We bred them to be like that. It started out that they were just useful pest control and then we gradually selectively bred the ones that were the cutest and most affectionate.

And in charge of basically everything. What in the name of fuck did people expect? Cheap eggs?

People don't want the news. News consumption continues to drop. People always thought of news as a bit of a chore. Something you were supposed to keep up with but not anything you enjoyed. It got turned into 24/7 entertainment crap when Fox News took over but that's not news that's propaganda. And even that isn't very popular.

People in America are in the habit of blaming individuals for either systemic problems or what our Epstein class is doing. It's a bad habit and I wish we would stop but well, there's all that propaganda encouraging us to do it...

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

I wanted the high-end Qualcomm chip because it has a much better modem and I have lousy reception in my area. Switching to the high-end Qualcomm chip was night and day. People could actually hear me on calls and I stopped getting text messages 6 hours after they were sent. My bedroom is no longer a dead zone.

Samsung has an equivalent phone but they put a small battery in it either because they were being cheap or because they didn't like how much it made the thing weigh. Whatever the case the battery life is horrible on it. Maybe it's better if you're not sitting in a dead zone where the modem has to work harder but I am.

There is the red magic but at the time I bought my phone it was closer to $1,100. Not sure why but it's dropped down to 800. That's not great but with RAM prices it could be worse. But I did only have to pay $500 for the phone I have now because it was right before the AI apocalypse.

Right now if you want a high-end Qualcomm chipset you just don't have a lot of good options on Android besides that red magic.

I'm just seeing the world as is. If you actually stare the real world in its eyes with all the children being murdered by Elon Musk so that he could be a trillionaire and bombs dropped on children in Gaza so some stupid little nationalist asshole can live out some weird fantasy or watching kids in America starve because some people just get off on that or because it doesn't matter how hungry your kid as long as somebody else's kid is hungrier well if you actually face that reality you turn out like me.

I guess ignorance is bliss and all. So go ahead and enjoy yourself. But I think the reason you commented is you know how bad things are and you know how horrible and horrific they are and you're trying your best to act like things are normal. You're the dog surrounded by fire in the meme.

Maybe survivorship bias will work out for you like it always has. Good luck and try not to think too hard

Conventions are a lot of fun but not everybody can live in a major city with a major convention. It doesn't really do any good for you to fly out to LA for Comic-Con. You're going to meet a lot of cool people but then they're going to scatter to the four winds.

Facebook makes it possible to meet people in your area with your interests. So you can find a d&d group or a bunch of guys to go fishing with or something like that.

This is especially important in our modern dystopia. Increasingly game stores are shutting down because private equity owns all the property and game stores just aren't profitable enough for the amount of square footage they need. All those tables that you are playing at aren't merchandise you are buying. And a store wants to get you in and then back out again so they can get more customers in. You hanging around doesn't result in enough extra sales. Yeah you might pick up a mini or two or a expansion book but then you're going to hang around using up space for basically the whole day.

Also people have to move a lot. People have to upend themselves and move to other cities all the damn time now because Jobs go away and you have to live where the work is. So if you're new to an area Facebook lets you find the community you want to hang out with.

I'm really sad to see the complete lack of nuance in this supposedly science focused forum.

Facebook can be an evil company whose product has good uses.

Actual social media instead of Doom scrolling can exist.

Social media means connecting people with like-minded interests in a positive environment.

Most websites don't do social media. We don't really have a good term for what they do.

That is on purpose. It's the same reason right wing extremists brand themselves as conservative.

If you're going to do something horrifically evil you don't just set yourself up as Horrifically Evil LLC. You pay a marketing firm to confuse the public because the public does not like nuance.

This is a complete non-story because this is dead in the Senate. Really tired of the news media wasting my damn time with stories that are meaningless.

Brick and mortar stores want daylight savings Time changes because their Big Data models indicate people spend a little bit more money in their stores during daylight hours. So we're not going to be able to get rid of daylight savings time because every time it comes up they just splash a bunch of cash around.

This is most likely just a fundraising average by a bunch of people in the House of Representatives

I think you meant "sold off their brand to Lenovo", they did that with their consumer brand years earlier but then later sold off their x86 server division as well. Lenovo laptops are still good but being Chinese owned is strictly verboten for anything that might be secure in the UK and US... So I've not seen an IBM (or Lenovo) server in years and can't comment if they're still as good as the old IBM X servers.

Motorola is my current go-to. I've got an Edge 60 Neo that is reasonably good, bought my mum a G56 that will probably see her the rest of her life (erm... she's old and a life long smoker).

The best manufacturer changes every few years, used to be Nokia. Motorola is currently making decent phones with good hardware for reasonable prices without too much bloat or crapware (and what little there is can be disabled easily). The G56 mentioned above is a £150 phone with a gorilla glass screen. Also much lighter than the ancient Samsung it replaced.

Not to mention the creepy guy at the pharmacy who'd judge all your photos, not that many of them where any good mind you, the average person knows feck all about photography and used to just waste film. At least now they only waste time.

I knew who OnePlus was, no idea who that other person is... Some kind of Social Media Infuenza no doubt that should just be ignored. Not like you can't just pay for subscribers.

The problem with OnePlus is that they were at best, offering the same thing as everyone else so nothing really stood out from the competition and when you're beige, you're going to be out-beiged by the big bois like Apple and Samsung who can afford to advertise the hell out of their beige.

When I look for a new phone, I usually check out what OnePlus offers and find that it's nothing special and move on. Then again, I'm not a typical purchaser looking for a new beige phone.

You can probably find the article but years ago a father found out his teenage daughter was pregnant because Target started sending him coupons for baby stuff. The reason Target did that is because they figured out that if you bought certain things that were not related to a baby it meant that you were pregnant. It was relatively simple machine learning that made that possible.

I think they feel it would be more like humans communicate. But humans invented blackboards and certainly found them useful to improve communication.