The fact that “family values” are politicized and cast as the best, most important way to live is honestly fucked up when you think about it.

Why did we decide being het and having kids makes you a fucking hero?

I’m glad we live in an era now where people finally realized that they can just not have children and for it to become more optional.

Having a kid and a family is not what it always take to have a fulfilling and happy life. For people to think that’s all it takes, would be devaluing all of their gains and the people that have helped them along the way aka friends.

Interestingly, I think people like you and me use Lemmy because one of the same underlying reasons as social media people:

Either:

1. Endless amounts of stuff that speaks to your interest. (With us it’s stuff like technology. On Social media, people are “interested” in what others are up to.

2. Getting likes/dislikes. Even though likes aren’t important on Lemmy, I notice in my usage that I do subconsciously get the same dopamine hits jf a post gets liked a lot, just like Social Media does. It’s less aggressive on Lemmy because you don’t get alerts for it, but it does factor in on engagement.

3. Engaging in conversations/discussions with other people.

4. Sharing things you find interesting yourself

The content might be different, but the underlying principles are really close. Social Media is actually really close to how forums work at it’s core.

But I know this is an unpopular opinion. And no, I wouldn’t call Lemmy Social Media per se. But the line is more blurry than I’d like to admit if I look at my time spent with Lemmy and how I spend it.

I too do not understand social media. The best I get is it’s about people shouting into a void and hoping someone else heard you to interact with it, by repeating it, liking it, or shouting back at you.

Hashtags are the only way to organize these posts and you need to add them or no one else will hear your shouts into the void.

I don’t mind playing sports even if I suck at them, but watching them? Uggghhh.

Oh. My. God. Can fucking apps learn that when I say “block” I fucking mean it? Don’t show me fucking anything about baseball, soccer, tennis, basketball, and especially not American football. I AM NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE.

Also, I have to block a large fraction of my social feeds at certain times of the year because all they talk about are sports.

I’ll never understand letting the outcome of a game make or break my mood in the following days.

I spent >10 years of my youth playing a sport competitively. I don’t think I ever watched a professional game to completion. Unlike pretty much all my teammates, I just could not have cared less.

Play the sport myself? Fun, sure! Watch someone else play? Uh, why?

I think it’s great that people enjoy watching sports. I dunno why but it just bored the hell out of me.

I do give a shit. I just don’t think that stupid popup is worth it. I can’t believe site creators decided that was the way to go instead of just not collecting bullshit analytics. Instead they hope through dark patterns users will just click the shiny button because they’re annoyed. Actually… I guess it’s working…

What about chocolate chip cookies?

You can get a plugin for Firefox that will do that for you.

Do you shit with the door open in public toilets? You have nothing to hide after all and don’t require privacy there.

I think that the idea that the EU might have had behind the cookie popup mandate wasn’t to actually provide any useful information or options on a per-site basis, but to make users more aware of the amount of tracking occurring.

On an individual website standpoint, I agree with you – the cookie popup law is obnoxious, and does a poor job of solving a technical problem that is better solved by just not retaining cookies. In fact, not retaining cookies – a better approach – exacerbates the cookie popups, because it ensures that a site cannot track you to remember whether it has already shown the cookie popup, so makes it do so all the time. I’m just saying that I’m not sure that providing a user a way to avoid tracking on an individual website is actually the goal.

On a related note, though…generally-speaking, I don’t care much about EU regulation insofar as it doesn’t affect me. People in the EU can do what they want, and if they want to place restrictions that affect people in the EU, fine, whatever. I start to have a problem, though, when websites present cookie popups to me. I’m not in the EU.

Not to mention horribly flat eq. No dynamic integrity whatsoever.

So, I am not a vinyl fan, and do not own any. And I agree that the “quality argument” about vinyl being analog and thus being higher fidelity is pretty senseless. But a couple of points:

Vinyl avoided the loudness war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7-inch singles.

Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as “victims of the loudness war”.

Because of the limitations of the vinyl format, the ability to manipulate loudness was also limited. Attempts to achieve extreme loudness could render the medium unplayable. Digital media such as CDs remove these restrictions and as a result, increasing loudness levels have been a more severe issue in the CD era.

I’d guess that audio recorded with the expectation that it would be played on vinyl is probably optimized for that format

Same idea for old headphones or amplifiers or whatever. I don’t know specifics.

