The internet seems to have reduced close friendships in society. When I was growing up I had a clique, a crew. People you'd do stuff outside with. And they'd have your back and vice versa. We'd fist fight one day and the next we're best friends. In addition to friends from school or neighborhood ... there was family, cousins who were like siblings. Lots of friends and still friends with them because of Facebook. I noticed that "friendships" that form nowadays are basically fake. When I was a kid, and up into my late twenties, before people had smartphones etc. you could just go to your friends place for no reason. With people that I met after my twenties, I need a "reason" to go their place and also you have to worry about offending them and things like that. When you go to dinner you have to make sure you pay your part and vice versa. Is that friendship to keep accounts, especially when everyone is well off? When hanging out with friends I made before my thirties, sometimes I pay, sometimes they pay .. without anyone tracking turns or amounts. Sure I might have paid more times than my friend or vice versa. It doesn't matter. Friendship shouldn't be subject to conditions like a business. If someone is going through hardship you'd do everything to help, with zero expectation of it being returned.

Will you pay my down payment? I did all the right things according to slashdot but my credit score is still only in the low 700s, so it's not enough to access first time home buyers assistance.

Oops, we forgot to have a society women would want to have children in. Maybe try making it not massively disadvantageous in every way to have children. People's kids used to be low cost workers. Now they are just expensive. Defray those costs if you want people to have children.

If you want women to have kids then make it an attractive option. If you don't care enough to do that then you don't care.

"Maybe Kristi can do an ad for that too."

At least the costume will be cheaper for the taxpayer

It sounds like you're saying that ethnically diverse workplaces are killing dating because they produce more ethnically diverse societies while most people's dicks/pussies are racist and would prefer to live in a racially homogeneous ethnostate, am I understanding you correctly?

This is what I like to call the Post-Reaganite/Thatcherite Ruin Loop, it was born in the first world and now plagues all of it, but has spread well beyond that now with many ex-2nd-world and third-world countries having entered it at this point. It goes like this:

1. Hollow out the economy by transferring hefty chunks of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the rich.
2. When people inevitably have less kids due to their good education and access to birth control combined with lack of resources to raise children (reduced in step 1), complain about it and point out that it's bad for the economy.
3. To satisfy capital's desire for unsustainably cheap labor, bring in fresh suckers from poorer countries who aren't up to date on how much shittier things became in Step 1.
4. GOTO 1

Any society with a capitalist economy will be fighting endlessly repeating battles to keep from entering this loop, and given enough time having to fight, it will eventually lose one of those battles, and that's all it takes.

Ban contraception? How do you think a kid that is born to parents that didn't want to have kids turn out? Homicide rates have been decreasing for a reason. Compare any country's homicide rate to what it was in the 70s and 80s or before.

That particular exploit, though highly sophisticated and hard to create, would have been flagged by static and dynamic analysis. Even a basic static analysis tool would have found that the loop can create an overflow.

they're Finnished.

Here's what's happened. Most humans don't want a bunch of kids. It's not actually programmed into us, what's programmed into us is the desire for sex. If human nature was such that we wanted to have kids, sex would suck. It would be undesirable, wouldn't feel good at all to do it. I mean, why do you think nature made sex desirable? It feels good because nature felt we wouldn't just do it voluntarily for the sake of reproduction. The concept of reproducing itself is not compelling enough, nature had to trick us. Most prosperous countries see population collapse (it's not Europe specific .. check Japan/South Korea for example). It's also happening to the native populations of wealthy Middle Eastern countries (their population growth is entirely the result of labor import). With education and wealth, many humans have "realized" nature can't trick them into having kids. I'm not saying that's the case for everyone. But it's looking to me that a majority of humans don't want to have more than 1 or 2 kids. And there may even be a significant minority (10%) of humans that don't want any kids. Though that may be counteracted by the 5% of humans that want a bunch of kids.

Lol mickeysoft dildos with mod points

It's inertia, largely from government, but also institutionally. When businesses originally adopted Windows (3.x) there was a massive cost difference between Windows and anything else capable of doing the job of allowing users to run business applications, and in many cases the software simply wasn't there. Putting everyone on a Unix workstation would have cost 3x as much or more, even if the software existed. Putting them on X terminals and using centralized systems to support those would not have saved any money vs. Windows, at least not up front, and required a strong network.

Today they could switch, but now would have to face the cost of switching itself, and they would also find themselves incompatible with government in a number of cases.

Which word confused you, not-a-car-guy-coward?

Oh my poor sweet summer consumer.

You don't "purchase" games any more, you don't get a "copy". You get a time limited license that expires when you stop paying the ever increasing monthly fees. That's on top of the $100 entry fee per game you get charged.

This is why publishers hate Steam so much, it's not that the 30% is onerous, it's feck all for handling the transaction and customer service components, what they hate is that Steam doesn't enforce a subscription model.

There is no driver facing camera. It doesn't do it in response to the driver looking away from the road - it just pops the message up at random intervals.