paultimate14 @ paultimate14 @lemmy.world

Posts

0

Comments

598

Joined

2 yr. ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/health/the-sober-truth-seeing-bad-science-in-rehab.html

Except 12 step programs don't help. There's no scientific basis for them. They are essentially cults. You'd be just as well off going to a chiropractor or using homeopathy.

Are you suggesting that the scientific method involves more than an anecdote about Courtney's feelings?

For decades, weed’s deleterious health effects were exaggerated, experts said, leading to excessive criminalization

This line fron the article is exactly why I'm skeptical. I had to sit through tons of middle school and high school programs that lied to me about the physiological effects of marijuana. This article itself opens with an anecdote about one individual, but fails to identify any academic study suggesting physiological addiction because... There is none.

Psychological addiction is real. There's a reason that in most places any gambling advertisements have to include a warning and a hotline. The problem is that these sensationalist articles never make the distinction between psychological and physiological addiction. This article mentions when the case study first tried marijuana, but fails to detail the circumstances of her life, her personality, and other factors that can contribute to psychological addiction.

Add in that the medical marijuana industry is trying to replace the very physiological addictive (and profitable) pain medications... Add that to the years of lies in schools and media... Forgive me for not trusting this BS at all.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

I love the Yakuza series, but I think the combat is just good enough to pass rather than a strength. I generally prefer turn-based games.

The problem isn't even the money. It's Denuvo. I don't want that on my PC.

I could get it on PS4/5 instead, but that's so much more limiting than having it on Steam. Denuvo is expensive, and I hope Sega drops it in a couple years.

Jerboa is SFW because, at least at the time I first tried it, the setting to uncensor NSFW content was not working properly. They may have fixed it since, idk.

Connect is the other. Those are the only two I've tried and they seem fine. Maybe one day I'll mess around with others, but they're good for now.

First, price. The Samsung Galaxy Ultra is $1,299 for 256GB, $1,379 for 512GB, and $1,619 for 1TB (only available as an unlocked phone.

That's a $180 premium to add 256GB. You can get an SD card for that much for $25, also from Samsung. To go from 512 to 1TB is $240, while a 512GB SD card costs around $35. It's Apple levels of ridiculous markup.

Both SD cards and internal storage can vary in speed, but I would expect SD cards to be slower most of the time. And that's fine. I view it just like how in desktops you might have a large, cheap, SATA SSD or HDD for bulk storage and a fast NVME for things where speed matters.

Why would I bother with USB C file transfer? That seems like something annoying to manage- having to remember to go and back things up, transfer things over, and just generally maintain. Especially with WiFi speeds nowadays. But that is for backups for the sake of redundancy. Moving files off the phone to make room because of low storage means removing a layer of redundancy.

The Steam Deck has an SD card, as does the switch and all of their handheld competitors. My Xperia has an SD card. The Samsung A series still has an SD card, and so do most mid-tier phones. It's something useful that most people want, but Samsung and others know they can cut the $0.50/phone or whatever and the whales will still buy the newest flagship as a status symbol anyways.

Simple: one app for the SFW accounts, one for the nsfw. I actually prefer this because a lot of other settings, like how it handles media posts, might also be different in different use cases.

Flagship has no headphone jack or even micro SD card. Absolute joke.

If they had those I would strongly consider buying. I was an LG person until they stopped making phones.

Misinformation that has since been debunked.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/24/23805783/ubisoft-delete-game-accounts

I don't really care about a corporation that makes the epitome of mediocre games, but let's criticize them for real things rather than fake things.

It seems like you are assuming that the only device that I want to use headphones with is my phone.

I'm a musician. I've got tons of audio equipment I've accumulated over decades, most of which use a typical analog headphone jack. So if I fully switched to USB-C or Bluetooth headphones, I would need to get a powered adapter of some kind that would then digitize what likely would have been a purely analog signal up until that point, just so it can be re-converted back to analog.

Or I could have sperate headphones just for my phone. Which seems silly.

So I took the 3rd option: got a phone with a headphone jack. The Xperia still has a micro SD card too.

Also I have dabbled in soldering circuits and doing basic repairs. I can easily replace most analog jacks and repair most cables. USB C... It's possible, and I will try to learn to work with it eventually, but it's always going to be more annoying to work with because it has many more, smaller pins.

Why do all of these articles always assume all vaping is nicotine-related? It's exchanging the words "e-cigarette" with "vape". Seems irresponsible of the author. It's like writing an article on the dangers of squares and mixing in the word rectangle

So you're suggesting that Biden just seize power? Just ignore the courts and Congress.

