AnyOldName3

It’s probably more risqué than that - with the rise of cam sites and then OnlyFans, plenty of people aren’t wearing any underwear at their day job at all.

In principle, copyright law doesn’t stop there being a system that lets you redeem the same key from Steam, Epic and Gog as long as it’s the same person behind all three acounts. There’s already a degree of precedent for this - when a publisher generates Steam keys to sell at other retailers (whether they’re codes-in-a-box at a physical shop or an online retailer like Humble Bundle), they don’t have to pay Valve a fee, but the keys can be redeemed on Steam and work just like if you’d bought the game from the Steam store where Valve would take a 30% cut. Valve probably don’t think it’s in their interest to make libraries transferrable/sharable between Steam and not-Steam, but if they change their mind, and the competitors that they’re building the transfer/sharing system with also thought it was in their interests (which is unlikely to happen at the same time), there’s nothing stopping them building it.

If you trust Adam Smith, an efficient market would quickly make new goods and services available for the lowest possible price. People are supposed to be incentivised to sell things, and competition is supposed to stop an excessive amount of money being diverted to profits instead of reinvestment and price cuts. There are supposed to be systems in place that ensure that there are always opportunities for competition, but the wealthiest have the most power to erode those mechanisms and the most interest in eroding them, and neoliberals think an Ayne Rand novel is the definitive text on how capitalism works rather than Adam Smith’s work, so even if you land in the capitalism makes everyone better off mode, it doesn’t last for long before it falls back into fuedalism with extra steps mode.

Magnets from Temu were probably just loose in a bag or some bubble wrap with no warning label. People should know they’re not food anyway, but defying a warning label wasn’t the particular flavour of dumbness exhibited here.

I don’t know if this is the same loophole used in NZ as in the UK and EU, but in the UK and EU, lots of things are banned from retail rather than completely illegal. If they’re imported and the importer sells them without demonstrating that they’re safe, the importer has committed a crime. If the importer keeps them for personal use, that’s fine, though. In theory, people ordering things from outside the EU and importing them are supposed to be aware that they’re importing things and that the stores aren’t necessarily only selling CE-marked goods, so they’re responsible for checking that they’re safe themselves, but in practice, people just see an online shop and don’t make a distinction from a domestic online shop except the price and delivery time. The EU is working on a law to close this loophole in some way.

Planking was just lying down on things, so hardly an instance of teenagers endangering themselves.

The tide pod thing wasn’t exactly what it seemed to be. Some children with learning disabilities and some people with dementia had died from mistaking laundry pods for food. At some point, some media outlets decided to sensationalise it by leaving out the bit about learning disabilities. That meant that there were teenagers who thought other teenagers had died from eating them, so they could make videos pretending they’d done that, just like teenagers have staged videos to make it look like they’re doing dangerous things that they aren’t really doing ever since people have let them have cameras. Some of them decided that the easiest way to pretend was to put a real laundry pod in their mouth, pretend to chew it and swallow, pretend to die, and then cut the video and spit it out. If they checked the relevant warnings on the packet, they just said not to eat them and to rinse their eyes if they got any there, so this plan might seem safe. However, laundry pods are so corrosive against mucous membranes that putting one in your mouth and spitting it out immediately because it starts to burn immediately can still be fatal or cause permanent injury. The media reported the deaths and injuries as if teenagers were intentionally eating laundry pods, rather than pretending in a way the packet implied might be safe, so most people weren’t learning that pretending was also deadly and that the warnings on the packet weren’t exhaustive, so it just made fake tide pod challenge videos even more tempting. If the reporting had been more responsible, then most people would have first heard even pretending to eat laundry pods can kill rather than teenagers are eating laundry pods.

Most FPS games have holding shift bound to sprinting, which makes movement much louder.

It’s pretty obviously both things that were a problem. A mediocre prebuilt with a $200 premium over other mediocre prebuilts was unattractive, but plenty of people do buy overpriced mediocre prebuilts. The killer feature being that nearly no games were compatible was going to kill it even if the price was right, though.

Now we’re in the era of Proton, and games just work, if the price is fair, it’ll sell. If the price is you cannot get anything like this without spending much more like the Deck or how consoles used to be priced when the hardware made a loss and the profits came from games, then it’ll sell really well.

I don’t think anyone who ever texted like that is still under 25 anymore. It rapidly dropped off around 2010 as smartphones with full keyboards became widespread, and not using full words was a signal that you hadn’t got one yet. That was fifteen years ago, so to still be under 25, you’d have had to be texting people while aged under ten, and people didn’t give preteens phones back then.

