Put simply, we have better things to do now. No longer do we need to waste time by just hanging out because we don't have anything else to do. Yes, that's what we had to do, we spent time with friends because we literally had no other form of entertainment and what little entertainment their was usually required going somewhere which would be boring on your own.

Now we don't have that problem and the places we used to go (theatres, pubs, clubs, sporting venues, et al.) have responded to this by becoming even more expensive which means we spend even less time planning to go out because it's so unaffordable.

The world has changed and the relics of the past appear to have chosen slow death over adaption.

I get you're making a joke but the British never transported the hardend criminals to colonies (the whole reason they started Australia is that they couldn't send them to the American colonies any more), the reason for this is because Britain didn't want the people back after they finished their sentence so convicts when finishing their time would be given a parcel of land and permitted to work it, good land in the colonies seemed so abundant that there appeared to be no end of it.

For this reason, only petty and lesser criminals were sent, crimes such as theft, burglary and larceny, fraud, being in debt, or sedition. This was to reduce the population the ruling class didn't like hence debts and sedition were being used to transport the poor and Irish/Welsh/Scottish as displaying an Irish flag was considered sedition. Hence there is an abundance of Irish surnames in Australia. A lot of the English came over in the interbellum period (See: the land of milk and honey), some 70+ years since transportation stopped (1856 for those who wish to know).

Hardened criminals like rapists, murderers, politicians and the like were kept in ol' Blighty.

The overwhelming majority of Australia's population came from colonists rather than convicts and most of the colonists arrived in the 20th century (notably the interwar and post war migration booms).

There is, it involves parents doing *audible gasp* actual parenting and ensuring that kids are prepared to deal with things that they find difficult and/or uncomfortable. Seeing as the parent vote is a twofer (two votes for one policy) blaming parents for not parenting is a sure-fire way to get unelected.

So politicians of all stripes take the easy answer which inevitably doesn't work so they take the next easy answer which is to double down on the failed solution with even more failure.

I knew a kid back at high school (what Americans would call junior high) and his parents tightly controlled everything he saw and heard, because they were religious fundies and didn't want any of that blasphemy getting to their kid. So much so that he was shuffled off to churchie boarding school and never seen again, not even on school holidays, years later in adulthood I learned that, as was tradition in Australia he was pushed out the door at age 18 to make his own way in the world and quickly fell into hard drugs and subsequent suicide before his 19th birthday. Rumour had it that he fell into the obvious traps that those of us who experimented with drugs during our teens knew well to avoid. The parents being good, church going folk started to pretend they never had a son, expunged all evidence of him from their lives.

Pretty much the only solution is for parents to, well, parent. Kids are always going to find a way around any restriction parents put in, doubly so if it's one the government puts in. That's all part of growing up.

You mean the systems that are cheaper and provide better results that the privatised systems of the US?

Unlike Americans, Europeans know exactly who pays for them, they do. What Americans don't get is that it's the same situation in the US, you pay, you just pay more for a worse product.

Yep, did some tests with Steam on Linux Mint a few months back with very good results, There was little to no discernable differences I could tell on Steam games, didn't get to try GOG but the one old game I installed via Lutris worked just fine.

Biggest problem was that Steam didn't support sharing drives between Windows and Linux (or NTFS under Linux) which means I need to reformat my games storage for Linux, which means I'll have to redo my mods (OK. Bethesda forced this with another pointless FO4 update) so I'm planning to go Linux on my new gaming box which I'll build as soon as I can find a decent video card that doesn't cost the earth.

OTOH, when it's not in a Linux repo installation can be a right PITA. Windows at least has that bit down to a tee when installing software that isn't in the abominable Windows store (I mean, who uses the Windows store anyway).

I'm struggling to find a replacement for Notepad++ on Linux, specifically to deal with large single line JSON files, most things either choke or refuse to open them, the closest I've got is Geany which will at least open the files but editing it is still a crapshoot.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of the average idiot.

Add greed to naivety and you've got a winning combination if you're a scammer.

I think a lot of the problem is that many people who grew up in nice, middle class burbs never had to encounter the kinds of scammers that I did growing up in poor neighbourhoods. You had fuck all as a 15 year old in a working class neighbourhood but you could guarantee that there was someone around every corner trying to relieve you of the fuck all you did have.

