bampop

Imagine what a tiny increment in their profit margins this will produce, what an infinitesimal impact it will have on the wealth, and standard of living of a handful of individuals. And for this they will fuck up an irreplaceable natural heritage which is there for the whole world. It shows that the value such people place on our coexistence with the natural world is zero or less. Maybe they hate it because they can't understand why normal people love it. Maybe it's just that they will feel richer, in a relative sense, when they have made us all poorer.

It makes my fucking blood boil and I don't even live in the USA. For all the problems your country has, the parks, the forestry, the public land and wild spaces are truly unique and precious assets, even looking at it in a global sense rather than a national one. Something worth defending tooth and nail. So of course Trump would want to destroy all of that, because if he didn't, you could still make the case that he hadn't really irredeemably and permanently ruined every single aspect of the country.

"I'm feeling lucky, give me the dee"

Blender.

10 years ago it was scarcely believable that a FOSS package for such a niche purpose could be so fucking good. And it got better in the meantime. If Blender had existed when I was a kid I would have probably spent every waking hour creating stuff with it. As an adult, I get limited time to do that, but I appreciate that it exists.

15 years ago was when I stopped using facebook. It had the potential to be a great way to organize and maintain social connections, but instead it was a toxic environment promoting the most annoying shit, particularly when posted by frequent users trying to broadcast their lives to the world. Simultaneously it did a great job of hiding anything I'd actually be interested to know. Fuck knows how bad it has become in the meantime. It was striking how much it seemed to bring out the worst in people, and equally remarkable how so many people just wanted to wallow in that.

"die" sucks so bad as a word. I propose we change it to "douse"

Jokes on you when you're mid tasting and you notice the whoopee cushion on a different chair

Yes, I don't believe there is a line such as you have mentioned because the difference between engagement and compulsion is only a matter of degree and varies from one individual to another. Indeed the link you gave illustrates how some individuals exhibit unhealthy compulsive behavior from overuse of an engaging product. Games are not generally considered to be "addictive" in the sense that it would warrant legal sanctions. The same could be said of social media addiction.

For clarity, I'm just talking about addiction here, not any of the other problems such as disinformation or active promotion of unhealthy or dangerous behavior. I think it's odd that the reporting is primarily focused on addiction, because it's the totality of these things that really makes it worthy of legal intervention.

I think your core issue is confusion over what addiction is and is not.

That's right. Because if your definition of addiction is broad enough to include compulsive use of social media, there's a lot of scope for confusion. That is a case of media companies using psychological tricks to get their users/viewers coming back for more, which is not fundamentally different from a lot of TV programming techniques. There are variations of degree or complexity, but it's the same game, and one which we've routinely accepted for years.

Don’t you care about spreading misinformation online?

How is that relevant?

If a TV program ends a series on an unnecessary cliffhanger, should there be legal consequences? How about if a smartphone game has timed events to encourage the player to come back regularly? While I agree that these things aren't typically beneficial, I don't think legislation is always the answer. There's a huge gray area around the question of whether a feature is beneficial or just designed to increase compulsive consumption. Trying to legislate something so ambiguous is bound to produce bad results.

I'm talking about a web page linked to by MoffKalast, see comments above

It could be, although it also seems that "opposing" representatives are usually of the left/green persuasion and the right wing is mostly "supporting", which is not what I'd expect to see in that case. All I can say for sure is that it's very confusing.

EDIT: thanks for that link 😁