LCD and LED displays, in 2024, are pretty much across-the-board better than CRTs in 1990. But a lot of old video game emulators try to reproduce artifacts that resulted from low display fidelity of CRTs. Scanlines. Blurriness. Blooming. Curvature of display. Even a bit of color fringing or the like. That’s because the game was designed to be played on the system in question (or one closely approximating it). The art very frequently looks better, less jagged.

I have magnificent MIDI soundfonts that can make any MIDI audio played on my computer sound vastly more realistic than it does on old, 1990s computer synth hardware or on something like a Super Nintendo. But the music can sound much worse, because the artists were designing the soundtrack with an eye to making it sound pleasant on hardware that had the characteristics of the time.

Album art

Vinyl records were not very space efficient. But that meant that artists had a huge amount of space to create album artwork compared to CDs.

That’s not something that I’m personally into, but some people really are.

Now, all the above being said, I don’t own vinyl or a turntable and have no interest in ever getting one. But there are some arguments that I can understand for why people may prefer them.

Saving accounts are just a great resource for banks. Their returns are always less than inflation so you’re basically always losing money with them.

Yep, S&P 500 or Russel 2000 is all you really need.

Of course, but the people who are constantly talking about “Stocks” and “The Market” are usually constantly trading, wheeling, dealing, doing all sorts of shit and then trying to brag about how smart they are cause they’re “hustling” while… barely keeping up with or not keeping up at all with those broad index funds you already mentioned.

I pump Large Growth and call it a day.

I’ve had stocks in a couple forms over my lifetime and after a while, both times I have pulled all my money out.

The first time was shortly after the 2008 crash. All those reassuring words my investing manager person told me were simply sweet nothings. I decided that taking the hit of losing half my money was a life lesson and used the remaining half to go travel and live a life for myself. That investing manager later went on to have a covid party out of defiance for masking requirements, caught covid and died. Felt good knowing my stranger-danger alarms were working even if I didn’t understand my decisions fully at the time.

The second time I simply put my money into a low risk, government stock option for a few years. After watching global leaders fumble the handling of a global pandemic, I lost faith my own government to have my best interest in mind. I pulled my money out again.

I personally feel super uncomfortable allowing other people to make money off my money that I am risking. Even if it is low risk. It make me feel exploited.

Ultimately, I decided I don’t need my money to work for me because I don’t even want to work. I hate the concept of money. To me, money just disconnects us from community and nature.

If you are curious to how I live, it’s with very little. I spent a number of years of my life living out of a 34 liter sized backpack. Living minimally while making sure what I owned had meaning, purpose or intention transfered over to when I finally started settling into a certain location.

Ugh, yep, I’m far from alone in saying I’d really rather not have any

Add getting married to that for me. I enjoy not being legally bound to another human

I realized far too late that most mainstream media is about maximizing views and not telling those stories that worth telling as you said. They start with an interesting idea for a story and if it gets popular it just drags on to get the most amount of eyeballs for as long as possible only for it to end long after it should have with an unsatisfying ending.

And don’t get me started on injecting soap opera esque character drama just to keep the lowest common denominator inerested (looking at you For All Mankind)

Same, I never saw a MCU movies for instance

The French word for “entertainment” is “divertissement” and you don’t need to know French to get what it is: a diversion from things that matter.

Electric cars don’t have more data collection than other modern cars. They all collect your data, regardless of the energy source.

This needs to be regulated.

I think people are too dumb to realize places in the rurals must have them. Like in Alaska, it isn’t optional with those bears.

I’ve come across a black bear while hunting small game and was very close in dense brush. People that have never experienced that kind of interaction lack the relevant info to have a say. While at the same time, after moving to Los Angeles for a couple of decades, owning guns here is for people with mental issues. One law can not cover all situations; it is impossible to federate. It is used as a distraction topic to avoid legislating reasonably against the loopholes of the oligarchy. It is the same reason why the news cycle camps on an election long before it is a relevant issue; there is no pressure to create reasonable legislation that would stop the privateers.

People who are on the move a lot. Yeah, USB batter packs are a thing but that’s far more annoying than not. I also second the person mentioning already having wired ones.

