This is the correct response. Social media, as a construct, is not evil and dos not do harm to anyone. The commodification and commercialisation of social media by capitalistic companies is what has caused the harm we see today.

All of the harms and evils of social media can be boiled down to a single concept: the algorithm. Because algorithmic recommendation of content wants to encourage people to stay on a platform (for capitalistic reasons), and the most enticing and attention-grabbing content is hate-content, these companies have forced hate-inducing concepts down the throats of people in an endeavour to make more money and destroyed individuals and families/friends in the process.

If we regulate the algorithms, we regulate the harm without disempowering anyone. We can, and we should, regulate algorithms on social media to turn it back into what it was 20-odd years ago - a measure to keep in touch with people you know or care about.

Honestly, while Booking.com acted shittily here, I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who buys a home and does short-term rentals. Every investment vehicle has risks, and this woman copped the short end of the stick when it came to the risk associated with her investment choice. She chose to purchase a basic human need and try to maximise her profit from it at the expense of the average person trying to buy or rent a house and, if she didn’t want the risk of this happening, she should’ve chosen a less risky investment like bonds or a term deposit.

Landlords are bad; fuckwits who own short-stay rentals are far worse. The market distortion they create hurts so many people in so many ways. Frankly, I hope she takes this as a sign she should just sell the property and move on to something else.

https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/problem-with-a-product-or-service-you-bought/repair-replace-refund-cancel

These are direct quotes from the ACCC website (my bolding added for emphasis):

• When a product has a major problem, consumers can choose between a refund or replacement.

• When a business sells a product with a major problem, or a product that later develops a major problem, it must give the consumer the choice of a: refund, or replacement of the same type of product.

While I take your point, the concept of telling a lesbian that they “just haven’t had the right dick yet” is almost always used as a slant to imply that they’d actually be happier if they were straight, not if they were bi/pan. It’s more saying “you’re wrong” rather than saying “you might enjoy something else in addition”.

Being bisexual myself, I find monosexuality to be pretty weird and struggle to understand it. I tend to put people who identify as either straight or gay in the same camp - as just not being open-minded enough to explore what feels like the natural state to me; that all people are potential sexual candidates. While it’s a pretty blunt instrument, I tend to think of the Kinsey Scale as being normally distributed - that true 100% straight and 100% gay people probably exist but are extreme minorities.

Again, that’s just my opinion, and it’s not one I’d ever levy at a person derogatorily. I just think as a species we haven’t yet come to the point of thoroughly and completely deconstructing the social and biological frameworks we’ve constructed around sexuality.

When your worldview is predicated on your ‘right’ to lie, cheat and steal from others in order to enrich yourself, socialism and communism are the greatest evils.

How I would love to offer an extremely exclusive and expensive product or service and have a billionaire approaching me trying to get it for free, to be able to say “Oh, I’m sorry, can you not afford it? We only offer this to people who have enough money to pay for it. I’m sure if you work hard, one day you’ll earn enough money to come back and give this a try!”

Nothing would hurt a fragile billionaire’s ego more than insinuating that they’re poor. Their entire lives and identities revolve around being rich and to take that away from them, even for a few seconds, would haunt them for many years to come.

It’s a real privilege to know that your vote can never be cast away, wasted or exhausted. I’ve literally never voted for the two biggest parties as my #1 choice, but my vote usually ends up with whomever I preference higher. In Australia we also give a candidate/party election funding based only on #1 votes, if they reach a certain quota, so even when my vote ends up with Labor (our major centre-left/centrist party) I’m actively contributing to the election coffers of a smaller party or independent and sending a message to the major parties.

And then you look at democracies with more pluralistic forms of voting and Green parties actually have decent representation. Here in Australia they teeter between being the third and fourth largest party (depending on the jurisdiction) and have been in governing coalitions a good number of times. Mandatory voting + ranked choice voting + proportional representative voting really changes things.

He’s been doing all of the awful, harmful, spiteful things he said he’d do. He’s done none of the helpful things he said he’d do. The cultists are still holding out hope that eventually he’ll get around to helping them because he kept the angry and bigoted promises he made. Many will keep burying their heads in the sand because the cognitive dissonance of admitting they followed the wrong man for a decade is too much for their fragile egos to bear.

There are larger, more established correlational studies that show a link between dental health and overall physical health as well. There needs to be much more study done but preliminary evidence would suggest that preventive dental care provides for a cheaper overall health cost for a person over their lifetime.

On one occasion when an idiot was blaring music from their phone so loud the whole train carriage I was in were forced to listen to it, I queued up some metalcore and held my phone up so close that it was near his ear. He jumped, startled, and then tried to start a fight with me which was a bitch to de-escalate and prevent myself from getting punched without other passengers verbally backing me up and him eventually getting off at the next station.

Suffice to say two things: it’s not something I’ll likely do again for fear of my own safety, and the people who do this have a significant overlap with people who consider personal violence to be a warranted response when inconvenienced; i.e. they’re selfish, violent arseholes.

I feel like it’d be ‘Solstheimer’, but I can’t explain why. Just rolls off the tongue better.

You make a great point - not all of us have the same capacities and there need to be protections in place to prevent people falling for scams - but I just don’t know where the line is between personal responsibility and collective responsibility. Like, for society to function, we all need to assume some amount of collective responsibility to protect others but that can’t be at 100%. People need to take some amount of personal responsibility for their actions, otherwise we slide towards a society with no learning and no repercussions which is a recipe for disaster and collapse.

It’s a tenuous relationship, and extremely context-dependent, so I don’t think that there is an objective and quantitative answer to the question. Would make an interesting philosophical/ethical debate though.

Weapon degradation seems to be a serious and genuine complaint that a lot of people have with BotW and TotK but for some reason it never seemed to bother me as it has others. I totally understand the criticism but frankly I always had a full stock of good quality weapons - particularly with the Fuse function in TotK - and never ran low or out of decent weapons on hand.

I think they were implemented to try to force gamers to think about other options to take down enemies rather than brute-forcing every battle which appeals to me, but it seems to have angered a significant proportion of people. From my perspective, it helps to engender the puzzler aspect of Zelda games in a novel way - viewing battles as a puzzle to be solved for maximum efficiency rather than how well you can strike and dodge.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned The Brak Show! That was definitely one of my favourites back in the day.

That figure absolutely staggers me. The fact that it’s so commonplace to irreversibly mutilate the genitals of a baby that has no capacity to consent to such a lifelong alteration really says something. Conservatives being up-in-arms about trans kids taking hormone blockers to prevent puberty but not about taking a scalpel to babies’ penises would be genuinely baffling if I didn’t already expect that without double standards, they’d have no standards.

That depends - am I only physically attracted to them? The answer is no, whether or not they’re trans. Am I also attracted to their personality? Then yes, whether or not they’re trans.

It helps that I’m bi.

It’s been Israel’s playbook against Palestine for a very, very long time.

We were taught a similar trick in physics - point your right-hand thumb in the direction that current (or electrons, same same) is travelling and the curling of your fingers shows the direction of the resultant magnetic field that the current creates.

While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!