I'm old enough to remember when the SEC took massive megacorporage mergers seriously and made sure to block exactly this kind of monopoly building. The Disney borg should never have been allowed to happen.
Yes yes, I'll just see myself out the door marked #okboomer
Thus we begin manifesting the "Canticle For Liebowitz" scenario, where human knowledge only survives in a very few niche pockets where some group of monastic weirdos managed to hold onto their passion for Scholasticism despite the fires of ignorance scouring the planet. Everything else is the product of SEO/LLM autocoprophagia. The Internet is no longer a human tool. The Internet is now just an inhuman centipede gradually necrotizing as it recycles its own filth endlessly.
This is the most beautiful thing I have ever read on social media. The fact that you know ACfL and how it applies perfectly in this context makes it even better.
Quick, find a way to monetize it.
There are many countries which banned handguns and yet hand guns are used by criminals. Citation: Canada.
OK, I've tried to ignore than overwhelming flood of off-topic replies in this thread but I can't just let this one go. "Canada" isn't a citation. Just using that word in a sentence does literally nothing at all to support or refute a claim. It's an almost comical real-world implementation of the chewbacca defense.
For the record, I don't have a horse in this fight. I have some views on gun control that brand me as a right-wing gun-crazy fanatic by my friends on the left, and some views that brand me as a gun-hating, America-hating despot by my friends on the right. I don't care about political branding; I care about independently verifiable facts in debate.
A citation to back up your claim means a link to a specific study or peer-reviewed article that makes the same claims you are asserting, with documented details to back up those claims. For example,
Left-handed people who binge-watch episodes of Matlock are more than sixteen times more likely to eat Nutella, according to this 1989 research paper from the Canadian Journal of Criminology.
See how that works? I cited a specific, peer-reviewed study which, in turn, cites independently verifiable facts to make its point. When someone demands a citation to back up your claim, do that instead of just saying "Canada" like that proves your point.
I admit I am an older poster and therefore my perspective is somewhat suspect, but doing our upbringing, we were taught that words do not actually hurt.>
Boomer here. This came up just yesterday in a conversation about our son's concerns that his daughter isn't getting enough socialization in her pre-K years. Relevant to this subject was her (the grandchild's) attempts to make new friends. She's just now discovering that not everybody is kind to her. And that's where the subject of this article comes into the conversation. She needs to learn two almost contradictory life skills:
B. that we should be able to ignore hurtful things said by others.
Yes, your friends shouldn't call you a $GENERIC_SLUR, but if he or she does, crying about it and seeking punishment will only make it worse. An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind, and all that.
So bringing this back to the real world: If you say hateful things, you're an unpleasant jerk. Full stop. Your community would be right to exclude you from conversations and social activities until you learn to play nice with others. And at the same time, if you feel offended by someone's words, don't look to the courts (or retaliation) for relief. You will literally suffer no harm at all hearing words that offend you. Maybe that person was having a bad day and not even aware how hurtful their words were. If they keep doing it, stop associating with them. Et voilà! Problem solved with nobody getting arrested or jailed.
TL;DR Both of you stop it or I'm turning this country RIGHT AROUND and taking us home so you can think about how you spoiled our nice society. Righty, quit being an arrogant jerk and calling your sister names. Lefty, quit being such a delicate snowflake that you find offense in everything. GET OVER YOURSELVES.
More likely they'll be "Hey Motherf****r!!"
My granddaughter will never, as long as she lives, be allowed to forget the time she was two and turned to get her father's attention by saying "Hey, Babe?!" in a perfect imitation of her mother's voice.
I would have thought that baby boomers are the employees most able and willing to return to office.
Well, you thought wrong. Hi, boomer here. I totally lucked out in the 90s when my home situation changed drastically and my wife and I thought I'd have to quit my job and become the SAHD while she became the primary breadwinner. When I told my boss this, she urged me to keep working for the company from home... which I did, with her defending me against an old-school upper management that still clung to the "if I can't see you, I can't manage you" mindset. As my seniority built up, my remote status protected me against more pushback against remotes.
Thankfully, my company wised up with a regime change right around the pandemic and they fully embraced the hybrid and/or fully remote models, so a number of my younger colleagues packed up and moved far away.
That being said, I realize that I lost out on nearly all promotions and bonuses by working remote. I was never there to glad-hand - I mean, "network" and kiss managerial butts to curry favor. But we went into it expecting that; from my family's point of view being home with the kids all day was a perk worth far more than a bigger paycheck. Here I am over 30 years with the company and basically in a holding pattern, only getting the minimal raises for inflation each year, while most of my colleagues from 10-20 years ago are in management. All I need is to hang on another few years and I can retire - poorer for it, but not at all burned out.
All of which is to say, there are a number of factors driving a preference for remote work vs. on-premises. Based on the wide age ranges of my friends who did and didn't choose to go remote, I'd say age doesn't even enter into it.
I have no idea what a For You Page is. I've never seen such a thing, but it doesn't sound any good at all. What's stopping you from doing your own curating? When I'm interested in a topic, the first thing I do is get on a search engine and see what sites pop up that are relevant to the topic. I can even exclude keywords that I don't want to see like -facebook or -etsy or whatever.
Over the years I have accumulated dozens of sites that are one-off sources of interesting or entertaining content - webcomics, tutorials, blogs, games, local independent news, whatever. So I have a plain HTML document with those sites organized into categories, and that HTML document is my landing page whenever I open a browser window.
Yes, I could just dump them all into the bookmarks folder but it's easier to see everything at a glance on one big page clearly labeled "COMICS", "NEWS", "WEATHER", "GAMES", etc. Periodically I go through and visit some of the older links, so I can delete the ones that are no longer online (or convert them to archive.org links). Plus by directing the browser to my homegrown landing page, I don't get inundated with suggestions and ads from whatever default start page was installed with the browser.
Some of us greybeards even remember the very earliest tools for crawling the web looking for interesting content, like archie and veronica. I think I still have a folder full of URLs I gathered back in the late 1980s.
I hung on to my flip phone as long as I could, but the world kept changing around me: My company's employee access portals require a smartphone app to let you in to secure areas (and don't get me started about multi-factor authentication apps out the wazoo), for example. And once I gave up the fight and got the (cheapest, fewest-features possible) smartphone, I found some of the gadgets handy: The magnifier and flashlight apps to help me read tiny lettering on menus in poorly lit restaurants, the GPS, the camera when I don't feel like lugging my Nikon around with me, the clock so I don't have to also wear a wristwatch, etc. Yes, I lived 50+ years without those things but they sure make life easier.
You know what I don't have? Games. Social media of any kind. I do occasionally use the web browser to look up information that can't wait until I get home ("Hey, before we make the long drive to Colorado we should check and make sure the recycling center is open today") but it's not connected to any of my email accounts and I deliberately use a low data allowance plan so there's an incentive to stay offline as much as possible.
I go for days on end without ever looking at my phone (except for that thrice-accursed MFA authenticator). I use a desktop browser for a fixed amount of time to check with friends on social media and check my email. And all it took to free me from phone addiction was... choosing not to participate. I don't need that crap physically removed from my phone; I just need to decide it's not worth my time or attention. Why is that so difficult for people nowadays?
Re-reading the above made me realize what a self-righteous, virtue-signalling jerk I sound like. I make poor life choices every day! I'm just saying, phone addiction isn't one of them.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
