Bingo.

I have people who I actually want to receive calls from on the "pass through" list, but when I just want to relax? Everyone else goes straight to voicemail.

Definitely upload it.

Normalize turning on DND permanently.

fair.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I absolutely believe the IRS needs to be funded enough to go after these ghouls (aka the opposite of "Starve the Beast"), but the first thing they did after the last increase in funding was go after people that sold more than 600$ a YEAR online (Ebay, Mercari...etc.) despite "The IRS insists it will not be targeting low to middle-income households"

They only delayed it for one year after the outcry. So yeah, I'll believe it when I actually see it.

Skepticism is healthy in this day and age, but that site is also biased btw. Even the founder says their methodology isn't unbiased.

When determining bias, there isn’t any true scientific formula that is 100% objective. There are objective measures that can be calculated, but ultimately there will be some subjective judgment to determine these. We have put up a scale with a yellow dot on each page that shows the degree of bias for each source. Each page also has a “detailed report” section that gives some details about the source and explains their bias.

When calculating bias, we are looking at political bias, how factual the information is, and links to credible, verifiable sources. Therefore, the yellow dot may indicate political bias or how factual a source is, or in many cases, both. It is important to note that our bias scale is based on the USA political scale, which may differ from other countries. For example, the Democratic Party of the USA is considered centrist or even right-center in many countries worldwide; however, in the USA, they are considered Left-Center. Please keep this in mind if our ratings seem off in your native country. (08/08/2022)

It's a site run by one guy and 3 volunteers. Not really the greatest source.

The top three are also nations where toilet paper is not available and you have to use your hands to wipe.

Where in the world are you getting this from?

They have Toilet paper, They also have Bidets.

In Diablo 3, I always saved the NPCs in Act 2 while doing bounties, even though there was no incentive to do so. Dunno if it counts as feeling good, but could never bring myself to ignore their cries.

Ah yes, the typical two-sideism crap.

Well if Aljazeera is the problem in your eyes, do you also think Ynet which reported it in the first place and shows pictures (which is what Aljazeera based their report on had you bothered to read the article), is also biased?

Side point (& I'm not the person you were responding to), but I have to ask: Do you not see online dating in the same vein as most other online corporate sites that commodify their users and devalue them for profits?

I personally think online dating is a "meat market" or "horse show" for everyone of every gender & orientation. There's little to no real effort on behalf of these sites to actually increase the number of connections (e.g. via coming up with features that actually encourage making connections), instead their entire ecosystem is designed to encourage the same type of "doom scrolling" that sites like FB encourage so that you stay on their sites/apps for longer viewing ads for longer, or shell out more & more money for their "premium" offerings.

It's hard to deny that online dating does not provide avenues for diversity in presenting people's strengths. Some people are more appealing in person than they are in text for example. Some people aren't photogenic (even if they are actually physically attractive), some people are livelier or funnier in person than they will ever appear in an online dating ad, some people just don't know how to create "eye catching" dating ads....etc.

It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those people at all, it just means those sites don't provide avenues for their strengths, which is a problem because people are extremely diverse, but instead these sites create the "meat market" dynamic because it's the only thing they apparently know how to do & it increases their profits to do so.

This piece from the Atlantic back in 2016 touched on what I mean:

Moira Weigel is a historian & author of the recent book Labor of Love, in which she chronicles how dating has always been difficult, & always been in flux. But there is something “historically new” about our current era, she says. “Dating has always been work,” she says. “But what’s ironic is that more of the work now is not actually around the interaction that you have with a person, it’s around the selection process, & the process of self-presentation. That does feel different than before.”

&

“The thing with design is, at risk of belaboring the obvious, how all of these apps make money is by keeping people on the app,” Weigel says. “Yes, there’s better & worse design, but there is ultimately this conflict of interest between the user of the app & the designer of the app.”

&

But getting as many people in front of your eyeballs as fast as possible doesn’t end up saving time at all. “I have women saying that they spend 10 to 15 hours a week online dating, because that’s how much work goes into producing one date,” Wood says.

