Well, I do imagine there’s some caveats as to the efficacy of welfare programs, but we’ll stick to this topic :D

There’s been hundreds of food programs over the decades, but there really isn’t a good way to do it. If you just sent aid to a government or group, it tends to either destabilise the local economy or empowers people you don’t want to empower, like armed groups who can just take that aid for themselves.

But if you send individual aid, there’s issues too. For example, let’s say you set up a ‘work for food’ program. Sounds great, right? But what that ends up doing is that the WFF option is more attractive than tending your own farm or doing work with future benefits. Basically, WFF pays now - a farm doesn’t.

The best way to help is to give people tools and knowledge. Teach a man to fish and all that. But when faced with kids starving now, that’s obviously a hard sell.

I work for a newspaper and actually spoke to a gentleman a couple days ago whose student group helped set up a school in Ghana 30 years ago. Kids who grew up in the literal gutter got free schooling there. And it works! The reason we spoke was because the school is now setting up a music program and they’re collecting used musical instruments. He told me that during his last visit, he met a girl who went to that school and was now graduating from university. Isn’t that amazing?

Problem is, that takes 20 years to do. And that’s a mighty difficult thing to accomplish in places that are actively in conflict like Sudan.

The article is not wrong. But the reality is, we’ve tried to help places like a Sudan a lot over the decades. I’d say we helped TOO MUCH.

We sent food aid which made them dependent on us. It didn’t incentivise them to fix their issues, it just made them reliant on outside help. Meanwhile, the population skyrocketed. There’s more mouths to feed, more famine, more conflict.

At some point, a country needs to fix whatever’s broken. And it won’t be pretty; it never is. But I don’t think interfering in an internal conflict like this will do any good to anyone. Can we as the west even reasonably figure out who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are in this conflict? Is there even a good or bad side to begin with?

Exactly. There’s a huge gap between ‘feeling cold’ and ‘being cold’. The human body is perfectly capable of operating for extended periods at temperatures that we deem ‘uncomfortable’. After all, our species survived to the present day, and proper clothing and central heating are relatively new inventions.

The human body itself produces a tremendous amount of heat. Go sit in a cold room with a few friends and it’ll soon get toasty.

I’ve spent a good amount of hours outdoors in cold and rainy weather. If you give in to ‘feeling cold’, the body doesn’t really learn to adapt to it. I know exactly when my body goes from ‘this feels cold’ to actually being cold and at risk of hypothermia.

“Mr President, there are aliens…”

“Yes, I know, that’s why we’re building the fence. It’s going to be fhe best, tallest fence anyone’s seen in the history of fences. And Mexico is going to pay for it!”

“… sigh…”

Same thing with the recent “””carmageddon””” game, that basically has fuck all to do with actual Carmageddon.

I guess it’s easier to get/use the naming rights to a beloved franchise and just hope for customers that way, instead of making an ACTUALLY GOOD GAME.

You cut them in half and count the rings.

Same thing here in the Netherlands: cheap, poorly made Chinese fatbikes that were incredibly easy to unlock flooded the market. The result: teens are riding around at 40kph and stunting on a bike that has no brakes. Because those wear down rapidly if you overclock the motor, and nobody does maintenance on those shitty bikes.

So now they’re trying to regulate it, much too late. When honestly, they should just ban the fucking things for anyone under 25 without a disability…

Assume all contacts are hostile and practice good OPSEC.

Which distro would you recommend for gaming? I usually hear people like Mint for that.

God yes. Back in 1995, the web felt like a little village. You knew everyone in your particular digital neighbourhood so to speak. Lots of great forums, lots of little niche websites… nothing was really commercialised yet:

And frankly, I liked that it was a nerdy thing as well. Everyone shared at least some level of knowledge and understanding of what the web was. And we were all some level of nerd, whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, trains, flightsim, Sci-Fi or whatever niche interest you had.

We lost all that when we made the web too accessible to the general public. We should’ve kept it to ourselves.

Not exactly surprising, and certainly a broader trend than the UK. Lots of parents aren’t really parenting. There’s parents who just let kids do whatever and ‘they will tell you when they are ready’. That soft approach just doesn’t work for things like this.

There’s also plenty of parents who see school as glorified childcare, and that teaching them even basic life skills should be the school’s job, not the parents.

It’s certainly disconcerting. One would hope that parents who CHOOSE to have a child would actually want them to grow up well and properly prepared for life’s challenges. Instead, kids are more like Instagram fodder, something to be shown off but otherwise nog given much attention.