That would lead to an impeachment. Either Harris sides with Biden and continues what he did, then gets impeached herself, or Harris sides with Congress and tries to take power. What it effectively biols down to is Biden and someone else acting as commander-in-chief, and who wins is determined by the Pentagon. At best, you are advocating for a military coup, and more likely a civil war.

If Congress gets turned progressive, they can suddenly enact a ton of policies. Of the Supreme Court tries to intervene, there is the option to expand the court (as has been done before) or the option of impeachment (has not been done, but... Maybe).

So the answer isn't just to sit at home blaming Biden for not starting what would effectively becoming WW3, but rather to vote in every election- primaries, state, local, mid-term, etc.

You just listed a ton of things that the Exexutivr Branch does not have the power to do. That applies to Medicare for All, Paid Leave, Vacation Time, Minimum Wage, Free/Reduced College/Childcare, the Child Tax Credit, expanding the EET Credit, universal pre-K, marijuana legalization, and allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug manufactures. You need to blame Congress, not Biden.

Biden has taken some measures on a lot of those fronts. He sponsored the bill you referenced that allows Medicare to start negotiating some drug prices. He directed the FDA to start reviewing Marijuana for rescheduling, which is as much as the Executive branch can do without further input from Congress. That's pretty far from the "0 movement" you claim. The DoE tried Student Loan forgiveness and that just got shut down by the Judicial branch, and they have started the process to try again with a different law. The US President is not a dictator and can't just implement these policies unilaterally.

I agree that I didn't like the handling of the rail workers strike, but the unions ended up getting what they asked for.

On climate change, Biden has done a ton. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/04/20/fact-sheet-president-biden-to-catalyze-global-climate-action-through-the-major-economies-forum-on-energy-and-climate/. Is it enough? Hell no - to be honest it's probably too late to actually do "enough". But even some of what he has done has already been undone by the Judicial branch: he stopped leasing federal land to oil companies, but the judicial branch has been starting and stopping that through appeals.

Housing affordability is typically a local zoning and supply issue, though there are bills pending in Congress to address corporate investment in the housing market. I don't know what you expect from the Federal Executive branch there. The federal government can't just start building stuff on the whim of the president. They can build on federal land (within limits defined by Congress). Even Congress would probably struggle to do much with local building because that's not their jurisdiction.

I'm going to assume you're not American because you clearly don't understand how the US government works. You're just blaming everything on the President.

I think if you compare it to games from the last 10 years, then yes.

But at the time it was miles ahead of everything else. Most RPG's were incredibly unfriendly to beginners, throwing paragraphs of text to read, spreadsheets of numbers to understand, incredibly unfair mechanics, making the player make decisions without understanding them, and legacy mechanics that traced their routes back to tabletop wargaming. The marketing for RPG's revolved around hyping up bigger numbers of systems, skills, weapons, armor, items, spells, and whatever else you can think of. You can still go back and have fun, but the ethos of a lot of RPG's was quantity over quality. They were very difficult to get into, and most RPG's kind of had the assumption that the player already knew how to play RPG's.

It may seem silly to say that Skyrim was a break from that. After all, it has radiant quests, tons of NPC's, a pretty big map, tons of dungeons, etc. But it streamlined a ton and made it accessible. The quantity of voice lines was incredible for the time, and reducing the reliance on text made couch gaming easier. The leveling system is incredibly intuitive and fun, and IMO the best I've seen before or since. A lot of systems exist to allow customization of either the roleplaying or mechanical experience, but most of those systems are optional. You can just bash through the game with the equipment you get in Helgen if you want.

The game isn't perfect, but when I see criticisms it's usually that people want to add more systems or more complexity. That's the kind of thing that always sounds great in an armchair thinking about it, but when you actually put it in a game the game usually ends up bloated and tedious. It's great to add mods later after a couple playthrough, but it's easy to overwhelm new players with things like a spell creation system.

Whenever I see people talking on the Internet about trying Skyrim for the first time, I see a lot of other players recommending to start with mods. I also see a lot of people saying they bounced off of Skyrim, and I think there's a correlation. I ran into similar experiences with Civ and Cities Skylines: it's tempting to add in tons of stuff to try to get the best experience possible, but sometimes it's better to start simple.

Skyrim has bugs, but most of them are either just visual, hilarious, or can be fixed by re-loading the area or the game.

It's not perfect, but overall I think it's fair to include Skyrim in the conversation for... Idk, top-20 ish games of all time.

I think this take got ice-cold shortly after Windwaker released.

