All aboard the LainTrain - We all love Lain!
It's too low on the priority list. Rent, bills, food etc. all come first.
I only buy e.g. video games that are exceptionally enjoyable and exceptionally niche or an album on bandcamp of an artist who's work I particularly enjoy with exceptionally few plays where 1 sale might make a difference, and even then I usually limit any such spend in total to a max of £20 at most, and it's something I would only spend once a month at most, normally rarer.
Higher prices are a deterrent.
For instance when I was trying to leave Spotify, I had no good piracy sources for one of the albums from my Spotify library, so I went to the artist's page on bandcamp and it was priced at £12 or something as minimum, when she was some indie Lana del Rey type "moan to a synth a bit" and it was nothing special, just decent vocals. Long story short I just shrugged, removed the song from my playlists both on Spotify and locally and now I no longer remember who the artist in question was, I instead bought the entire discography of a different, more unique artist at £2 per album.
As for like, drawings/paintings, I intrinsically see them as having almost zero value and cannot see myself ever paying for one, I would sooner invest in a printer and print something off Google images for a poster than anything else If I even could put up posters without running afoul of the rental agreement. On an emotional level - when I grew up, all images were just something on the internet that was free, watermarks and Shutterstock meant to prevent you from right clicking and saving an image and all that crap to me are seen as enshittification.
I would definitely never buy art for art's sake, it would be highly specific things. Out of all the people I know IRL, I'm basically the only one who considers paying for art generally, which probably has something to do with the fact I'm sympathetic because I'm a hobbyist musician. In fact most people I know don't even seem to have the attention span for music at all anymore, they just don't listen to any music at all (which isn't my fault I swear lol).
Beam me up, Mr.Curry.
But we're not talking about X-Y problems (a concept in IT support and mostly inapplicable in real life) in either OP's question or my example, nor are those things unethical or begging the question.
The response is still and always to answer it. You're not IT support talking down to an "ignorant" (in reality they actually just don't care) user, you're on equal footing and you should respond.
And lol what efforts? Blocking Imgur? Handing the nation's IDs to private companies via KYC and now not even being able to browse Reddit without entering an ID to some shady American tech giant? Outsourcing defense to Palantir?
You talk about ethics, here's a freebie: The ethical thing is to oppose the UK government.
Uhh, yes, I would support heroin addicts finding heroin, it's literally how the most successful drug treatment programs work.
How uplifting
As a working class person who can't afford art and has always pirates everything this is accurate.
Yes. But more specifically I really dislike the redditism where someone asks a question and is met only with someone getting all upset about that question. E.g.;
OP: "Hey how do I do X?"
Comments: "Don't do X. Why would you do X? I never do X. I am the moral and pragmatic centre of the universe so I know there is no reason to ever do X. You must be stupid to not be like me. No my underlying assumptions about your person don't need to be evaluated. It is obvious that I am superior"
One time I asked linux_gaming to give me some reasons I shouldn't game on Kali Linux, which I clarified as already using as my main and daily driver OS because I work in the sec field and most of what I do outside of work is CTFs and various HackTheBox machines and gaming was a small hobby not worth a separate OS install and disk use for me.
Anticipating the response I'd get, I made sure to mention that Kali is just convenient to have all the tooling available in one box, and as I do some hardware stuff I don't use a VM. I made sure to mention I know it's just Debian and there shouldn't be any problems but just in case there's some issues with steam that breaks something I figured I'd ask.
The responses?
"Uhh, Kali isn't for gaming, use bazzite" "You must be new. Visit the FAQ" "No you can't use it for gaming"
Especially the last, when I inquired as to why the user just kept stating over and over that it's not what it's for and it's why it doesn't work. His source? Kali FAQ that says the distro is intended for pentesting 🤦♀️
It was probably the only thing I ever got actually infuriated by on the internet. The motivation of pure spite got me playing CP2077 with Path Tracing on Kali by the end of the very same day.
Still, it just sucks.
It's purest form pseudo-intellectualism, where people who pretend to think reveal themselves as navigating by vibes alone. I would imagine (but wouldn't assume outright) that some of those people probably thought: "oh, LainTrain must be a newbie child (like me) and the only reason I'd use it is if I wanted to be l33t and (like me) LainTrain probably doesn't know anything".
Even with the redditism of endlessly providing context, people just don't really read and still just imagine something completely different and attack that instead.
So that's why I strongly dislike this shit. I would like the default assumption to be "person knows what they are doing and must know what they're asking or they wouldn't be asking".
It's frankly shocking to me how acceptable this paternalistic attitude got on the internet.
Like - No, it's actually not progressive or cool to act like a 1950s housewife smelling marijuana every time someone mentions something that doesn't seem like YouTube essayists would praise and promote.
Other than a technical label of the same species, folks other than you couldn't be more different and you have no right to dictate to them how to live or what to do, never, no matter what white picket fence gated community ass "culture" "healthy" bullshit you contort.
