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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I don’t agree with everything the guy above you said, but my circumstances are very similar to his.

    I have friends, but they don’t know anyone they can introduce me to.

    Sports are off the table due to both health problems and a lack of interest (do you really want group activities to be full of disinterested guys just there to chat up chicks?), never mind that they’re all heavily male-dominated around here.

    Local councils put on events, but they are either for children, for mothers, or for seniors.

    Everything has been turned into a product to be sold to you, almost every event costs money, and when you do pony up the events are somewhere between borderline scams and actual scams.

    This is a recurring issue with this subject. Someone offers advice, someone points out why that advice isn’t very applicable, and the first person makes no attempt to “adapt and overcome” themselves and either a) offer better advice, or b) admit that they don’t have any better suggestions.











  • They cited their sources and included direct quotations from the bill.

    And the direct quotations from the bill were less-than-damning without several paragraphs of editorial leading the reader down the garden path. This is on the same level as the ‘death panel’ hysteria from about 10 years ago.

    At some point in the future cars will have to incl. some form of assistance technology as a standard feature, big whoop. It doesn’t say it has to be enabled by default, or always turned on, and with all the assists and autonomous driving features already being added to cars, it’s very likely most manufacturers will end up meeting the requirements of the bill without even trying.

    If

    driver behaving erratic and interfering with safe function of car

    Then

    pull safely to the side of the road and temporarily disable ignition

    BuT mUh FrEeDoMs. Something something ‘right to travel’ = right to operate a car whilst intoxicated (sounds like some SovCit bullshit), as opposed to right to a functional public transport system or something…



  • This isn’t just an issue in terms of romantic relationships, or gender-specific.

    We used to all be exposed to the same media and had common points of reference and interest. It was called water cooler discussion. Unless you’re into sports, this doesn’t really exist any more.

    We used to share a more common set of customs. Schools used to have etiquette/finishing classes. Was a lot of it ultimately arbitrary and made up? Of course, but we were all taught the same things, and they became a common language. You knew to take off your hat/glasses when talking to me to show a level of courtesy and respect, and I knew you were showing respect when you did that. This also worked in terms of things like knowing when to adopt a formal tone with others… many people don’t have a formal tone any more, let alone know how to use it.

    Everyday life thrust us into more social interaction, too. You used to have to go to stores, talk to people. Even public transport and public spaces used to be a social experience before everyone buried themselves in their mobile phones and headphones. Now the majority of people left trying to interact with you in public are weirdos or trying to sell you something, so people assume anyone approaching you in public is a weirdo or trying to sell you something, suddenly it is taboo to even try to strike up a conversation with a stranger.

    And modern outlets like social media encourage some of our worst tendencies. Everything escalates into outrage, tribal warfare, makes us really bad at self-moderation and letting things go.

    The-way-things-were was never ideal for a minority of people, but the way things are is ideal for no one. I strongly believe even the innovations that are supposed to help a lot of minorities are hurting them to a degree, too. I fit into a couple of those minority categories myself, and have to force myself to go outside, to use manned checkouts, to put away my phone when outside, as while the alternatives may be easier in the short-term, in the long-term they are making me both physically and mentally less-resiliant.


  • That’s almost precisely their business model.

    Get users, retain users, turn users into recurring paying customers.

    Dating apps don’t exist to find you connections, they exist to keep you hooked. They’ll give you the bare minimum of opportunities necessary to make you think they’re viable, drag it out as long as possible, pressure you to pay for premium, and if they ever developed a matching system that worked well, they’d bury it to stop half their userbase from marrying each other and uninstalling the apps.


  • Maybe I’m just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

    Like that’s where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

    And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

    And then Digg’s redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

    Being tech-focussed really does help. I’d sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I’m not just interested in tech news.