FriendOfDeSoto

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.

I would tread very carefully. If she just seems interested but doesn’t cross the line into stalking territory, I would do nothing to confront her about it. If she doesn’t take it well and goes to HR as an unrequited love revenge move, you’ll be sitting in unnecessary hot water. You can do everything right and still lose.

Treat her neutrally. If you can send down the office grapevine how you’re interested in this person outside the office, that’s about as aggressive as I would get. Try and keep a physical distance. Discourage physical contact and avoid situations where you’re alone with her.

At this point in time, let them see what it’s like and if they join, great. If not, no biggie. The fediverse is not depending on user growth like any of the corporate platforms. And it is hindered by people having to learn to be their own algorithm.

Yes, it would be nicer to increase the ranks in certain Lemmies or on Mastodon. But I haven’t felt it’s tumbleweeds in any of my feeds lately - this may be very subjective. And I feel reddit or the Melon are doing a lot of the convincing for us at the same time.

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?

Get off the internet and find IRL help. Be that family, friends, and/or a mental health professional. The latter is highly recommended though.

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.

People behave very differently digitally compared to what they would do in person. It’s much easier to slam the door digitally and not having to explain why they did that. People are also insecure and do irrational shit, especially while dating. And some people will just troll you if isn’t a setup to defraud you. You just have to stop yourself from assuming best intentions from everybody.

Ghosting is just part of the ephemeral experience online now. In a way, people who ghost you do you a favor. They are not worth the effort.

You can describe yourself any way you like. It’s helpful to provide context, like you did here. Without it you may not be understood. So know who you’re speaking to and provide it, especially when puzzled faces stare back at 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.

On top of that you could argue that Latvia and Germany are probably more favorable regardless in terms of them enjoying largely functioning rule of law.

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

Because I swipe typed it and didn’t give it another thought. I’m gonna leave it as is so your comment continues to make sense here and thank you for the correction.

In my Venn diagram, “advertize” is a smaller circle wholly surrounded by “promote.” “Advertize” suggests to me there is a marketing effort with paid ads or something like that behind it. It’s simultaneously promoting whatever but promotion can be much broader. Preference doesn’t really come into it.

I find none of these arguments convincing. You have the right to vote. Unless you’re in Australia that means you can just not go vote also. That’s your choice.

Voter turnout has an influence on the vote share the extremes of the political spectrum get. If you’re on the extreme, you tend to go vote for your cause because you found your calling. So if enough people in the middle choose not to participate, you’ll end up with difficult majorities and/or more extreme governments. The latter is also true if either extreme is convincing many of the people in the middle. And that’s where tactical voting comes in. That’s why I would personally lean towards a “go vote and vote for the best of the worst if nothing fits well” approach. But I wouldn’t elevate this to the level of an ‘electoral imperative’ because it is a personal choice.

Somebody is going to jump into this. But I would keep my eyes open beyond just the Chinese market. Vietnam and Thailand are interesting places to watch. V because of the relative sweetheart deal with the trumpist of tariffs. And T because they already do a lot of SSD manufacturing. And China, more than any other country, will be at the mercy of a particular person’s bowel movements on Pennsylvania Ave.

You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they’re in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don’t like billboards. You’re going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.

Online ads are insufferable. I’m running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I’m also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.

The problem online is the cause of the problem. It’s the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It’s also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything ‘for free.’ Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a “militarization” of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.

Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.

The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.

Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.

Btw everybody thinks they’re immune to advertising. And we’re not.

The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.

And just for some context here: personally I don’t mind billboard ads to be honest.