Seems like confirmation the whole Elon v Trump falling out earlier this year really WAS just pure theater.

They could be in a similar phase of life. I was still 17 when I started college and had a full-time job. A 20 year old could still be in high school if they were held back. This is kind of the range where you can start counting months or talking about how different school systems have different cutoff dates that can mess with things.

I would not recommend 20 year olds and 17 year olds date in general. But it’s very possible for two people of those ages to date without being creepy or having problems.

Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.

The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.

I see two possible explanations:

1. Class warfare. The same people banning porn are the ones banning abortion, banning homosexuality, banning gender transitions (although they never seem to ban the same therapies for cis people), banning sex education, banning contraception. All of these attacks on individual sexuality are to try to push people into unprotected heterosexual sex. At the same time, these same political groups have been attacking both parental support systems and child labor laws. They want parents too desperate to rebel. They want children working. They want a larger supply of labor: more supply means more competition amongst workers for wages, which means the labor is cheaper.

2. Power. Maybe these payments processors don’t actually care about pornographic games. But attacking pornography in the name of “defending women and children” is easy to sell to the public and sets a precedent for these payment processors violating neutrality. So eventually they will move to banning games that are too violent (well, they’ve already been trying for decades). Then it’ll be games that are too “extreme” or promote “terrorism”. If these payment processors don’t see any consequences soon, I expect in the next 5 years they will try to take down any games that are anti-Zionist. Maybe games that are pro-Ukraine. In 10 years it could be any sort of left-leaning game. Disco Elysium for promoting communism. Horizon for depicting climate change. Stardew Valley for allowing same-sex relationships and being anti-corporate.

Notice that these discussions never seem to apply to copaganda. It’s perfectly fine to be violent and bloody as long as that violence is authorized by the state. The US Military offices have a well-documented relationship with Activision for Call of Duty, so you aren’t going to see any of these groups call for CoD to be banned.

At the very least, most of the Democrats are guilty of taking money from those ghouls.

To bring it back to Palantir, Biden himself was singing their praises back when he was vice president and the US government was using their surveillance tools.

As much as it is good to see MAGA turn on Trunk over the Epstein files, it’s not lost on me that Garland, under Biden, sat on the files doing nothing for 4 years. And maybe that would make sense if they were actively investigating and trying to prosecute people, but as far as I can tell Maxwell is the only one who faced any consequences.

I don’t want to distract the narrative away from Trump’s guilt. And also, when you stack up presidential accomplishments I’d still rank Biden near the top, probably top-5 in US history. But that says more about the other presidents than Biden.

I think Rupert Murdoch is involved too. And I think it’s good to mention Peter Thiel, the owner and founder of Palantir, any time they are brought up.

There have been a ton of governments swinging rightwards suddenly too. Not just the US- the UK has a long stretch of Conservative governance that was only barely broken by Labour in 2024, and the Labour party has drifted so far right that the Reform party was created. Germany is dealing with their own alt-right menace. Conservative middle-eastern governments like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been spreading their global influence. The Philippines had their stint with Duterte. India has had a right-wing Prime Minister, Modi, since 2014. And of course, we have Netanyahu of Israel and Putin of Russia.

Personally, I look to the downfalls of communist states. The USSR collapsing in 1991, leading to the absolute mess of oligarchs looting the publicly owned assets and turning them into private fortunes. The opening of China to the west started by Deng Xiaoping led to similar issues there. The rise of the oil age, which helped both those Russian oligarchs and middle eastern petrostates (and the US. And the Scandinavian petrol states, though they at least moved to social democracy instead of authoritarianism).

All of a sudden all of this power was concentrated in the hands of just a few hundred businesspeople and politicians. Reagan and Thatcher happened. Socialist governments everywhere were undermined by the US government. Then economic crash after economic crash after economic crash. The dot-com bubble, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, wars everywhere, Brexit, the invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic. Every earthquake that hit Japan, every hurricane that was horribly mismanaged by FEMA, the fires in Hawaii and California and Australia and Canada.

Every disaster a new opportunity for those few hundred people in power to tighten the screws, acquire more power, and distance themselves from the rest.

I don’t mean this as a conspiracy. The billionaires fight each other too sometimes. Trump mostly seems like Putin’s puppet, but there are some exceptions. Putin backs Iran while Trump backs Israel. Putin was on good terms with Musk, and afaik that has not changed while Trump has distanced himself from Musk publicly. Just that the overall trend has been towards power moving from the people into the autocrats globally for the past few decades.

