BananaTrifleViolin
@BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
- Comment on I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07. 6 days ago:
The thing about inflation is the food is not expensive, its the value of money that’s gone down. Its salaries that are way too low to afford the new prices. The food isn’t too expensive - employees are being underpaid.
- Comment on NPR: 'Star Trek: Discovery' ends as an underappreciated TV pioneer 2 weeks ago:
Yeah its just not a good show.
I just watched a scene where Michael and Mol were working together, then suddenly Michael decides to attack Mol, then they have a kung fu fight and finally Michael asks Mol stop and says she needs to trust her. The writing is nonsensical.
Unfortunately that is symptomatic of the show as a whole and just one of many problems.
- Comment on Why Toyota Is Intentionally "Falling Behind" On EVs | Morning Brew (10:10) 3 weeks ago:
It depends on use case. If you’re driving in a city or living in a small country or state, electric makes a lot of sense.
Range anxiety only really kicks in if driving long distances. But 300 miles on a full charge is already common among electric cars. I’m in the UK - that’d easily covet the 200 mile journey from Manchester to London.
I think the real anxiety around range is a lack of chargers either on the journey or at the destination. Without that infrastructure then it will put people off electric cars. But the infrastructure is getting better every day -at least in Europe anyway.
- Comment on Should I permanently leave Israel? 5 weeks ago:
You need to decide what you want from your life. It is not your responsibility to “fix” Israel. If you feel truly passionate about it then go for it.
But if you’re worried about this out of a vague sense of guilt or responsibility then park it. You get one life to live - don’t waste it doing something your don’t want to do or are not passionate about. Live a good life and strive for happiness, and try to be kind and good to those you meet on the journey - that is all that can be asked of anyone.
- Comment on Mr Bates vs Post Office drama lost £1m, ITV boss says 2 months ago:
I think his point was more the state of broadcast television at the moment. There has been a major advertising slump in UK TV - for example channel 4 is in dire straits, cutting 17% of their workforce, stopping commissioning an holding lots of shows back from broadcast as an accounting ploy to not pay production companies until the next financial year.
ITV on paper are doing much better but to find their biggest hit of the year actually lost money says alot about the state of UK broadcast TV. The first run advertising and the UK streaming catch up money (or fragments of subscriptions to ITVX) haven’t made the show profitable.
Shows now need to be saleable abroad to make money and a show like this just doesn’t sell enough to make profit.
Its bad news because it means ITV and others are less incentivised to make these types of shows and instead retreat back to cheaper shows (reality and quizzes), and stuff that will sell abroad. Stuff that sells abroad is not necessarily bad but it does push to more generic types of TV over culturally important or unique shows that would only appeal here.
There isn’t really a solution to this in the commercial sector. Advertising might bounce back but probably not as that money is now directed at the Internet and social media, not TV.
The BBC could be a champion for this type of stuff but it’s doing badly too as the license fee has not kept up with inflation for years, so it’s having to make very deep cuts to keep as much of its many commitments going as possible.
Meanwhile American streamers including Netflix are gobbling up the market and UK broadcasters can’t compete with the shear scale of their operations.
Personally I think the funding for the BBC needs to go up substantially, and maybe slices of new money even become available for any broadcaster to apply for to ensure culturally important shows can be funded. The commercially viable stuff will always have funding but the more niche and UK specific stuff needs to be protected and probably subsidised to maintain a cultural voice and support diversity in the output of our creative industries.
- Comment on Cities Skylines 2: "Beach properties assets are all gone and my city is screwed. Thanks a lot." 2 months ago:
I loved Cities 1, I was massively looking forward to 2 but it’s been nothing but a shitshow.
I’ve also had a enough of the gaslighting around this game that somehow it’s the angry customers that are the problem.
- Comment on What do you see that you wish others saw? 2 months ago:
I think others see this but not enough: the slow collapse of Liberal democracy.
A rot has set in and people in politics and government no longer believe in liberal democracy. If you read history you find impassioned fighting for liberty, freedom and equality.
Now we have quasi democracies, with erosions of freedoms, rights and even dumbing down of access to news coverage and knowledge. Countries like the USA and UK that were leading lights in liberal democracy have fallen back into more authoritarian regimes. Countries in continental Europe that were bastions of liberal democracy also seem to losing their way. Big corporations and a wealthy elite are working against the interests of Liberal democracy and we’re letting them do it.
Authoritarianism is the scourge of our age - being pushed by China and Russia and taking hold in India, the middle east, Africa and increasingly in the west.
It’s depressing to see the rot.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
Long term, why would it be limited to $1000?
This is honestly an issue about the long term prospects of our species. More and more production is becoming automated, resources owned, and complex work likely going to AIs. This causes a fundamental breakdown of our current system - people working is largely “redundant” in a world of automation; people are less and less of a “resource” and capitalism begins to make less and less sense.
We’re playing with the idea of UBI now, but we’re going to need solutions to this problem. Whoever owns the robots, AIs, land/resources owns everything. Either we let this be concentrated in the hands of an arisocratic class of billionaires, or we rebuild the system and accept capitalism is over. If people can’t “sell” their time through work, then how are people going to live.