Because we've got all the low hanging fruit like preventable diseases in childhood, dangerous products, toxic pesticides, et al. But don't worry, Trump and the Anti-Vaxxers are working tirelessly to bring back such wonderful easily preventable diseases as Polio, Measles, Rubella and if they can manage it, Smallpox.

It should be noted this is a record for the US... which is still lower than almost all other developed nations.

For those who aren't idiots, I'm sure I don't need to explain that the biggest factor is the reduction in infant, child and young adult mortality as people under 25 dying in larger numbers skew the statistics downwards.

Thing is, PC gaming has been diskless for ages. The last game I bought on disk was in 2015 and that was because I lived in Australia and internet speeds were shit back then.

PC gaming has never really been cheaper, even with the ridiculous price of RAM and SSDs at the moment. A gaming PC I built 5 years ago is still more powerful than a PS pro (to start with, it's a Zen 3 CPU, the PS pro is still Zen 2).

PC gaming is cheaper than console gaming if you actually play games. Consoles are a false economy, the initial hardware is sold at a loss to get you in the door then they pile on charge after charge after charge, pay for access to online services, pay more for games, so on and so forth. PC gaming is the opposite, higher cost of entry as no-one is subsidising the hardware but no-one is expecting to make that back in additional fees and charges afterwards so once you've paid the inital cost for the hardware, savings start immediately. Games are cheaper and go on sale more often and Steam, GoG, et al. could triple their access fee tomorrow and no one would care because 3 x $0 is still $0.

People are realising the console price is a false economy and it's not helping (or is helping, depending on if you're a console fanboy or not) that a PS pro is only £80 more than a PS pro. Because people are looking to reduce their ongoing spend with consoles, Sony and MS are having to raise hardware prices. This, to digital only is one way Sony is trying to shore that up, by making sure that they get a cut of every single sale. Also the breaking of backwards compatibility is a feature, not a bug, as that means all your older games need to be re-purchased through the rip off store.

Which brings me to another point... I've 30+ year old games that still work on my current gaming PC. Of course I've got the installers on a hard drive now as no-one's seen a floppy drive in years and the original disks have probably melted in my sisters garage back in Oz. Games older than the original playstation.

Yet console fanboys keep lining up for more. Doesn't matter how much abuse they get, the only response is "yes master, may I have some more".

The Concorde's engines were adapted from military engines, the Rolls Royce Olympus which powered the Avro Vulcan bomber, so yeah, they were F-ing loud.

Question is, can we develop quieter engines these days? Modern high bypass turbofans (like the RR Trent) are way quieter than their older counterparts. Especially the older low bypass turbofans (I.E. on the 727s)

The gun nuts are the ones supporting the secret police.

Whilst you're 100% correct that gun nuts are melts living in a fantasy world who would piss themselves if anyone broke into their house rather than carrying out their heroic gun fantasies, I think the GPP was referring to a breakdown in society where people get territorial and violent. Society is, as they say only three meals away from anarchy. In anarchy all bets are off.

Erm... the US is becoming a Soviet state?

Well you are aligned with Russia now.

For the uninitiated, and the reason no-one actually uses "second world" any more is because it originally meant what side of the cold war you were on. The planet was divided into three separate "worlds", the first world being US, NATO and allies, the second world being the Soviet Union and countries aligned with them, the third world was unaligned countries. As time went on and the fact most developed countries were aligned with NATO and most unaligned countries were developing or undeveloped it became shorthand for rich and poor countries and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the second world ceased to exist.

So technically speaking, the Philippines is a first world country whilst Switzerland is a third world country (the former being staunch US allies and the second being staunchly neutral).

I'm no grammar NAZI so you can use first and third world to refer to economic development but "second" world is categorically wrong as it never developed a new meaning, it ceased to exist 30 years ago. If you would like to differentiate between poor and dirt poor countries economically, might I suggest using the terms "developing" and "undeveloped" respectively as that's what you'd put on a report you'd make to someone like the UN security council.

All spelling and grammatical errors contained in this post are intentional, grammar nazis need entertainment.

You misspelled "privacy".

This just "virtue signalling" for those with absolutely no virtues. Equal and opposite, instead of standing up for good causes they're letting everyone know they only support bad ones, I guess we can call it vice signalling but that still sounds too kind as most people with vices are generally still nice and well rounded, sin signalling then... Being British and Australian I'm going with "cunt signalling" as that's what they're trying to tell us they are and who they're trying to appeal to, however that's not really a BBC Two word.