Very scary indeed.

I hear ya.

These days I only buy things that have years of good reviews, or that I know how to inspect for quality issues. Learn what makes a good shirt, a good knife, a good tool… what are the signs of quality and signs of cost cutting that you should be aware of? A consumer really does need to do a bit of homework to find the diamond in the dung pile.

I also really love old gear and tech for that reason. Fewer things to break and easy to fix. I use film cameras that are older than I am, often by decades. It might be old, but at least it’ll keep fucking working AND can be fixed if it doesn’t.

Absolutely not. Just look at games these days. Number one complaint: everything runs poorly. Optimisation is an afterthought. If it runs like shit? We’ll blame the customer. A lot of games now run like trash on even the most high end graphics cards. Companies don’t seem to give a shit.

Vote with your wallet I guess.

Yeah… no. None of that sounds appealing.

‘Curbing toxicity with AI’ means a bot is going to ban you because it doesn’t recognise sarcasm.

And ‘new tech to verify your identity’ sounds like a privacy violation at best.

‘Verifying that you own a product before they let you post in its community’ is a complete lack of understanding of how people use places like this.

Digg can fuck right off.

The main thing holding me back is the fact that it doesn’t have an OLED display. With the price hike between the original and 2, in my opinion it should’ve launched with an OLED as standard. When even cheap phones come with it, Nintendo has no excuse not to include one.

And the game prices also aren’t helping, I imagine. Not when the games themselves are lacklustre as well. The new Mario Kart should’ve been a system seller. But the people I know who own it, have reverted back to playing the previous version. That’s a baaaad look.

I’ll likely buy the Switch 2 when they launch an OLED and release a new Animal Crossing.

Oh I’ve been to some :D

One time our boss took us to a fancy restaurant that had a Michelin-starred chef owner. We did some ad work and publicity for him, so this was sort of a thank you, and a way for him to go all out and make a surprise menu to try things. Basically, we were dining for free there.

They go all out. Nine course meal. And as you’d expect, that means giant plates with tiny portions.

Now, thing is… our company is more of a steakhouse crowd.

Halfway through, they serve a perfect steak. Cooked to heavenly perfection. Best steak I’ve ever had in my entire life. And garnished with gourmet fries. They serve those in this tiny ramekin, intended to share. Basically, everyone gets a handful of fries.

One colleague sees the steak, grabs three ramekins and proceeds to load up his plate. He promptly flags the waitress and asks ‘hey, can you get some more fries?’.

Waitress comes back with some more. Colleague again: ‘hey uh, you wouldn’t happen to have a bottle of curry sauce?’ The look on her face was priceless. That was not a question this restaurant had ever had. ‘I’ll go ask… the chef’

Luckily the chef had a good sense of humor about him: out comes this wild, tattooed, giant bearded mountain of a man carrying the biggest kitchen knife I’ve ever seen. ‘WHO’S THE FUCKER WHO JUST ORDERED CURRY SAUCE IN MY RESTAURANT??’ Colleague meekly raises his hand. Chef hands him the bottle of curry sauce he was holding behind his back 😂

Well, it’s just pain compared to some other options :D

I love sausage on pizza though! Meatballs, minced meat as well. And I recently discovered ‘nduja, ever had that? Tastes great on pizza. It’s a spicy, spreadable pork sausage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Nduja

I do also enjoy a Hawaiian on occasion though…

You know what my favorite food is? A plain pepperoni pizza. Absolutely love it.

You can take me out to dinner to the fanciest restaurant: five Michelin stars, the best trained chefs, the most expensive ingredients, the perfect ambience… and it would be utterly wasted on me. Because nothing beats a plain pepperoni pizza.

Some people are like that with movies. Even movies which are objectively some of the best ever produced in the history of cinema, will have people who don’t like them. And that’s perfectly fine.

I was one of the very, very, VERY earliest people to ever buy Minecraft. This was late 2009 during the early alpha development.

I bought it because it looked fun and relaxing. I introduced a fair few people to the game, but frankly… I expected it to remain a niche thing due to how it looked and the fact that it didn’t really have set gameplay goals. You basically had to make your own fun.

It was wild to see it become a cultural icon. It was even wilder to go to the cinema and watch a billion dollar movie starring Jack Black based on a dumb game about blocks that I bought from some random Swedish dude’s site 16 years before.