Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.

The average human considers the Pythagorean theorem “sophistication”. Let’s not take our education for granted.

The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.

The educated and the well-travelled may have a broader set of view points to see how many different ideas and values work (or don’t work) in practice.

I don’t disagree on some just lacking empathy. But I also think not all education creates exposure to a wide range of ideas and values that stick (or the education is just too narrow), so you’ll still find plenty of people who are educated on paper, but not cognizant of a broad set of world views. I also think we are too quick to label foreign ideas==bad ourselves. Empathy is a two way street. The key in navigating this may be in identifying when an idea comes in good faith or if it is hostile.

Other than making sure to be wearing your glasses if you are near sighted enough that your local licence requires it, glasses are an irrelevant factor. It’s not like you are going into active combat duty…

This won’t help your situation, but as a general rule, I don’t engage in debate on Lemmy or anywhere else. In part to avoid these kinds of problems but also because I find that responders are rarely interested in considering my opinion in good faith, and are rather usually looking for a place to dump their own opinion. I admit to doing this myself. I think it’s an inherent part of not-face-to-face communication. Similar phenomenon as with how the faceless ness of cars so easily induces road rage.

We’ve got these things called “social media” that are built expressly for the purpose of influencing people to buy more stuff (literally in the name: influencers). And if it can get people to part with their money, you can be sure the same tools can be used to get people to vote against their own interests.

We thought the internet was a tool to spread democracy. We were wrong. The Internet is a tool used to undermine democracy, so long as people using the Internet are not strongly inoculated against organized interests, foreign, and domestic.

Can’t tell if you are joking. I know a lot of junior developers who think this is a legitimate solution.

You were so concerned with the undesirability of fear that you forgot why humans naturally experience fear in the first place.

“Don’t worry, if you keep your hand on the burner long enough, you’ll feel nothing at all!”

You correctly answered OP’s question. But the question was irrelevant to begin with. The ban on TikTok has nothing to do with data collection. It’s about controlling potential sources of foreign interference: controlling what is said or how platforms (pick and choose what to) broadcast what people are saying.

The Design of Everyday Things

So you’d rather the overpriced subscription printer service, where they supply the ink?

There are legitimately situations where a meritless person is mooching off of an organization because of corruption (e.g. cronyism, nepotism, abusing union). And then there are situations where a person appears completely incompetent, but has this one unique skill or asset that makes them absolutely invaluable to the company (e.g. savant, schmoozer, someone with connections). It’s important to be able to tell them apart.

I’m pretty sure Windows is a key part of their “cloud stuff” strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can’t use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).

Lemmy lacks niche interest communities, beyond stuff like Linux.

The second part of this comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.

My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.

The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.

A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:

• I paint a picture, spending about an hour of my time and 30$ of paint and canvas.
• I then organize a silent/shady auction for my painting, and secretly bid $1,000,000 for my own painting
• Then I decide to not pay for it and at the same time I decide to retract the sale instead of opening it up.
• On paper I have a $1,000,000 asset that has been depreciated by $1,000,000 which allows me to deduct $1,000,000 from my other taxes.

So obviously this example was fraudulous. It’s possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.

Maybe something more scummy was at play?

Who knows.

3rd party app support…

There are many other reasons, but let’s be real. A lot of us ditched reddit because they dropped support for third party apps. Having an interface that isn’t trying to constantly milk you for all sorts of monetization schemes matters a lot, as it so happens. Enough to say goodbye to a lot of familiar and large communities with otherwise good information.

Your dystopia doesn’t account for automation. Corporations don’t even want your labour.

A social crisis seems inevitable on our current trajectory.

when they were a scrappy bunch of nerds working out of a house

Much of the recent criticism relates specifically to toxic/bro culture and a work culture that encouraged cutting corners, mistakes, and burnout. I’m not sure what was going on in the house behind the scenes was a model of a professional workplace.

People have access to more information, but less access to tough life lessons, and therefore less experience (ranging from survival skills, to applied political science, etc.).

Is being “enlightened” mean you have more (possibly fake) information, or does it mean having more life experience? You decide…