best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.

You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)

Among other reasons, caps chill usage. A lot of user content would not get shared because “ehh I don’t want to waste my data for the month”

One of my friends wanted kids. She has a full time job in software and does side gigs like bartending. Can’t afford kids, so she didn’t have any. It’s sad.

Meanwhile the ultra wealthy have more money than they can spend.

Nationalize health care. Basic income. Public housing. Enforce existing tax laws. Tax or prohibit bullshit like “I’ll get a loan against my assets but that’s not technically income so I don’t pay anything”. Break up monopolies.

No one made the “pee v pee” joke yet?

You don’t seem to understand how things or people work, so I don’t think engaging with you further will be fruitful.

It’s not you. Google has been getting worse.

https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

Street performers aren’t the same as people watching videos on their phone.

You can’t be serious. Or you don’t spend a lot of time in public.

Most people’s conversations in public are fairly quiet. People often do get annoyed of people are having a screaming or otherwise disruptive conversation on the subway. Most humans don’t find a quiet conversation that distracting though. Hearing half a conversation annoys most people- I think it’s because the brain keeps trying to figure out what’s happening.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hearing-just-one-half-of-a-conversation-is-really-really-annoying-2657804/

It’s not really “”“arbitrary lines”“”. The shared theme is “don’t distract other people in public”. Whistling fails this check. So does singing. As does a phone alarm going off. But also like most things that annoy or tolerate are arbitrary.

This is especially true if you need to hear announcements like what stop this is or that this train is going express.

Anyway, my current thinking is you’re doing some sort of “bit” as a selfish child, or you just don’t spend a lot of time in public.

As I understand it, people mostly change their mind (and thus behavior) for two reasons.

The first is in-group beliefs. If someone sees other people in their in-group believing a thing or behaving in a way, they’re more likely to adopt that. Possibly the people who play audio in public, their friends and peers are the same way. But if you also might be in one of their groups, like a college kid to another college kid, or a junior professional to another, talking to them might make a difference. But if you’re like a 59 year rich old white guy, telling a 16 year old non-white poorer kid is unlikely to land, because they probably see you as outgroup.

The other thing that changes minds is horrible trauma. Like, if you smashed their head into the bus window, took their phone and transferred all their money (via venmo or whatever), then tossed the phone out the window, they might change their mind about being a public irritant. Maybe. They might also take some other lesson instead. But either way you’d go to jail for several crimes, so probably don’t do that.

They might be a literal child, as implied by their name.

There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.

One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.

There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.

I also really liked pillars 2, and am sad they’re not making a third one.

Targeted ads should be illegal.

Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I’m looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don’t need to know I’m a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That’s how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It’s fine.

Guild wars 2 is a very good game, but very different than guild wars 1.

They both avoid the endless gear and level grind, but gw2 is generally easier and less tactical. You can solo most of it. Builds are a little more limited, but it’s also harder to make a useless character.

They addressed the most common problems with early mmos: other players are never a bad thing. there’s no kill stealing. If you’re doing some event to fight off demons that have invaded the town, and other people show up, the game silently scales up a to accommodate more players, and everyone gets credit. it’s great.

I really like it. I don’t play it every day, but I go back to it all the time.

Have you played Nioh2? It has diablo-like items, but actual combat. It’s very good.

What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?

Horizontal progression is pretty cool .

Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want that. They want to feel cool and competent without actually doing anything. That’s not to say like you need to “earn” your fun or whatever. But that the progress quest number go up don’t think too hard is immensely popular with a lot of people. They don’t want to be challenged.

And that’s fine. It’s a game. It’s just not a game I want to play all the time.

I still remember the thrill when I was a teenager when I clicked a random corpse in Diablo 1’s hell and the unique staff Mindcry popped out.

Been happy buying music from Bandcamp and not having a subscription. Didn’t even make it onto the chart :(

A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.

Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.