Instigate

While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!

I had a little chuckle-up myself

If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.

As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.

I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.

I always used to use a 3PA that had no ads or recommendations, just my own curated sub list, and I honestly loved that. There were definitely echo chambers but things worked well for me as long as I stayed conscious to that. Then when the APIpocalypse happened I browsed reddit on the web and in their official app for the first time in almost ten years and just noped right the fuck off.

At one point in my feed it went:

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• Suggested Subreddit
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• Post from subscribed feed
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Like, only 1/6 items were things I had actually asked to see. It was atrocious. Default reddit is absolutely cancer now, and I really struggle to empathise with people who are still using it vanilla without any extensions or domain changes.

…does the chicken’s power level need to be over 9000 in order to be safe to eat?

And even those self-imposed selective forces are ever-changing and vary quite wildly from context to context across the globe and across the socioeconomic spectrum. Modern human evolution is really fascinating.

I think he’d feel this similarly devalues it.

I respect Watterson too much to assume his stance.

Well… which is it? Do you respect him too much to assume his stance or are you assuming he’d feel this similarly devalues it?

Holy shit, is this why lowly assistants are colloquially called gophers?!? I never drew the connection. Sometime we just take weird words or phrases for granted without thinking about their etymology.

That’s a fair call. I just think all reasonable measures should be taken to limit the attractiveness of vapes to children, and that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s not a necessary piece, but I think it would have helped as part of a suite of measures to regulation. I think you’re right in that online glorification definitely had a role to play here as well.

If the government, 5-10 years ago when it would have been apropos to do so, looked into vaping and drew up specific regulations to have legal vaping, we wouldn’t have the issue we have today. Instead, because of almost a decade of inaction, we now have a new generation of nicotine addicts that they’re hurriedly trying to stop.

We needed regulated, plain-packaged and limited-flavour vapes available to legally buy at a reasonable price to quash out both smoking and prevent kids from getting addicted, but that horse has already bolted.

The cynic in me says they intentionally didn’t regulate vapes because the science wasn’t ready yet, and they didn’t want to accept any blame for legalising something that could end up to be pretty harmful in the long term. So, because they didn’t want to accept that risk then we now have a whole generation of vapers whose health issues we’ll be dealing with for 80+ years to come.

Spoken as an ex-smoker, current vaper as a smoking cessation method.

Holy fucking shit mate, I’m a social worker who works with people experiencing violence and fuck you highlighted the issue far better than I ever could. Thank you for giving me the tools to better explain myself when I need to.

I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.

This is absolutely what a ‘Smurf’ account is - someone who is very experienced or has a significant backing behind them accrued from other account(s) creating a newer account to pose as an inexperienced player in order to be matched with them. In World of Warcraft, a ‘Smurf’ is a character that you intentionally don’t let past a certain level and throw a tonne of gold and gear at so that when they come up against regular players that level they have an insane advantage.

Well, yes and no. Paying that fine once would just be a cost of doing business, but now that the precedent has been set if they continue to do it they’ll continue to get fined in that order. Those fines won’t need court cases, so they’ll need to be paid quickly and in full. Sure, the fine they received didn’t really hurt them but it will change their behaviour. It will also prevent others from engaging in the same behaviour.

I don’t think the EU wants to bankrupt companies like Apple - it’s not in the collective best interest. They need to guide behaviour by setting up punishments that are deterring but not destructive. I think €500m fits that pretty well - it’s akin to giving a child a timeout while their friends play or a smack on the back of the hand. It’s doing what it’s intended to do.

Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.

Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.

High-heeled shoes were invented in Persia for cavalrymen and later used by sharpshooters. Men wear flowing cloth garments like skirts/dresses in many extant cultures. Men used to play all of the female roles in Western plays, in full clothing and makeup. Men have been removing and shaping body hair since the ancient Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. Even as recently as the 1970s men would wear cropped tops and short-shorts.

There are so many examples to deconstruct things that we view as feminine or masculine as being entirely arbitrary, culturally-locked and era specific. It’s all socially constructed, and therefore can be deconstructed - but only if you’re willing or able to engage in reflection.

Ahh okay, so it’s not confirmatory for the diagnosis but rather assessing the impact of living with Coeliac? That makes sense. I’m having a full endoscopy/colonoscopy later this year for a similar purpose. Fingers crossed everything comes up clear for you mate!

Out of curiosity, why are they doing a colonoscopy rather than a gastroscopy for Coeliac confirmation? The disease affects only the small intestine, and so an upper small intestinal biopsy is sufficient and doesn’t require uncomfortable fasting/dietary practice before the procedure, and is a cheaper, quicker and safer procedure.

My confirmation was blood test and then gastroscopy - after the biopsy it was confirmed.