Not saying it's right, but for context:

One legal distinction is that Van de Velde is unlikely to have been convicted of rape had he stood trial in the Netherlands rather than England. In England, sex with a 12-year-old is rape, regardless of the circumstances: an under-16 cannot legally consent. But after he was extradited to the Netherlands, having serving almost a year of his prison sentence, he was released after less than a month. Under Dutch law, his crime was deemed to be the lesser offence of ontucht, sexual acts that violate social-ethical norms.

From https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/30/netherlands-child-rapist-olympics-steven-van-de-velde

It is real. And I think it continues with this snake pretending to be a female so many males try to mate with him, thereby warming him up and allowing him to ~~sneak in and mate with an actual female snake~~ join the mating frenzy

How do you define "things"?

On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

As for non-human animals... For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

1. Just because I have heard of NordVPN doesn't mean I'll necessarily use it (in fact I use ~~arch~~ mullvad, btw.)
2. Let's see some numbers that ads work. You can't just calculate how life would be without ads, but I wonder what would happen if ad expenses for all companies would be capped somehow. When cigarette companies were severely limited in terms of advertising they saved a ton of money. Of course people already knew their brands, but still.

I think ad space sellers wildly overestimate the effectiveness of ads and google has made it far worse with targeted ads. People have gotten used to saying things like "ads work" and "brand recognition" but does anyone know the numbers? Or is this just repeating some phrases you've heard?

I don't know the numbers myself, but I'm quite skeptical.

Ha! He's a comedian making a joke. Perhaps not the best joke, but obviously a joke. He's even on stage in his role as comedian.

After all the vile things Wilders has said that were dead serious I feel like this is nothing.

Probably good publicity for the comedian though, and of course it's some political points for Wilders and the rest of the far-right ("look how violent these left-wing people of color are!").

Things have been going shit here actually, and blaming minorities for a country's problems is still a surefire way to win votes. As a dutch person I'm sad, embarrassed, and scared.

I think to a large extent it's a case of cognitive dissonance.

Loads of these people have defended Trump for years, supported him despite his obvious lies and grifts and so you kinda have to believe that whatever else he comes up with is also true. If you believe all his previous falsehoods, why not the next?

To admit he's full of shit means your whole belief system has to change. Trump supporters have lost friends, alienated family, spent their money on him... It's much easier to keep believing in him than it is to admit you've been wrong all this time, cause that would mean having to admit you've been taken for a fool this whole time AND it means all your efforts and sacrifices have been for nothing.

That's great! Glad it's working out.

One thing made me chuckle though:

with only 4 gigabytes of RAM

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads of RAM?

Damn, I wouldn't have recognized him from that photo alone. Fuck cancer, I hope he can enjoy the rest of his life which will hopefully still be many years.

Yeah but you won't know if it will pay off until many years after studying, so it's a gamble.

For the majority of cases having a university degree will give you a higher salary, not to mention the value of the experience of going to university as well as the connections you make there (both personally and professionally).

University in the US is just stupidly expensive and the loans have a crazy interest rate.

I'm from the Netherlands where you'll receive money from the government while studying. You can take a loan on top of it with minimal interest and so it's basically always worth it if you can afford it and are academically able to.

Bizarre. But the article outlines a lot more vulnerabilities. Seems like every part of this device is poorly secured.

IOActive's hacking technique exploited glaring security vulnerabilities they found in the shufflers, the researchers say: They bought their own Deckmates for testing from second-hand sellers, one of whom told them a password used for maintenance or repair. They found that this password and others they extracted from the Deckmates' code were configured in the shuffler with no easy way to change them, suggesting they likely work on almost any Deckmate in the wild. They also found that the most powerful “root" password to control the shuffler—which, like all the Deckmate's passwords, they declined to publicly reveal—was relatively weak.

This is just ridiculous / hilarious.

I use Organic Maps as much as possible. For public transport I use another app (not google maps but a local app for my country). Sometimes I check google maps if I can't find a place or if the opening times are missing on openstreetmap (the source for organic maps).

The main issue with organic maps (and I think any map app based on OSM data) is search. Especially in places where multiple languages are used I've found it quite frustrating.

Valencia, for example, has Valencian/Catalan as its main language on OSM, but Spanish is very common. If I search in Spanish I don't get good results. A small typo will also mess things up. That's pretty frustrating and means I often have to go to the website of wherever I'm going to get the proper name in Valenciano without typos, or I have to look it up on google maps.