It’s easy to terminate staff when you keep the real reasons hushed.

Hard to prove discrimination, union busting or workplace bullying when all you gotta do is set unrealistic targets, PIP those who fail to meet their goals and push them out through disciplinary/capability processes.

It’s how I got scapegoated for department-wide failings and shitcanned from Teleperformance years ago…

It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon

I mean… Yes but also no.

Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.

What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.

As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?

I grew up on most of the examples you quoted. They’re Emmy award winning masterpieces compared to Skibidi Toilet.

In all seriousness… Skibidi toilet is probably one of the egregious examples of brain rot in our society. Gen alpha is truly cooked.

I’m in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.

Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.

Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.

Actually, the screenshots of the ban messages were found via a Google image search and are not me.

But yeah, Reddit has a problem with rude power mods swinging their banhammer. It’s been documented for years.

This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.

We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.

Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.

That’s a very tough question. Aside from karaoke, which I mainly do with a friend group I meet at least once a week, I don’t really have anything to look forward to.

Work has turned monotonous with a lot of downtime and I feel like I’ve learned nothing new in the past few months. A lot of my friendships have been falling apart for their own reasons. Not gonna elaborate further on that.

My love life is basically non-existent and despite having tried paid dating apps, it feels I can’t get anywhere at all. The latest shock I’ve had was over a week ago when I found out a lady I met sixteen months ago through Facebook Dating who had continually been ducking out of meeting me or committing because of her chronic fatigue is now giving another guy that confessed his feelings to her a shot… I feel like I’ve been led on big time.

I turn 33 years old in less than an hour and I’m not particularly excited for it.

Online dating apps. I’d:

1. Break up the monopoly that Match Group and Bumble Inc hold on the market, by working with the Federal Trade Commission and UK Competitions & Markets Authority.

2. Introduce caps on what apps can charge for Premium features. Charging the same price as several World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV subscriptions just to see likes is scummy as fuck.

3. Introduce mandatory ID verification to dissuade fake users, and have very strict regulations on how said data is processed and stored, with massive fines for data breaches that could easily have been avoided.

4. Have a correct appeals process towards account penalties/closure and outlaw the use of shadowbanning.

Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.

Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.

This just makes me want to switch to Linux.

I’m autistic and I’ve never heard the term ‘aneurotypical’ before…

If you asked me fifteen years ago if I wanted to live in the United States, I would have jumped on the first ship to Staten Island in a heartbeat.

Nowadays I don’t even want to visit the country, and unjust bullshit like this is a big reason why. Y’all have a serious problem with allowing your police forces to do whatever the hell they want and argue “qualified immunity” for things that would land you significant prison time in another developed country.

I really question why there’s still a lifelong waiting list to apply for a visa to work in the US, when the state of the country is actually quite bleak…

Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

To be totally honest you have nothing to apologize for. Dogs and cats are metabolically different to humans and cannot survive on a vegan diet unlike us. Forcing obligate carnivore pets on vegan diets is certainly animal abuse.

I remember when there was a growing campaign to ban r/nonewnormal on Reddit due to it being a hub of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this led to a blackout much like the later API protests.

Rather than read the room and introduce a new rule banning medical disinformation, Reddit’s Tintin-looking moron of a CEO instead threw out tonnes of BS statistics on brigading likely plucked out of his own sphincter, and banned the subreddit because their activity exceeded this arbitrary percentage he made up.

And before you tell me this guy’s figures were legit, aren’t we forgetting that he pathologically lied about his interactions with the Sync developer? Spez is a snake.

Some good examples:

• Fat acceptance and body positivity. Obesity is glorified (even fetishized) when it’s a woman, whereas obese men are shunned. Have you noticed that nobody in the fat acceptance movement is vouching for the 300lb basement dwellers?

• Older ladies who date younger guys are called cougars, whereas if you flip the gender roles, an older man dating a younger lady half his age is going to be labelled a pedophile, even if she’s of-age. Just look at at the anger surrounding Tobey Maguire (48 years old) dating a 20 year old actress. There are people who legitimately think men like him should be hunted for sport.

• The amount of effort you have to put into your dating profile. Women have the opposite problem of being inundated with matches even with minimal effort.

So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.

Negotiate a peace agreement between NATO, the European Union, Ukraine and Russia, with the aim of:

• Keeping control of Crimea and small parts of the Donbas in exchange for the land Ukraine gained in their Kursk incursion. This would give Russia access to a second sea port that can be used all year round, and unlike Kaliningrad, isn’t an exclave sandwiched between NATO powers.

• Negotiating the immediate release of all POWs on both sides.

• Obtaining a neutrality agreement to ensure Ukraine will not join NATO (EU or EFTA membership is fine.) Not really anything we can do about Finland or Sweden joining.

• Joint Russian and Western aid in rebuilding Ukraine.

• Lifting all economic sanctions (including those placed on Russia before 2022), travel restrictions and readmission back into the G7, Council of Europe, FIFA, IOC, etc.

I used to be hugely into World of Warcraft.

The more I think about it, what ruined the game for me wasn’t a particular update or new game feature. It was the community, or rather how much it has degraded into a hotbed of elitism, toxicity and greed.

WoW is the kind of community where you’ll be ostracized from joining groups unless you already have a high ranking. And even if you get into a group, people will abandon the group or boot you out and call you a “boosted retard” in the process over a minor error, like dying to a boss mechanic or not pressing the Bloodlust/Time Warp/Heroism button in time.

Blizzard doesn’t do anything, because Activision and Microsoft have spent years gutting out their customer support teams and installing automated systems in their place.