And if anyone’s panicked about the immoral stuff going on in the porn industry (and there are plenty of things to be addressed and critiqued about a hystorically predatory domain)

You’re 100% correct, but I would also like to point out how weird it is that porn seems to be the ONLY industry where these religious nutjobs pretend to care about workers.

In the US, the same people who say they care about the porn industry preying upon women are the same ones rolling back child labor legislations to send 14 year olds to meat packing plants. The same ones who have kept the minimum wage where it is for decades. The same ones who want to ban abortion even in cases where the woman’s life is threatened. I know this is a BBC article about the UK, but I can’t help but see some parallels with the right-wing religious conservatives everywhere in the world.

They don’t care about women. They don’t care about children. They don’t care about workers. They care about having lots of cheap labor. They care about parents being too tired, too overworked, too risk-averse for the sake of their children to dare to fight back. They want a world where peasant girls get married at 14 and start cranking out more babies immediately. Any substitute which threatens that (birth control, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, sex education) is under attack.

All the good phones are dying. I still quite enjoy my 1 IV, and honestly the Xperia line would probably be my choice in a couple years when I am ready to upgrade if they are selling them in the US at that point.

I’m hoping Fairphone gets US support at some point because they seem like the best option.

It really feels like design peaked a decade ago. Headphone jacks, micro SD card slot, removable batteries, front-facing speakers. Everything good has been removed and the phones are 5x more expensive. The few phones left with some of those features are the cheap weak models for people who only use their phones to call and text.

https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/2531490/-/comment/11832636

You might be living in an echo chamber. Most Americans use AI at least sometimes and plenty use it regularly according to studies.

You literally are right here accusing me of being in an echo chamber for thinking Americans view AI negatively, then when I back that up with a source you are now… Claiming that the article says that.

Except that the whole “most demographics are positive on AI” piece that you toss in counters your own countering of my disagreement. You’re talking in circles here.

It’s also worth noting this article is using a sample size of 700 and doesn’t go all that heavily into the methodology. The author describes themself as a “social computing scholar” and states that they purposefully oversampled these minority groups.

The conclusion is nothing but wasted time and clicks. You’re in this thread telling people to “read the article” and I’m in here to warn people that it’s not worth their time to do so.

And this is part of a trend I’ve noticed on Lemmy lately: people posting obviously bad articles, users commenting that the articles are bad, and usually about 3-4 other users in the comments arguing and trying to drive more engagement to the article. More clicks, more ad revenue.

We could argue all day over who is experiencing reality or who is in an echo chamber.

Pew Research found that US adults who are not “AI Experts” are more likely to view AI as negative and harmful.

The thing is, EVERYONE hates AI except for a very small number of executives and the few tech people who are falling for the bullshit the same way so many fell for crypto.

It’s like saying a survey indicates that trans people are more likely to hate American ISP’s. Everyone hates them and trans people are underrepresented in the population of ISP shareholders and executives. It doesn’t say anything about the trans community. It doesn’t provide any actionable or useful information.

It’s stating something uninteresting but applying a coat of rainbow paint to try to get clicks and engagement.

For the most part they trusted me. It helped that my step-dad played videogames before he met my mom. It probably also helped that I never gave them any concerns. I was a fat nerd who never got into fights or showed any signs of violence. My parents were concerned about me spending too much time indoors and not getting enough physical and social activity, but never concerned with the content.

I also was a smart enough kid that I knew the limits of what I could ask for. I wasn’t going to ask them for Leisure Suit Larry or BMX XXX, for example.

There were a couple of exceptions where my mom heard things about specific games through the media. I remember the marketing campaigns for God of War and GTA3 really leaned into the controversy. Although I did end up getting GTA3 eventually.

Ironically, there was only one case where I felt like I was allowed to play a game before I was ready, but it wasn’t one I asked for. My step-dad bought Twisted Metal Black. I had played a bit of the Twisted Metal series earlier, but preferred the much more whimsical Vigilante 8. I still remember getting nightmares about getting my head locked into a mask like the one character (I think her name may have been Dollface?). As I am remembering it now I realize it was probably a metaphor about identity, but as a middle schooler I was just freaked out about it.

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#517324be3d78

Just within the top-25 I see Jensen Huang, Mukesh Ambani, Carlos Slim, Changpeng Zhao, Zhong Shanshan.