Your rights end where theirs begin and vice versa and if bro wants to gamble let him gamble.
OP didn't ask for a lecture. OP didn't ask to be judged. OP just asked a question about what people do for gambling these days.
So to OP: if you're still here, I don't gamble, but I reckon after WSB GameStop saga, lots of folks moved onto CFDs and stuff like PolyMarket, but I see lads betting on horses too. Robinhood is available in the UK now, but we also have eToro. Their KYC is mostly theatre too. Don't bother with T212 or anything more "legit" it's impossible to get verified.
Back to Reddit, Now!
Okay but an OLED wasn't exactly ahead of it's time. Every smartphone had an OLED since like 2011 barring iPhone and crappier androids.
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Uh-huh. I've done enough drugs to know a downer from an upper. Weed is an upper only in the way benzo withdrawals are "stimulating".
Muh weed not addictive
Yes and? And lol many plebs still get """addicted""" to it anyway.
Muh terpenes
Non-THC cannabinoids
Can't spell methamphetamine
Bro is cooked.
You are right, I am comparing meth and coffee, coffee is for normatron dweebs and all it does is make em twitch and I'd rather do meth anytime.
I'd rather be addicted and OD'ing on something that gets me something than waste my life on "terpenes" that aren't linked to overdose.
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I'm biased against weed fwiw I'll admit that, shit spikes my heart rate to like 140, no other drug ever done that, not even borderline lethal doses of cocaine.
It's super uncomfortable unless doses are extremely moderate, a couple tiny buds barely ground and stuffed in a (so they'd actually stay in the bong bowl(?) and not fall down into the water) would last me like a week if not more of going for multiple tokes daily.
Even when it did feel good though, I don't miss it, same as I don't really miss xanax or valium or alcohol or codeine. For me it was not a very productive drug, sure I'd paint once in a while but never would I have called it relaxing or bringing any sort of clarity at all - if anything the complete opposite, its obnoxiously anxiety inducing, I relaxed more drinking coffee on hour 4 of an LSD trip than anything I ever had on weed.
I have been tempted to try it in a combo with Vyvanse to see if it's more chill that way though.
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Uh-huh. You do you bro but I have better things to do than downers.
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Gonna get crucified for this, but:
While the comic is cute, the message is bourgeois slave mentality propaganda.
If the capacity to enjoy less is so aspirational as scorates, ghandi et al. would have us believe, then why don't the rich ascend to this purer existence in a trailer park? Why is it always the poors? It's because they have class consciousness and we don't.
These people have an objectively shit life and shouldn't have to live like this.
Don't get me wrong - If they want to - that's fine, but you can't really say you truly love something you didn't go out of your way to choose - and it doesn't seem that way here, and either way - this is a comic glorifying poverty, when there are many who don't want to live like this but have to, and it's kinda gross, tbh.
Also, weed is 21st century opium. Yes it should be legal, but you shouldn't do it if you want to have a life, it's no different from excessive social media use, it is an artificial relief for an ancient instinct of boredom that you have for a reason - it is your brain telling you to get off your ass and do something. Using chemicals to quell it - is just brainrot coated in an appeal to nature fallacy and new age aestheticism to make it more palatable.
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Wanna let me in on the joke?
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Yes, but again - not by SM/apps/big tech, just by the establishment and grifters. Same as it always was with the press.
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That's fair, still, I'd rather talk to "crazy" people who reasoned their way into than "normal" people who got there purely based on vibes
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Both have a profit motive, one simply earns actual capital that it's owners (Murdoch etc.) exchange for political capital (favourable laws) and the other earns political capital (position promises, coverage opportunities, connections with assorted tory wankers), to exchange for actual capital (bonuses, cushy jobs).
Every system is corrupt.
In so far as beeb vs the sun hey are practically indistinguishable in terms of actual levels of bigotry, the actual tone is the only thing that sets it apart, but in terms of harm the Beeb takes the cake for me for being so transphobic one of their articles has a whole-ass Wikipedia page about it.
Then you have the frankly bizarre amount of sucking up to Rowling, Farage, et al. they do and now the coverage of the war in Gaza too.
The Sun is arguably more harmless because nobody really thinks it's unbiased truth. But many people do see the Beeb that way and it hasn't been so since the BoJo years at least when the new head got appointed, it's just polite fox news now.
Tomatoes are biologically fruit, but culinarily they are a vegetable.
You wouldn't expect them to put an orange slice on your burger because you asked for some veg, would you? But you'd expect tomatoes, tomatoes are veg outside of any scientific context. Language is fickle. Life is complicated. Reality defies categorization.
Not close at all these days, mostly occasional emails, but as a kid I would often think and say that my parents are some of my best friends, we always had good times together and I'd often just step away from the computer to just go hang out with them and riff on some TV while eating dinner or whatever or see what they were up to generally and talk. Nothing but good memories there.