By that token, I would also recommend the one-season X-Files spin-off ‘The Lone Gunmen’. It can come across as a bit hokey for the first few episodes, but they found their pace and it became really enjoyable. I don’t think it was ever meant to be more than a single - and, by then-current standards, short - season but I really enjoyed it. The show blended the comic relief of the three geeks from the main series with some more serious storytelling and even had an episode with a plot that resembled a later real-life world-changing event.

Ich bin 2004 ausgewandert, und habe beide Stücke noch in Erinnerung als vor meiner Auswanderung geschehen.

Scheisse, ich werde alt…

Devil’s advocacy is supposed to be, ultimately, constructive to the discussion. If that’s what you’re doing, then good on you. A lot of people just do it to throw a spanner in the works.

The only thing worse than people misusing the term ‘enshittification’ are people who criticise that but can’t be bothered to get their facts straight.

No, it’s not a meaningless buzzword. And no, it was not made up by nostalgic millennials. It would have taken you a mere minute of online research to figure that out yourself.

‘Playing Devil’s advocate’.

Mostly because most people who use it do so in glaringly wrong ways.

I suggest you read up a bit on how and by whom the term was coined and what it actually means. It’s by no means ‘vague’ and it is also a bit more than just repackaging and selling something already known. I suspect many people using the term aren’t even fully aware of what it describes and, crucially, what is being proposed to reduce the effects it describes.

Lucky Number Slevin

Man On Fire

Syriana

Equilibrium

And for some solid Australian cinema: Mystery Road

Ja, ist schon ein bisschen eine ‘Wasser macht nass’ Meldung. Wenn die Politik nur endlich mal ernsthaft was dagegen unternähme, und zwar nicht nur Verbote, sondern auch richtige Hilfe für Suchtkranke. Wir wissen schließlich, dass diese Spiele aufs perfideste darauf zugeschnitten sind, Leute süchtig zu machen. Diese Branche sollte eigentlich nur in strengstens regulierter Form existieren.

Glücksspiel ist in Australien eine ernsthafte Krise, aber weder Staatsregierungen noch der Bund unternehmen bislang etwas ernsthaftes dagegen. In fast jedem Pub gibt es Spielmaschinen (im Prinzip elektronische einarmige Banditen - ‘Pokies’ genannt) sowie Keno, ein andauerndes Tippspiel. Überall wird man mit Werbung für Sportwetten zugeschüttet. Und ständig liest man in den Medien Berichte darüber, wie sich Leute immer wieder um ihre ganze Habe spielen und wetten, wie gefährlich die Spielsucht ist, und was da für Unmengen an Geld im Spiel sind.

Thing is, I am actually Gen X. Early even. And I look at the Boomers and see the generation who kept pulling up the ladder. They got free education and privatised it to make it expensive for us. They got free healthcare and privatised it to make it expensive. They got into the housing market for cheap and started using it as an investment and speculation vehicle, making it harder for each subsequent generation to get into it. They were pretty much the last generation in which it was possible to raise a family on a single income. Climate change is front and center of mind in my generation, we’ve known for over 30 years what’s coming. When you look at those who most fervently oppose climate change action - all old fogeys, and I say that being very conscious of the fact that I am approaching ‘old fogey’ status from the perspective of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

I can only imagine how todays teenagers and young adults feel…

Teenagers today were born in the aftermath of a global financial crisis, are seeing war after war after war, grow up with the knowledge that the world is going to shit and the older generations aren’t willing to do anything about it. They see everyone pull up the ladder behind them, the ‘fuck you I got mine’ mentality is everywhere.

And TikTok is to blame for their mental health?

Specific to subway surfing: I’m 46, and I know this stuff happened when I was a kid. There were no social media back then to show you, but somehow kids still these got stupid ideas. It seems like social media is just the new video games are the new comic books are the new heavy metal is the new whatever scapegoat society wants to use to blame for its own deliberate shortcomings in bringing up the next generation.

A decade ago 1TB SSDs were rare and, like all new things in tech, expensive.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with it being an interest-free loan, if it serves to keep a business over water and saves jobs. To me that’s an appropriate use of taxpayer funds. I’m all for taxpayer subsidies if they are balance-positive to the taxpayer, i.e. jobs are preserved and the subsidies result in meaningful economic activity.

What’s bad is when otherwise profitable businesses use threats of job cuts and closures to obtain taxpayer bailouts so they can keep paying big bonuses and shareholder dividends. A lot of that happened through COVID, and the taxpayer threw billions at big business for very little in return. So maybe restrictions on layoffs and such would need to be written into a system like that. The punitive aspects need to incentivise the intended behaviour and strongly disincentivise the wrong behaviour.

Isn’t that pretty much the short version of what I said?

Big corporations begging taxpayer bailouts and then using them on bonuses and dividends. It’s a humongous waste of money that does nothing but enrich the wealthy. Most of the time it doesn’t even save jobs.

If, as a large corporate, you want a bailout from the taxpayer, then the government/state will take a portion of your shares in escrow, equivalent in value to the amount of money you’re asking for or getting. Those shares (in case of publicly traded companies) are withdrawn from the stock market, become non-voting shares and are frozen at their price at that time. Within a to-be-determined time period (five years maybe) the corporation, if it gets profitable again, can buy back all or part of the shares from the government at that price per share - thus returning money to the taxpayer. Anything that’s left after five years, the government can do with as it sees fit - sell them at market price (thus recovering the spent money), or keep them use them to vote/control the company.

There probably is a lot wrong with this proposal. But something needs to be done to discourage big business from hoovering up taxpayer money like it’s going out of fashion. Most of the time the taxpayer is getting absolutely no value from that spend.

It’s because they think only other people’s feelings should get fucked, not their own.

Ask that question again when it’s a site that you need to use.

SSDs were relatively new in 2010, and priced accordingly. Now it’s just about increasing sizes and (hopefully) reliability. I just don’t think that all of a sudden we’ll have huge cheap SSDs - people are used to a certain price point and manufacturers will take advantage of that.

Only a week or two ago people were arguing on Lemmy that the fact Microsoft wants to use this facility shows nuclear is economically viable.

I was wondering how they could keep a straight face…

I watched the first one and know a lot of people who did. I even know people who went to see the second one.