican system created and approved by voters in one of the most leftist states in the nation. It makes them so mad that they can’t blame a black guy for it when you do.
I don’t have the data to back it up, but I disagree. By the time that lootboxes and micro transactions appeared, the video game industry was already in competition with Hollywood for profits - if not already making more.
One of the largest costs for the industry historically has been manufacturing the physical media. It costs a lot to produce all the cartridges and packaging, and to have that shipped around the world. As technology improved, however, those costs began to drop on a per unit basis from the cartridges of old to the cds and dvds of the 2000s, allowing for a higher profit margin on a per unit basis. But the biggest kicker was the development of digital storefronts. Suddenly, you didn’t have to make a single piece of physical media in order to sell a game, and companies suddenly began to make back a lot more of that $60 directly instead of having it spent on manufacturing. They make the game once, and then each copy they sell after the first costs effectively $0 to manufacture since it’s the exact same copy as the first. Then you also have every game selling a “digital deluxe edition” for as much as $100 (or more!), often for just some exclusive cosmetics.
Micro transactions and live service is what they call the “long tail” of a game - you already made the product and sold it, but it continues to bring in money after the fact. Companies don’t have to spend huge sums to make a brand new game when they can just trickle out incremental updates and skins and rake in the money.
Whales are largely a myth told by video game (and gambling) companies to hide the truth of who they’re actually targeting and to keep you blaming the wrong people.
They want you to blame the dude with more money than the church and not enough brains to know the difference between cents and sense, but the truth is that the vast VAST majority of money made through lootboxes and other forms of gambling comes from 3 sources:
Kids aged 15 and under, people with addiction issues, and people with mental health issues like depression or neurodivergent conditions like ADHD.
Game companies hire psychologists to develop the most effective ways to exploit the way the human brain functions in order to maximize the amount of money that they can squeeze out of people, and all 3 of these groups suffer from the same issues that they exploit: poor impulse control and difficulty with keeping track of how much they’re actually spending. Kids because their brains aren’t physically developed enough yet, addicts (and people with ADHD to a lesser extent) because their brains are literally wired that way, and people with mental health issues have reduced capacity for both and are more likely to seek out things that promise quick access to dopamine and serotonin (think “retail therapy” or self medicating). Also of note is that researchers suspect that kids who grow up spending money on lootboxes and micro transactions in general are more likely to develop addictive personality issues later in life - basically being groomed into gambling addicts.
That’s also why they never let you buy stuff directly with money and use fake currencies that don’t have a 1 to 1 translation - it makes it 10 times harder to track how much you actually spent. It’s also why you can never buy the exact amount you need for an item: if you have currency left over, you’re more likely to buy more so that it isn’t “wasted”.
The children only matter when they can’t speak for themselves.
That way they can’t disagree. It’s why they put so much emphasis on the unborn. Once they can speak their own opinion, they’re worthless.
It will be 100 degrees and data centers will be draining local water supplies, while residents will be told not to water their flowers or take too many showers.
Wasn’t this already the case like 2 years ago in Texas? Except I remember the governor telling people to drink less water and shower together when possible to save water for the data centers.
Don’t forget the number of places named Springfield. A quick search pulls up an article that puts the number at at least 30 different places in the US.
This reminds me of a story about a French ship that landed someplace, and a native of the area walked down the beach and greeted them, saying “Bonjour.” Shocked that the locals spoke perfect French, the sailors asked “Parlez-vous francais??” and the local, confusedly asked “what did you say?” in the local language.
As it turns out, both the local language and French had apparently arrived at more or less the exact same word for a greeting by pure coincidence.
IIRC, the story that I heard years ago was that this originally came from a promotional comic for the original Metroid, and Nintendo at the time didn’t want to reveal Samus’s gender for some reason and basically had to call this canon as a result when asked about it.
I don’t remember exactly, but I think one of the early Metroid games had an ending that had a scene revealing Samus is a woman.