There are a fair few troubleshooting things I’ve seen where I could have smugly pointed out a clever way Windows avoids the same problem or an easy way it provides to solve it, so it doesn’t even always need the lol at the end. It’s just an annoying thing to see when you’re already annoyed at a disobedient computer, unless learning the technical details would be an interesting distraction, so should be saved for when you know your audience and know it’s interesting.

The scary dystopian part is the ability to work out that the account belonged to someone who hadn’t used it for a decade rather than just that they could see what had been posted. The Internet Archive doesn’t let you ask it what someone’s Digg username was.

The article was updated a few hours ago but when it was originally posted and accumulated its first slew of upvotes, the fine hadn’t been rescinded yet and the only statement from the council was that their enforcement officers had acted appropriately and the fine was appropriate.

Also, in much of the UK, the surface water and foul water drains both go into a single combined sewer system, with areas that have been built up for centuries like this one being most likely to still use that old approach.

I’ve seen plenty of news reports say that combined sewers are nearly ubiquitous, but now when I’m googling it, I’m seeing some sites back that up, and other sites saying it’s only about a fifth of the country, so I don’t know which to trust. I can see Ofwat and some of the water companies say that the rules changed (potentially in 1991) so new developments after that point have to use separate sewers, and that wouldn’t be that much of the UK, as most building is redevelopment of existing sites where existing sewers can be reused, rather than new developments, and most things haven’t been rebuilt in the last thirty years, so I’d be surprised if it was 80% separate if it’s only new stuff using it, but less surprised if it’s just the Victorian sewers that are combined (and areas that still use Victorian sewers that have been spilling foul water into waterways) and things have been gradually switched over for more than a century. Do you have a source that explains the incompatible figures?

Even if nationalised, our water infrastructure still needs hundreds of billions of pounds investing in it to bring it up to an acceptable standard, and the government doesn’t have the money and has other priorities to spend it on if they magically got a surprise pile of cash. The only financially viable way to fix the problem in a hurry would be to seize past dividends from water company shareholders to cover the cost of doing the things the water companies were supposed to be doing (which would conveniently tank the share prices and make nationalising the water much cheaper), but lots of pensions are propped up mostly by water shares, so doing that would plunge lots of pensioners into poverty, which isn’t politically viable as the government’s already in enough trouble for perceived being mean to pensioners, and they can’t afford to support more impoverished pensioners.

It’s only not treated because the UK has a massive problem with not treating sewage. In the UK, storm drains flow into the same sewers as toilets and go to the same waste treatment plants, where everything gets pumped out the same emergency overflow pipe into open water because there are millions more people in the UK than there were fifty years ago, and sewage treatment capacity is virtually unchanged because it’s cheaper to pay the fines for emergency overflow than to build more treatment plants.

The UK only has one type of sewer, so the storm drains flow into the same waste processing plants as the toilets. However, those waste processing plants then declare an emergency due to unexpected high volumes and just dump everything into open waterways if it’s rained within the past week, which, as it’s the UK, it almost always has. There are multiple issues at play here, and they’re all dumb and foreseeable if you assume companies will do whatever is most profitable without breaking the law, and none of them are this person’s fault.

It’s the UK. It’s a big scandal at the moment that most of the drains lead to rivers, lakes and the sea with only a small fraction of sewage actually being processed before being released from the processing plant. The fines for not processing the sewage were smaller than the costs of building and running treatment plants, so the water companies have just been paying the fines and giving all the money they were paid to build the treatment plants to shareholders as dividends. As no one’s broken any laws they haven’t already nominally been punished for, there aren’t any realistic and politically tenable solutions unless billions of pounds can become magically available.

Lower emissions, and natural gas is cheaper than diesel. Also, the lead time is much shorter, as there aren’t many manufacturers of large diesel generators that could keep up with AI datacentre demand, whereas there are lots of airliner turbofans being retired that could be refurbished to become these generators.

The format was originally designed to interchange animated palettised depictions of giraffes, so Giraffic Interchange Format made sense. They just changed the acronym when they realised that by storing different colours in the palette, you could depict things other than giraffes.

These days, the majority of users refuse to use anything except discord, unless they’re willing to leap further into the abyss and ask an LLM. Forums end up dead, with very few users asking anything, and no one except devs coming back regularly to answer questions, so they still end up with devs dealing with every question themselves.