• 244 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • 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?




  • Indoor smoking bans in public places made sense, but this is just dumb as fuck.

    Second-hand cigarette smoke is a health hazard when frequently ingested and it was probably refreshing to not have everything smell like tobacco. But this harmed the hospitality sector and made smokers far less inclined to go out drinking. A lot of pubs shut after the 2007 smoking ban introduced by the UK and the hospitality sector hasn’t really recovered since. A good ‘best of both worlds’ approach would have been to allow larger establishments to have a ventilated indoor smoking area and make it a soft-ban, but unfortunately big tobacco is the enemy.

    And now Keir Starmer (British PM) wants to push through a similar outdoor smoking ban to what the EU are proposing, where it would become illegal to light up outside a hospital or in a pub beer garden.

    This moronic plan would basically kill what is left of the hospitality industry, and if Keir Starmer’s grand master plan to solve our country’s housing crisis is to make more pubs shut so greedy parasitic landlords and property developers can snap them up and turn them for a profit, then he’s gonna be remembered as the UK’s worst prime minister. And believe me when I say that the Tory bastards who killed thousands with austerity measures, dragged us kicking & screaming out of the European Union, partied in 10 Downing Street while we were forced to lock down from COVID, and who crashed our economy with tax cuts have put up some stiff competition.

    Fun fact, you used to be able to smoke on airplanes, and the air quality on flights actually decreased after smoking bans were put in place, because the regulations around air conditioning were also cut.




  • 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.








  • 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.








  • Clbull@lemmy.worldtoFacepalm@lemmy.worldJob application hell
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    9 days ago

    There’s a very good way of gauging how much of a dystopian shithole our world has become, and that’s by simply watching quiz shows on daytime TV.

    Compare Who Wants To Be A Millionaire to The Chase. In its original run, WWTBAM had two milestones for answering 5 (£1,000) and 10 (£32,000) questions correct respectively. This meant that failing after one of these checkpoints guaranteed you that prize. The Chase on the other hand is a series of quick-fire pub quiz rounds with some notoriously difficult questions where you’re up against a professional quizzer and have to survive multiple rounds, before all the remaining contestants have to beat the ‘Chaser’ in a two-minute quick-fire round of pub quiz questions. Fail at any point? “You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!”

    The Chase is legitimately a much harder show where it is exponentially harder to actually win a cash prize as a contestant and that is one of the main reasons I fucking hate that show.

    Where am I going with this? With the way the economy, automation, AI, scarcity, human population growth, etc is going, we are one day going to reach a point where we’ll have to compete in game shows just to get a fucking job! If recruiters are making you record 2 to 5 minute video responses on a fucking job application, then we’re already part-way there.



  • 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.