I know it all sounds very science-fiction but this is the reality our world is sleep walking into. Instead of coming up with plans to dace this, our politicians are unsurprisingly pissing about focusing on nonsense and tinkering at the fringes of the problem at best.
- Comment on Why are mental hospitals run like prisons? 3 months ago:
I hope you recover soon. I’ve been depressed in the past and convinced that suicide is the right path. It is not - when you’re mentally ill you lose perspective and people telling you “it’ll get better” or “life is worth living” but thay will seem hollow.
If you find it difficult to understand why people want you to live then maybe think of it this way: what have you got to lose? If you’ve decided it’s over and there is no point, then you might as well try the support and the medication because you’ve got nothing left to lose.
I’m glad I took the support and the meds. It did get better, and that was the route for me to heal and change the direction of my life.
I hope you try, and maybe realise that it wouldn’t be a true decision if you’re too mentally unwell to make a rational decision.
- Comment on Why are mental hospitals run like prisons? 3 months ago:
Two reasons.
One is to ensure people do not come to harm or allow harm to others. As harsh as it seems, the whole point is to stop people from killing themselves or enabling someone else to kill themselves.
The other is to prevent illegal drugs coming in to mental health units. Unfortunately mental health services are also overwhelmed by social issues and drug use is rife. The units don’t want to deal with high patients who can be aggressive or even OD.
It can seem harsh but it’s not like a prison. A prison is punishment, while a mental health unit is often a place to hold someone in a crisis so they can’t harm themselves. The loss of freedom and dignity can feel like punishment, particularly on over stretched understaffed units but they’re trying to save lives. It’s a blunt tool as a last resort.
- Comment on How does delisting a game make/save money? 3 months ago:
This sort of makes sense but not for quite the same reasons. This may be an attempt to simplify their licensing arrangements so they can resell them. It’s easier to cancel all the licensing agreements in one go so they can then make a fresh exclusive arrangement with a single company.
It’s less about competing with the existing games (which they already control through licensing) and more to do with being able to sell or use the licensing cleanly without worrying about pre-existinf commitments.
Like, for each new game either you do legal compliance to make sure you’re not breaching your previous agreements OR you cancel all the agreements in one go and you never have to bother worrying about it. Saves money but also makes you the sort of company businesses will be wary doing deals with. But they probably have a deal with a big publisher lined up or intend to take the whole thing in house.
- Comment on Amazon "search through reviews" is blindly just running an AI model now 3 months ago:
Just don’t buy off Amazon. I buy electrical goods from other retailers because Amazon provided products are pooled with 3rd party products in their warehouses - which means lots of counterfeit electricals even if you select something sold by amazon directly. Not worth the danger of a fire in your home buying a shitty knock off full price off amazon.
All the other shit you can literally buy on Ebay - they’re the same sellers reselling the same chinese crap. The reviews are meaningless.
- Comment on Do you ever worry that you're secretly a psychopath that unknowingly manipulates people around you? 3 months ago:
It’s good to be self aware and self critical but I think you’re over analysing yourself and putting negative labels on you.
A true psychopath wouldn’t care or have the ability to care.
The way you describe yourself you sound like you’re intelligent and insightful, and it’s unsurprising you would get on with older people if you’re more mature than others of your age.
You do need to be careful about inadvertently manipulating other people to your way of thinking - but anyone needs to be careful fit that, particularly if they’re skilled in being persuasive. Just because you can persuade people to your way of thinking does not mean you are always right. I’m able to do the same in real life but half to stop myself and think - it’s really important to learn to be open to other positions before you rush in and try to change people’s minds.
Having said all that, that is not “gaslighting”. You may need to understand what your friend is saying. It may be that actually you are doing a good thing in persuading them. Or it may be you’re inadvertently doing harm.
Or it may just be that your friend is very impressionable - some people are a bit like pillows - they will take on the opinion of the last person they spoke to much like a pillow takes an indent from the l last head they laid on. That’d be their problem, now yours.
Overall though, you seem to take quite a negative view of yourself or are worrying you are a “bad person” (although a psychopath isn’t bad, they’re just built differently; but obviously that seems bad to a lot of people). The fact you worry about being a psychopath shows you are not one, but also it shows you seem to be feel bad or guilty about who you are. You should explore why that is. As others have said, therapy can be a good way to do that. But having self awareness and a degree of self criticism (within limits) is alreadt a powerful thing.
- Comment on This shouldn’t be normalised 3 months ago:
Yeah, Microsoft is normalising the idea that your own personal email clients should be open to them to access and steal your data so they can advertise at you.
Fuck windows and fuck outlook.
Thunderbird is free and entirely private on all platforms (And K9 mail on Android is also maintained by the Thunderbird team)
- Comment on This shouldn’t be normalised 3 months ago:
There are extensions for that.
In Firefox Consent-o-matic and Ghostry both do a good job in android and Linux/Windows.
I have no idea if they have that on iOS though given Apple forces browser makers to reskin Webkit.
- Comment on Does the rest of the English speaking world generally understand what an American means when they say "soccer", or does it help to clarify by adding "football"? 6 months ago:
The word Soccer is actually British - it’s short for Association as in Football Association, although it’s sland from Oxford University of all places, and is late Victorian.
Irony is a surprising number of “Americanisms” turn out to be old British terms that died out in Britain but reached and continued in the US.