So if there’s a fundamental problem with dating apps, one baked into their very nature, it is this: They facilitate our culture’s worst impulses for efficiency in the arena where we most need to resist those impulses. Research has shown that people who you aren’t necessarily attracted to at first sight, can become attractive to you over time, as you get to know them better. Evaluating someone’s fitness as a partner within the span of a single date—or a single swipe—eliminates this possibility.

I don't really give a shit how Incels perceive dating (seriously, no one is "owed" sex), but it's hard to deny that online dating sites, like several other online "experiences", have not negatively impacted their "space" for profits, similar to how sites like Reddit & Facebook were supposedly supposed to "help people communicate & make & keep connections" & only became more & more enshittified to improve corporate bottom lines, resulting in the opposite outcome (E.G. Shit like FB heavily encourages divisiveness instead cause that's what gets the ad views, news sites resort to click bait instead of actually reporting news cause again, profits..etc.).

Of course paywalled dating sites might be better on this, but considering the financial status of a lot of people (especially the younger demographics that are having a harder & harder time even finding the time & money to pursue relationships as one of your sources pointed out, which is also a HUGE part of the problem IMO), it makes sense why many would assume the freemium sites are representative of online dating as a whole (since they do have a larger market share as well)

& of course there are some efforts to address the issues I've listed (like Swan)

I don't know for sure since I'm not a sociologist nor have I personally dug deep enough into this topic, but I imagine that while not the sole reason, these for profit dating sites definitely have a sizable impact on the rise of incel "culture".

But I digress.

y'all are missing the context.

The first one was written by ChatGPT, the rest is just actual users trolling ModCodeofConduct

After 9/11, USA went into a bloodlust, invading Afghanistan because they (Taliban) wanted proof that Osama bin Laden was involved with the terrorist attack first. bin Laden fled to Pakistan, but the USA didn’t invade them, nor threatened to. Instead, USA just kept their boots on foreign soil because, hey, free real state and cheap poppy, amirite?

Just to add to your point.

From way before 9-11

Before the Invasion

After the invasion.

Afghanistan was fairly cut and dry. The Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden and the US invaded.

That's incredibly false

From way before 9-11

Before the Invasion

After the invasion.

This has been known for quite some time. Propaganda really is a hell of a drug.

Nope, still completely empty

They're mostly a bunch of neo-colonists that believe in western exceptionalism and won't spend any time learning about the country the west occupied for over 20 years, let alone the complicated dynamics of the country.

I mean legit half the comments are variants of "We need to civilize the savages".

Reminds me of all the crocodile tears against leaving Afghanistan in the first place "Think of the women!" they cried, well what happened when the country was dealing with a famine (which of course impacted millions of Afghani women) and the US stole half of Afghani assets at a time they desperately needed it? crickets.

Propaganda is a hell of a drug.

Remember when the Afghan people had a phenomenally well equipped and well trained army, and then they just gave up inside a week because things were “hard”?

You didn't read the Afghanistan Papers did you?

It's not about specs or scope, it's about designing a game to be actually FUN.

This is the key point that these publishers and studios are trying to avoid.

• How much of most AAA budgets are spent on designing microtransaction psychologically manipulative money sinks (dark designs)?
• How much of most AAA budgets are spent on creating addiction in the player-base so that they keep playing the game (and spending money)?
• How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit DLC (not actual new content)?
• How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit to satisfy shareholders?
• How much of most AAA budgets are spent on shit the devs don't want, but executives do?
• How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit padding for marketing purposes?
• How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit DRM?

And keep in mind, by budgets here, I mean both the dollar amount AND time spent by devs that could be spent elsewhere (which is part of the dollar amount since salaries, but I wanted to make it clear that time spent is also important).

Some of the absolute best games in the industry have literally none of that, and people still want to play and buy them years after release because gasp they're actually fun, but these publishers and devs don't want to compare to those, because they WANT the industry to be a bunch of "GAAS" bullshit that's basically a vacuum pushed into people's wallets, cause hey, if it worked for Candy Crush....

Best thing i could find on it. doesn't seem like it's actually a controversy

A single console is one of those things that sounds great on paper, but considering how scummy the industry has been lately, would be used in the most anti-consumer way possible.

A single console on the market = Monopoly. Those are never good for consumers.

My guess is that at least one of them is going to require a download code which sucks.