BraveSirZaphod

This behavior is literally millennia older than capitalism.

This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don’t usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

I did my first cruise this year, and honestly had an absolute blast. However, the extremely important factor here is that it was a gay cruise (from the company Atlantis), and so it was absolutely nothing like the standard experience. For one week in the Caribbean, it was basically just a giant non-stop party. No kids, no entitled retirees, just you and 5000 other gay men trying to enjoy as much debauchery as can be fit into a week.

There were some port stops as well which were nice, but the main draw was very much the parties that would go on all night and through the morning. The music and production was incredible, and most of the other entertainment options were also swapped out for more gay-oriented options, so instead of bingo or whatever it is the boomers do, it was drag queens doing Britney Spears singalongs and things like that. And because everyone is gay, there’s already a shared common experience and identity so people tend to be very friendly and welcoming.

Also, if you’re single or otherwise available, the amount of sex you could have is genuinely ridiculous, though I was there with my boyfriend so we mostly just enjoyed the parties and made some great new friends. I had such a fun time, contrary to my expectations, that we’ve actually signed up to do another one in Europe later this summer, and that winter Caribbean cruise will probably become an annual thing for us.

Who is ‘they’?

You’re acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who’ve focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.

How do you know that these parents haven’t also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?

Well, on the plus side, now you know to actually read contracts before you choose to sign them.

In the meantime, enjoy your iPhone.

If the cost of not voluntarily choosing to get myself into bad contracts is being a smug asshole, so be it.

If the phone costs $500, they simply increase your monthly bill by $500 / 24 months = $20 a month.

It’s a bit more complicated than this, and they’ll likely have some interest built in as well, but functionally, it’s no different than being given a loan to buy the phone and then paying the loan off over the two years. That’s why carriers often require a credit check before doing this.

I’ve personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don’t really have any regrets there. I’ve seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I’d never have known about otherwise.

I can’t imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.

So Verizon gave you a phone for no upfront cost, and they’re shitty for making you pay for it if you decide to dash away early?

Fascinating threshold for shitty behavior you have.

I’m gonna take a wild guess that most Lemmy people use Android, and the suggestion that someone might prefer an iPhone is triggering to someone whose sense of superiority comes from their choice of operating system for some reason.

The idea was that Biden was rigging the game and then Kelce would propose to Swift after winning, who would funnel the insane amount of media hype into a Biden endorsement. Kelce wins the Super Bowl, Swift gets attention and a happy boyfriend, and Biden gets a big endorsement.

They probably don’t know that they’ve been dating for less than a year.

Violent revolution because of an operating system is genuinely one of the most terminally online ideas I think I’ve ever read in my life.

Everybody said they’d cancel Netflix over it

What’s probably more likely is that the “everybody” that you heard from was an incredibly unrepresentative sample of people from a bubble of nerdy tech enthusiasts.

Perfectly harmless is overstating the case. It is undoubtedly much less harmful than alcohol, but there are still some detrimental effects.

Of course, there are also significant, much more so, detrimental effects to soda and to sitting down. There’s a level of risk for which society has solidly decided that the choice is up to the individual, and marijuana undoubtedly should be in that category, but we shouldn’t pretend that there are literally zero negative effects.

You’re gonna have a hard time defining “drug” in a way that all people agree with.

Presumably you don’t mean prescription medications, though of course many of them are abused. Does caffeine count? Coffee is linked to many measurable health benefits. What about alcohol? No health benefit and a clear risk of abuse, but there’s also thousands of years of social history, and I think plenty of people would say that, at least sometimes, the benefits of a great night out with friends or meeting new people and developing new relationships is more than worth the cost.

Then you have things like hallucinogens, which generally have only minor health concerns and were mostly criminalized for political reasons. Marijuana is literally a plant, and while the health profile is mixed, at least for some people, it’s without a doubt a net positive. In comparison, and especially relevant to Mexico, there’s heroin, which is incredibly addictive and dangerous while also funneling tons of money into the cartels.

I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but more to make the case that any kind of policy or position on “drugs” as a whole is way too widely scoped. There are too many different substances with drastically different social and medical costs and benefits. Probably no one should ever consume heroin or meth. People with a risk of schizophrenia should absolutely not touch LSD, but people with PTSD may genuinely benefit from MDMA. Alcoholics should never touch alcohol, but your average person having a few drinks on a Friday night out with some friends probably isn’t making a bad decision.

No, that’s not what I mean by ‘falsifiable’.

That there exists some external force or entity that is completely outside the realm of anything observable is not a falsifiable claim, because there is absolutely nothing we could ever observe that would absolutely contradict it. It is, quite simply, not a statement about the observable universe, so it’s definitionally outside the domain of science. Science will never disprove the existence of Heaven, because Heaven is by definition not observable.

That’s a very different kind of claim from “If you’d sneakily observed Jesus’ crucifixion and followed him as he was buried, you’d eventually see him come back to life, move a stone away from his tomb, and wander up into Heaven after having a few chats with friends”.

To be clear, I’m not saying that those religious claims have been absolutely proven false, only that they hypothetically could be proven false. Of course, there are other religious claims that have been proven false, like young earth creationism, but those have a funny habit of being either abandoned or significantly re-interpreted after conflicting facts come about. It’s also probably just a coincidence that the more fantastical claims all tend to be from long enough ago that gaps in the historical record provide a significant amount of fuzziness. Why God got tired of performing miracles after the invention of the camera is just one of those mysteries.

It needs to be emphasized that I am not making the absolute positive claim that Muhammad never flew to Jerusalem. What I’m saying is that someone with sufficient information could possibly make a clear determination of the truth. Muhammad himself, for instance, presumably knew the truth of the matter. It’s falsifiable in that it could be falsified given sufficient observed information, unlike the existence of Heaven, which categorically cannot be.

(It’s also worth mentioning that the Qur’an itself actually contains only the slightest and briefest mention of the Night Journey; the story is greatly expanded upon in the hadiths, which he himself did not directly write but are rather traditionally attributed to him).

The vast majority of religions do make explicit falsifiable claims about the natural universe that go far beyond the existence of a god.

A random Jewish preacher coming back to life, for instance, or a random Arab religious reformer casually taking a midnight flight to Jerusalem.

I think the entire point was actually that no single party can unilaterally make that decision. People who want to interact with Meta can, and those who don’t can simply not.

If you don’t wanna deal with them, be on a server that doesn’t federate with them.

They - and literally anyone else - can already do that. Mastodon data is totally public.

I know corporate America doesn’t really deserve any meaningful amount of good faith, but for whatever truth is worth, “sustainable” in a business context has essentially always meant financials. A platform like Twitch is generally going to have really high operational costs between infrastructure, network traffic, engineers, and revenue sharing with streamers, and given that Amazon doesn’t operate Twitch for charity any more than you do your job for free, they need to make sure that they actually have sufficient revenue to be able to make the finances sustainable. I won’t pretend to know how profitable it is, if it even is yet, but cutting employees is obviously a pretty easy lever to pull to reduce costs if your operations can get away with it.