I remember wanting to be a forum mod when I was like 15 and thought that it would make me cool on the forum. As a grown adult… no way. I am so busy between work, grad school, and my personal life, I have no time for such silliness. I have a lot of respect for mods that donate their own time to run communities.

My last Ford was a Focus with the dual clutch transmission, it was a complete fucking lemon (to the point where they were successfully sued over it and have done multiple recalls to fix it). I can excuse an automaker for the occasional shit car if their overall lineup is good and they’re honest with customers, but they knew the transmission was majorly flawed and continued to manufacturer vehicles that used it anyway. I’ve had it refuse to shift while I was driving on the highway before, which left me redlining at maybe 45 MPH. Dangerous and it could have gotten someone killed. I will never buy another Ford.

https://www.freep.com/in-depth/money/cars/ford/2019/07/11/ford-focus-fiesta-transmission-defect/1671198001/

AI-generated articles, books, coloring books for example, are all a thing now. Behind the Bastards did a podcast episode on the latter two.

Remote workers are overall more productive, report a better work-life balance, and suffer less from occupational burnout. It also saves companies money because they don’t have to spend as much on office space.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/intentional-insights/202303/the-surprising-truth-about-remote-work-productivity

My time is the most precious commodity I have. Unfortunately I’m in a career where I can’t work remotely, but if I was I would refuse to go back to the office. Life is too precious to waste it sitting in traffic if you don’t have to.

Stasis was in the first game, yes. You were required to use it several times to be able to pass through a few malfunctioning doors. You get it for free early in the game and don’t have to upgrade it at all to open the doors, preventing the game from soft locking itself.

There also isn’t any guarantee that a quality game will actually sell well, especially if the dev takes a risk and creates something new instead of releasing the 14th installment in a well-established series. It sucks but this is what it looks like when you have gigantic businesses steering video game development.

Did you know they’re based on Japanese history?

I have very little faith in businesses to do the right thing for the right reasons. Publicly traded companies in the US literally can’t do that legally if they think it will hurt their bottom line.

Go vegan. It’s better for the planet too.

the elderly are not always mobile enough for public transport

They should just do what Japanese elderly people do and use the (free) ambulances as taxis!

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/how-often-do-happiest-couples-have-sex-it-s-less-ncna828491

Once a week or so is the average. I’m at about the same amount of time in a relationship as you and we’re about once a week. Personally I feel like sex is nice but it takes time and effort and I’m not always in the mood to spend time pleasing someone else (and I’m not going to initiate unless I’m willing to do that). I could see myself having sex a little bit more often if I had a better work-life balance where I felt less pressed for time. This gets me thinking that I should check in with my partner about this topic though!

Here’s my advice as someone that quit drinking about 6 years ago due to my inability to drink responsibly.

Do you want to quit? If you feel like you can’t handle playing a game in moderation, maybe it’s time to think about quitting it entirely. If you feel like playing other genres of games will eventually draw you back into playing more addictive games like WoW, then you could think about quitting that too, it’s up to you. If certain music makes you think about playing WoW and you can’t control yourself if you listen to it , make a sacrifice and don’t listen to it. I avoided bars for years and still don’t really love being around when people are drinking. The sacrifices I make are well worth it though and I’m much much happier as a result.

Have a long, honest conversation with yourself about what you want from life and how video games fit into it. That’s what I did with alcohol and realized I didn’t want to waste my life on stupid shit any more and decided to quit.

Yes, in the US they have gone so far as to lobby against EV adoption and run anti-EV commercials in favor of trying to get people to buy their hybrids. They innovated earlier with the Prius but then stagnated and are behind now and instead of trying to catch up, they spent time and money trying to block competition. Really made me dislike the company despite the stellar reputation of the quality of their vehicles.

I’m honestly starting to feel like it might be a net benefit for the barrier to entry to be higher. Since I switched to the Fediverse I have found that post quality is higher here than on Reddit, there’s less flaming, fewer low-effort overdone joke comment chains etc. Also it reminds me that there is better shit to do with my life than spend 3 hours a day reading a bunch of hyper-specific subforums that I’m subscribed to.

It’s certainly possible they’ll have to reassess their strategy in the face of new applications rising so much, but I think up to this point they’ve just felt that community quality is more important than growth. I just recently joined this server and I didn’t find the application to be that onerous. I just spent perhaps 15 minutes or so thinking about why I would want to be a part of a community like this and crafting a response that showed that I do care.

I forget if there’s a term for it but I think it’s intentional because it raises the expectations for what people think the minimum acceptable tip is.

I never tip with takeout. The only way to stop the cancer of tipping from spreading is to refuse to buy in to it. Pay your damn employees a living wage and then they don’t need tips!

Yeah, even if they backtrack on all of this shit, I am done with them. This episode as a whole is a great illustration of the danger of allowing a private business to run one of the biggest spaces for community and discourse in the world.

Just use another AI to edit the first AI’s articles!