• 8 Posts
  • 118 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • I think you’re missing some key parts of the Star Trek lore. America didn’t peacefully evolve into the Federation. Earth wasn’t able to get past it’s self destructive tendencies until after World War III, a conflict so devastating that 30% of the Earth’s population was killed. My knowledge is more fuzzy on this, but I don’t think the American empire survived WWIII as an entity.

    Also we have images of black holes.


  • People bought excess of lots of things, toilet paper just was more noticeable more quickly because of it’s huge volume to value ratio, and slow restocking (in part because of that ratio, it’s not worth warehousing so there was little flexibility in the supply chain).

    Once the shortage started becoming obvious it was self-perpetuating, you needed to buy what toilet paper you could when you could because you didn’t know when you would be able to buy again. The supermarkets near me at the time had no toilet paper restocked for more than three months as supplies got redirected to “higher priority” stores.



  • Some of this is the fault of the design of Word. Even modern versions have direct formatting in the Home tab, to the left (chronologically “before” for people used to left-to-right paradigms) of the styles box. The styles box itself becomes rapidly less accessible if the window is not full sized.

    If they moved direct formatting to a formatting tab, had a more focused concept of styles, and possibly repurposed some of the direct formatting buttons for quick style application, people would use them a lot more reliably without any training.






  • This is exactly the conversation that happened in Parliament over the Australian social media ban and its absurd.

    There is a broad recognition that in a regulatory vacuum corporate social media created toxic and addictive “engagement”-maximising algorithms that harm all facets of society exposed to them.

    So a solution is proposed: ban it for children.

    When exactly, did it become fine for corporations to actively and deliberately harm people as long as they were old enough? How about preventing the harm?

    It would be just as easy for a government to ban opaque and engagement maximising feed algorithms. But they went with the option that allows “tech” giants to keep harming the less marketable 80% of the population.