Even if you don’t use wired headphones, others shouldn’t be forced to share your lifestyle if they have another preference. This is just selfish

Bluetooth beacons are a thing. You can effectively track someone through a store to the point where you can recreate their steps all the way down to the product level.

Also, wireless headphones are just another thing to keep charged and are uncomfortable to fall asleep when wearing while the dongle means I can either charge or listen.

I get that removing the port helps with waterproofing and one less hole to clean and yea, it is 100% a personal choice.

I agree that the difference is small, but it feels like enshitification and an anti consumer choice to me and that frustrates. Typing this from my jackless phone 🤳. I have DAC dongles everywhere.

It’s absolutely a personal preference. Some people don’t care, others do. A 3.5mm headphone jack is a requirement for any phone that I buy along with a micro SD card slot. It’s getting more and more difficult to find devices that meet those requirements but that’s a choice that I make. Along with unlockable bootloader and the ability to be rooted, but that’s a whole different issue.

3.5mm headphone jack just works with anything you plug into it and it has for decades. No pairing, no charging headphones or earbuds, no latency, better sound quality, no having to choose between charging the device and having audio output OR find the right OTG dongle.

A lot of people don’t care about this at all and that’s fine. But for those of us who do I really hope that these options don’t disappear entirely just to sell more Bluetooth earbud garbage and cloud storage subscriptions.

I prefer wired headphones (perhaps after bad experiences with infrared headphones), and used to only want phones with headphone jacks…

But the latest one I got doesn’t have one, so I had to buy an adapter. Honestly, it doesn’t seem a big deal now I have it? I can keep the adapter in the same case I keep my earbuds in, and they’re decently cheap.

1. Adaptor is extra
2. My car only supports music via aux port
3. I already have wired headphones

If rather replace a $5 pair of earbuds every year or so than a $30 pair of wireless earbuds that lasts a year if you’re lucky and only works if you remembered to charge them. Also, I hate Bluetooth because its unreliable and a pain in the ass to get stuff to actually connect. It takes 1 entire second to plug an audio cable into an audio port. You can’t beat that.

It’s not the jack itself, but rather what it represents. The ability to simply and easily do what you want with a device you paid potentially thousands of dollars for, and it was taken away for no better reason than to save a few cents, or mimic a more successful company that wanted to save a few cents. Similarly, easily swappable batteries. The battery is likely the first component in a device to die, and when it does fuck you, buy a whole new phone. I used to never put my phone on a charger; I had two batteries and I’d just switch them out every morning, easy and simple. That feature was taken away by greedy megacorps who refuse to make a product that I actually want to buy, instead I have to settle for a worse product that costs more than it needs to and does less than what its replacing.

One would love renting because they’ve managed to find the sweet spot that is an area where things are relatively quiet and peaceful. Management actually cares. Tenants keep to themselves. Things are relatively retained in condition.

But if you’re living in a complex opposite of that, yeah you’ll hate everything about renting. Tenants who make you wonder how they scrounge enough money to pay monthly rents with how they behave. Management who you wonder how they keep their jobs with how they handle things and allow said problematic tenants to come rent from them. You’ll be getting e-mails of management telling you “oh, package room has to be monitored now because package theft is now a problem” or “we’ll be closing the pool down for the rest of the season because children and tenants can’t behave”

And just a bunch of other issues.

Seems like you’re describing renting in an apartment complex or similar. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison to owning a single family home.

Not that you’ve raised bad points. Renting does have the benefits you’ve described, though lawn care in my experience is hit and miss. The issue is getting these benefits must cost something. So long as having them doesn’t mean the rent is double the mortgage, then it’s worthwhile.

Otherwise, renting is just another more expensive option for all the people that can’t afford the upfront cost of getting into the housing market.

Which country? In France and Germany tenants are expected to do all of that by themselves. On top of financing their landlord’s cocaine, of course.

Edit: actually in Germany it’s often the opposite, landlords will tell you about how difficult it is to own a place while sucking your blood off. Shitty country

I shovel the driveway when it snows, takes 20 minutes and is good exercise. I don’t pay a repair guy to fix stuff, I do it myself. I mow the lawn once a week and it’s a nice chance to get outside for half an hour. I don’t maintain a swimming pool since I don’t have one. If I have problems with my neighbors I make them brownies and talk to them. And all the money I pay into my mortgage is going into an asset, not some other fuckstick’s pockets.