Unrelated to the topic here, but does anyone else get pissed when news sites change articles, without any indication, without any differences and/or old version linked somewhere?

I've sometimes read the article, had a whole argument with someone, where they quoted something from the article that completely changed the meaning of the first version of the article and what I was arguing about. With more and more sites blocking archiving services (archive.org etc.), it's even harder to find the original texts, some existing for weeks or even months before being changed.... it gives me a total "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" vibe.

Trump attacked quite a few countries in his first term, even killed the Iranian general (Soleimani), and you guys reelected him after all that. You guys clearly weren't bothered by that enough to vote for someone else.

If nothing else, Iran has learned that they really need those nukes, because you guys will never leave them at peace otherwise.

The only difference is, is that before him we had "Iraq has weapons for mass destruction! we must attack them, before they attack us, we're in danger!", and now there's "we're going in and we're taking the oil!".

So from "we can do whatever we want if we lie" turned into "we can do whatever we want", not really relevant to all the people killed.

But hey, some americans would say that "It's worth it" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP_VnVlFhXU

Same for politicians, 4/5 years matter, if the world collapses after, it's the next governments problem.

And in financial terms, those are really long periods, at least compared to HFT.

Now you can do it in minutes, get 50 books out, 20 of them sell 10 copies, you've earned $200.

(i might be exaggerating the times and earnings, but the point stands)

And to add to payments, the store loyalty apps are the worst... Lidl over here has an app only (no physical loyalty card), and they should be hanged for developing that... first of all, you're waiting in line while a grandma takes her phone out of her purse, then unlock it, and of course android is not satisfied with her fingerprint right then but also wants a pin... then all apps, then scroll down to L, find LidlPlus app, tap on it... QR code? Nope, not yet! First you get a daily coupon wheel of fortune, tap, wait for it to spin, see what your award is... and if it's something that she just bought, she has to manually activate that coupon in the menu (again, tap, find, tap, tap back), and then click the card button to get the qr code to scan... it's literally minutes sometimes of just waiting, instead of scanning a simple qr code on a plastic card pulled from the wallet.

We even had one of our telcos break down (full internet loss, country wide), POS terminals not working at all, and there are actually people with zero cash with them, not even like 50 euros (for just-in-case (like this))... and then you have to wait for them to turn around, take their stuff back and go home hungry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk

This could be done with setting the age too. Kids don't have their own money and can't sign their own cell contracts, their parents do, and during the phone setup process, the parent could set "the owner of this phone is a minor" checkmark, set the age of birth (so it auto "unlocks" at 18), add a parental password to manually unlock for whatever app needed (or reset or change the setting). Then the phone would just send "user_is_a_minor" flag to whatever and/or filter the 18+ stuff.

eg the comments here: https://old.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1u8d9mq/olde...

The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.

Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.

Somehow we still need day after pills, abortions, antibiotics and other STD meds, and vaccines, now (hopefully) for HIV too.

Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.

If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.

This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".

Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?

Blocking vpns is the same kind of bad... with governments requiring you to show your ID or do a face scan just to jerk off, vpn usage will go up, and you'll be blocking all those people for no good reason.

Sure, you can block whatever you want, and i can and will hate you for that.

(/s, it's a joke, like this one: https://i.imgur.com/CMsAp8v.png )