It's really gross to me how people misrepresent taxes so often.
And especially people who I KNOW aren't complaining about OASDI and Medicare, other than perhaps they need MORE funding. Yet they include those when they toss out random numbers like "25%".
The tax rates are defined and published. These aren't fuzzy numbers we can play with, like survey results or experimental measurements or estimates. It's literally just math and yet people refuse to do it.
Or... Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of "intellectual property" has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?
Despite its name, TST is not affiliated with the Church of Satan
I find it really funny that they need to call this out given the thousands of different Christian churches that all have varying degrees of affiliation or animosity with each other and often nearly indistinguishable names.
This may be controversial, but I think the way to combat dog whistles like this is to overuse them and muddy the waters. Make it so the Nazi's aren sure whether the "pattern noticer" they are interacting with are antisemitic or not.
ISIS went from being an Egyptian goddess and a great band to a poorly translated acronym for a terrorist organization because everyone let the terrorists win on that one. The swastika has been a neat and simple symbol used by a variety of cultures with a variety of meanings ranging from positive to neutral until it was taken by the Nazi's. 88 is a really neat looking number that's done nothing wrong.
Society keeps on ceding cultural ground to assholes and the rest of us have to tiptoe through every piece of communication in fear of being associated with them.
What's next? How long until some fascists start to use the "cool s" that we all doodled in our notebooks in school? Are we going to have to stop using any numbers with less than 3 digits? Will Allah, Jupiter, and Thor join Isis as symbols of fear?
I've seen predictions of Firefox's downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.
It's really easy to see the headlines saying things like "Firefox is tracking it's users and violating their privacy!!!" And panic. But digging into the latest "scandal" (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.
One of the main criticisms is that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. Which... I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren't going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.
I don't fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It's good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.
But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.
He claims they removed the ability to adjust graphics options. This is false- they just removed the launcher so it's tucked away in the launch options instead. Unless you're the kind of person who wants to change the settings every time you open the game I'd call this an improvement still.
He also claims that the FPS is lower than what the Deck is reporting and claims it feels bad. Fails to go into any methodology or even say if he tries to verify the FPS any other way. Maybe I'm just used to actual journalists doing actual research, but isn't this the point where most competent people would look to install 3rd party monitoring tools? Maybe hook it up to a capture card or external monitor? Look at frame time graphs? Like, we have the technology to support these claims, but this is just one dude saying it "feels okay". He makes references like "we tested" but doesn't include any test results.
Not to mention... Go look at Valve's publications about the Verified tag. I can't find a single reference to the frame rate anywhere. So even if the frame rate is low, that's not part of the testing process. What is or is not "playable" is incredibly subjective and variable. Some games are fine at 30, some need 60, some really benefit from >60, some games can even survive as playable at 15 FPS. Some games run mostly at 60 but dip occasionally. Some will be impacted by the performance settings on the Deck. Not to mention devs are constantly pushing updates and it's not worth the time to re-test for Deck verification that often for a possible +/-1 FPS difference.
Then he mentions crashing. No solid data or anything, just mentions a crash. He doesn't mention, but anytime I hear anyone complain about a Bethesda game crashing my first question is "are you using mods?". It would be incredibly irresponsible to do "testing" with mods, but at this point I'm not sure whether the author is sharing real experiences or just parroting what he read on Reddit.
There may very well be valid concerns here, but it's impossible to tell because of how bad this article is.
I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I'm a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn't?
Then I remembered Starlink exists.
Here's his voting record in the Senate.
Seems like he's the politician I thought he'd be on like 99% of the issues. But if we want to book down an entire politician's record to just one issue, sure.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but the Biden administration has really exceeded my expectations.
Queue all the people in the comments talking about ad blockers or alternative apps.
Those might be great (and ad blocking is important in general), but I've found I ultimately just watch YouTube less.
A good chunk of my favorite creators had been pushing Nebula for the past couple years, so I finally tried it out and it's pretty decent. I've even found new channels there that would have been buried on YouTube. Still tons of room for improvement for the platform, but it's functional now.
Other creators have their own websites with text content, or podcasts hosted elsewhere.
It's only a small handful of channels I check for on YouTube anymore. It kind of sucks that it's mostly small channels where video is a key component and they don't fit with the edu-tainment vibe of Nebula, and I don't know of another platform for them. Lots of DIY home improvement, self-sufficiency (not religious or conspiratorial lol), music videos, and channels dedicated to specific videogame franchises.
I know LTT has Floatplane too. I wonder if all of these other videos streaming options getting worse will start driving more people to smaller platforms.
We're experiencing a shortage of workers for the jobs nobody wants to do
We're experiencing a shortage of workers for the jobs no one wants to do AT THE WAGES THE EMPLOERS WANT TO PAY TO PEOPLE WHO ARE VULNERABLE TO EXPLOITATION.
There's not a shortage of workers, but of wages.
Honestly I think the bigger reason is that most games are more suited to a miniseries or full TV show.
Also Use Boll "retired" in 2016, and while he has still done some film work since, he has stopped cranking out bad videogame movies.
Recent stuff like Minecraft, Uncharted, Gran Turismo were "meh" instead of "terrible". TV shows like Arcane, Cyberpunk Edge Runners, Castlevania, Fallout, and The Last of Us have been pretty well received. Heck, the first season of the Witcher was really good. The Mario movie did well enough that they made a sequel, and are making a Zelda movie.
Not to mention other cross-media franchises. Marvel has been gigantic. D&D has had several videogames and movies over the years of varying quality. Warhammer is getting a TV show. Pokemon has been a gigantic mess of good, bad, and mediocre media of all kinds. Star Wars too.