…Nintendo has removed online support for pretty much every other platform other than the switch. I get that this comes sooner for China than expected, but it was an inevitable outcome either way.

In terms of grassroots support, he’s been very effective. This map is from 2020 when there was an actual primary but it does paint the picture pretty well:

Source of graph (it’s paywalled but I found the image directly in the search results and copied it lol)

In some states, you can’t vote by mail except under specific circumstances, such as being a senior citizen or swearing that you’ll be out of state entirely on election day.

I’ve been able to nix so many intrusive web elements with the ublock picker tool, often without leaving a trace due to modern web design practices. The YouTube shorts shelf is one such case, and it’s shocking how well it worked!

In the US, there are still a lot from McCarthy-era sentiment and “Communist” is a pejorative within the general population. For instance, The Communist Control Act of 1954 is still on the books. Though it has issues as a law for being really vague, and hasn’t been used seriously against leftist organizing on account of that, it nonetheless remains and has never been outright challenged to the Supreme Court of the United States. Either way, it had a chilling effect, and was pretty successful as part of the US’s broader campaign to demonize communism and communist organizing.

Because of the way “Communism” and “Marxism” are used within US press and mainstream politics (especially by the Republican party), the average voter is conditioned to view them as bad words accordingly. The Democratic party, trying to court “moderate” voters within the political landscape here, all but refuses to touch those words with a 10-foot pole. It’s not part of their brand (and not part of their policy either, not by any stretch of the imagination).

Progressivism in my view is an umbrella term, but still pretty linked with liberalism as a movement in the sense that it’s mostly reformist, and acts a subgroup within the Democratic party. Most “Progressive” candidates for US political office are SocDems at most.

You can call it newspeak, but political movements arise under new/different names as the situation dictates, and often refer to different things. I’d argue that the point of newspeak within 1984 was actually to limit the evolution of language and restrict the development of new words/ideas, but I do get where you’re coming from on account of “progressive” being considered more politically correct.

Y’know, now that you mention it, the sealioning behaviour I’d been conditioned to expect is a big reason for why I spend so much time writing my comments and adding qualifying statements.

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

I spent like 40 hours on XC2 and uh, idk I really liked the world design but wasn’t a fan of the effectively gacha mechanics to unlock new fighters. The story seemed to have a really slow start (which I’m not necessarily against) but the combat wasn’t my thing unfortunately. The Japanese voice acting is definitely a lot better than the English, and was worth waiting for the download on even though I didn’t end up playing that far in.

Ideally, I agree wholeheartedly. American gun culture multiplies the damage of every other issue we have by a lot

One or more parents in denial that there’s anything wrong with their kids and/or the idea they need to take gun storage seriously? That’s the first thing that comes to mind, and it’s not uncommon in the US. Especially when you consider that a lot of gun rhetoric revolves around self defense in an emergency/home invasion, not having at least one gun readily available defeats the main purpose in their minds.

edit: meant to respond to django@discuss.tchncs.de

If they were conscripted tho?

Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.

I think the joke is that one would expect premarital sex to be between partners in a relationship, but technically any sex between two unmarried persons fits the definition? It’s extremely forced, to say the least

Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages silently and automatically truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

I know this might not be the most convenient solution, but learning to resolder mouse switches means you can just replace the faulty components (and maybe the sliders too) and just keep using the hardware that works for you. As long as you don’t have a mouse with that awful rubber that de-vulcanizes after about 3 years, and don’t mind the visual wear from your hand on the shell over time, you’ll easily 10x the life of most products manufactured with planned obsolescence. Logitech almost always cheaps out on the switches for their gaming mice, unfortunately. After replacing the switches on my g pro wireless when they started double-clicking after 2 years (almost exactly), it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

ifixit almost always has comprehensive teardown and rebuild instructions for popular peripherals. Bonus points is that whenever you take apart something to do a repair, you can clean out all the hard to reach places that collect random dust and debris. Can be kind of gross but is also pretty satisfying. Additional bonus points for being more sustainable with your consumer habits and minimizing e-waste in landfills!

If you’ve got a mechanical keyboard, you can do the same but it’s generally a lot more tedious since most have the switches soldered on, and LEDs double the amount of joints you have to deal with. I recently did just the WASD and a few other high-traffic keys on my board after one one of them failed, and it was a several hour process

Paywalled article

Oh yeah, it’s pretty terrible. Sometimes you can order meat from a deli/butcher counter and get it wrapped in wax paper but there’s the extra time spent to order it that way, and there’s a possibility that the wax is actually just plastic lining anyways.

Regardless, if you can find an alternative that works for you, any reduction in plastic is a good thing. It all exists on a sliding scale.

A lot of times, matters such as these should be seen as more risk management/reduction than risk elimination. A plastic lid has much less contact area than a whole plastic bottle, and single use bottles tend to shed more microplastics than reusable ones.

Just like the shopping cart theory itself, this is mostly just a thought experiment at this point in time.

The point of a protestation is to make it hard for others to ignore, and make it clear what the end condition is. I don’t plan on just starting to do this as an individual because it would have no impact; I still make sure my own carts get returned personally.

The point stands that our goodwill is frequently exploited for profit, often under the pretense that it’s just basic human decency.

I gotta be honest, my bf or I still make sure the cart goes back every time we shop, but I increasingly question whether I should bother. These grocery stores keep raising their prices well above inflation so they can pocket the rest and brag to shareholders about it, at the cost of people who actually shop there.

It’s tempting to say that if they’re going to play that game, they get no courtesy from me as a customer and can hire more cart collectors. It’s miniscule on an individual level, but it is unpaid labor.

There’s the argument that unreturned carts mostly inconvenience other customers, but honestly if the store is exploiting both customers’ goodwill and wallets, I think it’s fine to make the experience at that store just that little bit worse; maybe that last little push will encourage people to shop elsewhere (where it’s an option of course, i.e. not a small town).

I don’t feel this urge at stores like H Mart even though they have so many fewer return stalls and it’s often a longer walk to do so.

I guess this is kind of an antithesis to Shopping Cart Theory I’ve been developing in my head over the past little while. It’s conditional on the store itself being overtly greedy, but I think there might be something to it.