Blake

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Well, it’s the thought that counts, TLDR bot!

I remember having to hunt high and low for the dune 2 manual to find out how heavy an Atreides airfield is because that’s what anti-piracy measures were back then.

Also it was much more of a crapshoot whether or not a game would work at all. Some games just completely refused to be played outside of specific hardware, especially when it came to video cards. Stupid messages like “sorry, you must have a GeForce 2300 or newer to play” that literally checked if your video card name started with some specific string…

Similar kind of thing with sound cards. Most games had a couple options for sound: if you have a sound card that contains the magic words “sound blaster” you got to enjoy nice sounds! Otherwise hope you like some kinda shitty half-attempt at MIDI sound.

And every game ever came with an EULA, if it wasn’t in the game it was in the manual or in some readme. It’s just as meaningless now as it was back then.

Then when CDs came out, sometimes they’d get scuffed and become impossible to install, so you’d have to end up buying a game twice because your cousin got a hold of it.

Things haven’t changed that much. There’s still a lot of shitty games, with a few that are great. It’s more like micro transaction or “free-to-play” games instead of shovelware now for the most part it seems though.

Everyone remembers the classics and forgets the duds!

The “labour” party campaigning on a conservative policy. This is great stuff. Can’t wait for the headfirst rush towards far-right ideology that will happen when people realise that voting labour didn’t make things better. \s

Facebook is able to track you quite successfully almost everywhere unless you block them using an anti-Facebook blocklist with a decent ad-blocker such as ublock origin. At the very least, everywhere you see a “share on Facebook” or a “like” button, you’re being tracked by Facebook

Mozilla, sadly, isn’t really that trustworthy anymore. A VPN is not really helpful when it comes to ensuring privacy - a VPN hides your IP address from sites you connect to, but cookies, browser fingerprint, login accounts, etc. are much more useful than your IP address because your IP address is likely shared with other users, potentially many others. And additionally, you’re trusting the VPN provider with far, far more than you really should. It would be pretty straight forward for some VPN provider to steal your login details for basically any website if they wanted to do so.

For emails, disposable email address providers exist and if you use Bitwarden password manager (highly recommended!) then you can use them to generate username/password combinations for any website you like.

Some of these are good suggestions, others not so much - unfortunately this area is rife for lots of issues such as undisclosed (or underdisclosed) sponsorship, creating content specifically to further the agendas of think tanks, and just straight up disinformation. There’s lots of criticisms of CGPGrey and Kurzgesagt for example. Just in case you weren’t aware

Yeah, for me the issue with GMOs is less with the concepts of genetic engineering and more with the legal rights. Should be impossible to copyright or patent a fucking plant, and if that means that big corporations don’t want to do it anymore then that’s absolutely fine.

No one would be so inhumane as to do a study where you mistreat a lot of dogs to see the effects.

Of course they would, and they have, and they do, animal testing on dogs is pretty common. I am absolutely opposed to it, of course, but if someone could have made some money out of it, they would have done it.

Additionally, even the RSPCA when arguing against breed restrictions accidentally reveal quite a damning statistic - of the pit bull puppies they raised, they deemed that around 70% of them were affectionate and non-aggressive enough to be suitable as family pets. That means 30% of them weren’t. I wonder what percentage of golden retriever puppies the RSPCA could raise to be suitable family pets

Data were gathered via owner report using an online survey […] advertised online (via Facebook and relevant dog/breed specific groups, Twitter, pet fora, via the UK Kennel Club”

Such science, very wow

Had a Google around myself and didn’t really find anything convincing. Just a lot of handwringing about how banning breeds is imperfect because some dogs of that breed can be raised in a loving and caring environment to become affectionate and caring pets. Sure, great, but so can every other breed. There aren’t really any sensible proposals for how to handle the issue of dangerous dogs from those who oppose breed bans. They seem to favour treating each dog individually, but how would that work? We would need to establish a fucking huge office of dog assessors to check every dog in the UK to evaluate if they have good inherent behaviour and that they’ve been raised well, and if they fail the test at that point they’re taking away a beloved family member from people who presumably did their best. I really don’t think that’s a better outcome for anyone.

As it is we have far too much dog breeding going on, so anything that happens to reduce that or to make it harder is a good thing in my view

Absolutely agree with you about banning dog shows. I am sure that there are valid criticisms of breed specific bans, but the article you linked wasn’t very persuasive at all, it was really clearly biased and had many weak arguments. Of the various claims made, I looked deeper into a few of them and found that the article was quite misleading. For example, it mentions that the Netherlands repealed a pit bull ban, with the implication being that they instead treat all breeds equally… but that’s just not true, because the Netherlands still classified pit bulls as a dangerous breed, and dogs classed as dangerous need to go through state mandated testing or be euthanised, which is a lot more work and much more cruel than the UK’s dangerous dogs legislation.

I’m open to hearing good criticism from a perspective of improving outcomes but surely we can do better than that americentric article

Ah, at our school we weren’t directly given free condoms, just told about how we could access them. So of course a bunch of kids got some free condoms which encouraged lively discussion around what flavours were the best before some of them inevitably ended up as balloons.

There are massive differences between implementing a ban on pit bulls in a single city (Denver) and across an entire nation (the UK). The US is such a mess of federal, state, county, etc. laws that it is difficult to enforce such a law, but in the UK, it’s much easier.

Honestly I’d go a lot further and ban all breeds with significant health issues as well, to be honest.