White people are over-represented in the list, but there’s plenty of non-white billionaires that are just as problematic as their white counterparts. The vast, vast majority of white people are not billionaires. Racial division is a distraction that serves the billionaires.

Anti-pedophilia is antisemitism

This kind of reminds me of how every several years it seems like a group of pedo’s tries to portray themselves as an oppressed minority, and try to “join” LGBT+ spaces. Hard to say how much was genuine vs anti-lgbt astroturfing. I wonder if they will pop up again in all this.

Not just that, but they even get the sexism and racism wrong. It’s suburban, middle-class, straight white women who are supposed to be associated with $9 lattes.

It’s important to remember that this is a model used to analyze relationships. Famously, “all models are wrong, but some models are useful”.

Human relationships can reach incredible levels of complexity. Heck, human sexuality alone is a huge thing to study.

I know a couple where a bi person is married to an ace person in an open marriage. I know a couple that owns their own house and run their own business together but keep separate personal bank accounts. I’ve heard of people who are “just friends” who parent and raise children together. I know people who are married but maintain separate residences. And of course I know people who are married, own and live in one home together, and have parented and raised children together, and have a joint bank account. There are a lot of different ways people can relate to each other.

For my credentials: I’m not diagnosed myself. Growing up I always felt like a watered-down version of my older sister: a genius who suffered mental breakdowns. She helped to raise me and was eventually diagnosed with autism in been mid-30’s. I’ve always been high-functioning and never had a reason to seek a diagnosis or treatment, but I’ve had a lot of non-professional opinions that I’m probably on the spectrum too. It’s also possible that I’m neurotypical and was just heavily influenced by her growing up.

Also I feel obligated so say that the technically correct answer is to seek professional help, but I’m assuming that either that’s not an option or hasn’t worked if you’re posting here.

For the intimacy part, it might help to plan and talk about it in advance. Discuss in the morning what the plans for the day are and bring that up as an option. Or perhaps a recurring weekly schedule.

I have also found with adhd partners that they seem to be able to turn things on FAST. Like, one minute there’s no sign of anything sexual. We might be watching some nostalgic stuff from our childhood like pokemon, or some gross out horror movie, or a video essay on marine biology, or it’s late at night and I’m about to pass out to get up early the next day. Then all of a sudden “hey you wanna fuck” out of nowhere really catches me by surprise, and I struggle to switch gears that fast. Whereas if we planned in advance I might suggest we watch something a bit sexier to prepare: an action movie or HBO drama perhaps.

I don’t know you so this isn’t a personal attack: it’s possible that you might be displaying a lot of emotion that is intimidating to her. Facial expressions, voice tones, word choice, gestures, tears. She could be afraid of upsetting you, or just afraid of being in such an… Energetic conversation.

It’s worth noting that the trope of autistic people missing social cues is an oversimplification, and I suspect that only applies to people deep in the spectrum that do not function well. For myself it’s the opposite: I spent my childhood careful observing and noting social rules to try to follow them as best as I could, but the frustrating part is that no one else does. Everyone thinks they do, but people are just different from each other and most individuals are themselves inconsistent. So it might help you to keep an eye on your own mannerisms and behaviors too.

I understand my last 2 paragraphs were suggesting you change yourself. It’s totally valid for you to not want to, I’m just laying out options.

In my mind, emotions are the end result. They are a reflection of the past. Decisions, including communications, should be made rationally with the goal of producing good emotions in the future. In my experience, most people make decisions irrationally based on the emotions they are feeling in the present. Negative emotions can lead to bad decisions, which creates a downward cycle. Positive emotions can also cloud rational thought. To avoid the cycle, you need to make calm and rational decisions. When something goes wrong I set the emotions aside to become cold and calculating and make the best decisions I can. An important part (and one it sounds like she needs to work on) is to go back later and reflect on that emotion. Feel it fully, understand where it comes from, and understand if there needs to be any communication about it.

I don’t believe for one second they are actually letting this guy do anything. He’s a fall guy. He’s going to get fired when something bad happens and they need someone to fire.

So either someone else is running it behind-the-scenes (like how Musk wasn’t technically the head of DOGE) or the department ceased functioning (they could be inviting a terrorist attack as an excuse- go to war, declare emergency powers, cancel elections, etc).

Or they just actually gave this guy this job. But that just seems so incredibly unlikely.

He probably “works” more than that, because for him his “work” looks like riding a private jet, golfing with business associates, fancy lunches and dinners, or sending emails from his phone on the beach.

Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?