The issue is that game developers have been using this as a crutch to do less and still charge full-price. Even with Windwaker, I always found the art style was inappropriate for the tone the rest of the game tried to set. It really felt more like they were trying to save time and money than actually having something that serves that art. That style worked pretty well in the handheld games, but I just don't think it holds up as well as Twilight Princess on a big screen.

I enjoy the occasional 16-bit style indie game, but I'm not paying $60 or $70 for that. I love Supergiant games, and they all look amazing, but even they know that art style can only push the price so far. There's also value in a game that is realistic and not stylized, especially in military shooters and racing games.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have AAA games from big studios selling for full-price that have neither. Look at GameFreak's Switch games: terrible quality textures, uninspired lighting, bad draw distance, terrible FPS, and they literally cut to a black screen describing what your character does instead of animating anything. And the art style is just the most generic anime-style imaginable. It looks like Nintendo too the Mii system and just made some minor updates and used that to make human models. This may be a hot take, but I think the models in TotK and BotW are the same. The devs create some fancy clothes, hair, and accessories, but the actual models are bland. It's essentially the Mii system.

Graphics and art style are not mutually exclusive. It's fair to ask for both in a full-price game.

Normal people 100% care about appointing judges, because that has a huge impact on everyday life. We just saw the Supreme Court overturn Roe V Wade last year (filling the country with thousands of unborn children every year is going to effect everyone). This year they overturned affirmative action and student loan forgiveness. The reason Miranda Rights and gay marriage exists is because of Supreme Court decisions. Tons of state courts have had huge impacts on the drawing of districts over the last decade, either supporting or trying to eliminate gerrymandering. If you don't think appointing judges impacts you, you need to go back to your 3rd grade social studies course.

The EPA helps to protect the air we breath, the water we drink, and the soil we grow our food in. If your electricity gets more expensive, blame your local provider for not seeing the writing on the wall in the last 40 years and switching to renewable and cleaner energy sources. Or blame yourself for not investing in solar. I don't want to breath pollution just so you can get a few dollars off your electric bill.

Also you're ignoring how Biden literally sent out stimulus checks. That is the single most direct thing a president can do.

There was the management of the oil reserves at the start of the Ukraine war, and the pressure he put on gas companies to stop price gouging. Even if you don't drive, the price of gas effects everything you buy.

What are you looking for from the president? Head pats? Magicka tricks? Do you want him to fix your municipality's terrible zoning laws? Do you want him to tell you it's okay to be racist or bigoted?

The railworkers got their sick days: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave

Maybe try talking about things you're informed about instead of spreading lies?

That's not quite true: other parts fail more often. I've never once had a headphone jack or micro SD card slot on a phone break on me. I've had headphone jacks on other devices break, but pretty rarely. On other audio equipment, 1/4" jacks break all the time, but headphones jacks just aren't subject to that kind of force. I don't remember anyone I know personally having issues with those things. LED's are incredibly robust as long as you don't put too much current through them or invert the polarity. And you wouldn't want that much current for a mere indicator anyways.

The part most likely to break is the screen. Next is the battery, which doesn't break but rather wears. Next is the charging port (depends on the standard, but this is less of a concern recently with USB-C, Lighting, and wireless charging). Next is physical buttons (power, volume, etc). Then you start getting to the point of headphone jacks and micro SD cards. It's hard to find solid academic research, and a lot of this varies over time and by make and model, but a quick search turns up a bunch of articles from cell phone repair places that back this up.

Also worth mentioning that the CPU, RAM, and updates, along with the ever-increasing demands of apps a d websites, means phones that were powerhouses 10 years ago are barely able to do anything today even if the hardware is in pristine condition. That's a whole other problem, and others have pointed out the waste and evils of intent obsolescence. Related to headphone jacks, SD cards, and indicator LED's: that further invalidates the reliability and longevity arguments because those parts are going to last way longer than the main parts of the phone would anyways.

You realize Biden broke Trump's record for executive orders and appointments, right?

He did a ton of work, most of which was reversing Trump's damage to Federal agencies like the EPA.

He also gave out stimulus. Student loan forgiveness was struck down by the Court, but they are putting together a secondary option. They've started to look into re-scheduling marijuana.

I don't love everything he's done. I could point to the railworker strike or foreign policy in the middle east as things I don't like. But he has far exceeded my expectations for both accomplishing goals and for those goals being further left than I expected. He's only done "nothing" if you decide to conveniently ignore all that he's done.

This defense of feature removal always conveniently ignores the phones that manage to accomplish fantastic ingress ratings even with headphone jacks, SD cards, etc.

It's not because of water/dust. It's purely cost cutting.