This is wonderful and detailed advice but you can combine the circumcized and uncircumcised points. Studies on circumcision having any medical or protective benefit have been highly influenced by religious interests. The biggest ones by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in the 2000s look like pure philanthropy on the surface but people involved were calling for mass circumcision before they did the study. They draw a correlation with questionable methods that people who received free circumcisions in Africa had less cases of AIDS, which could be from any number of social or economic factors even if the data could be trusted. Medical organizations do not consider it to be a benefit.

That is indeed equal parts really funny and then really sad knowing this is part of being American.

Google is pulling shenanigans with Chrome through it’s inbuilt ad tracking and web integrity.

Agreed on convenience being enough for most people. Unity isn’t going anywhere. They are priced above Unreal now but they have the market share to justify it. There are a million other game engines with newer approaches than “coke and pepsi” but they take more work and there’s less community to pull from. There are just so many assets and abilities pre built in those game engines that allow a young developer to be productive. If you don’t need all of that then you have a wide pick of frameworks to apply your code chops to. I’d love for Godot to become Dr Pepper but it’s got a long way to go for even that slot. If unity had done this in a year or two from now it might be a different story but it takes a long time to reach a status like Blender, and even Blender isn’t the go-to for industry professionals. I love LibreOffice but I’ve never worked at a company that is willing to tolerate those little rough edges.

Twitter is still the centralized place for a mainstream figure/organization to engage from. They have all researched mastodon and the like, opened accounts, and can’t get the same engagement. It takes people more work to find their accounts in other places and most lay-users just aren’t going to put in the effort. They’re only in it for the lulz. This may reach a critical mass someday like with myspace but any alternative still needs a central point to funnel them to. Reddit doesn’t benefit from centralization the same way and I think Lemmy/ap will scratch the itch for major topics, but it’s still harder to grow smaller communities that aren’t risa.

Blizzard has been being blizzard for years, that’s not just a 2023 thing!

I wish it was different. We all hate nodding to authority. But there’s a certain momentum that carries with popularity and they can surf that on their enshittification for years to come.

Our son’s public elementary school gave no leeway about letting him walk 4 blocks after school. In the mornings they couldn’t prove where he’d walked in from but after class they could only release him to an adult they had on their list… Nobody walked home from that school. I assumed it was insurance bullshit, but I also read stories about police being called by nosy neighbors for kids playing unattended in their yards.

As a 90s latch key kid I don’t get this modern American hysteria. I’m sure kidnapping/assault stats are better than they ever were in decades past… yet its less socially acceptable than ever to let a kid have any independence.

The concept of the patent office is a genuine one if too idealistic. Having been through the process it did feel like they pushed back for revisions with the sole intention of squeezing some more money out of the filer. Perhaps like insurance companies rejecting every claim initially.

The protection it affords is questionable. It’s really just a 1st place ribbon you can bring to court if you have the money to sue somebody copying you… A lot of that is glorified brand warfare: if you’re too similar to WD40 they’ll sue you regardless of what’s in your can.

Though originally encouraged to be layman friendly it now strongly uses overly technical jargon to obscure the invention while still legally protecting it.

That said, it holds a lot of collective knowledge that us nerd types can reference when innovating. Otherwise that knowledge is locked up in private corporate data stores or college curriculums. It’s the original open source repo. It eeks out a win in the big picture despite the abuses capitalism inflicts on it.

Which seemed to stay on the rails for many decades…but with a global capitalist economy there is currently no authority which can keep multinational corpo’s and billionaires on the rails. They live between the rules of any one country.