I think from memory stuff was generally very formulaic but there were awesome exceptions to that rule in terms of commercials that you don’t see so much now. Looks like it would have been a fun time to work in advertising.

Cornwell’s Plum Sauce. I haven’t seen it since probably 2001 and I still want it back. It was the best thing on Macaroni cheese. The closest alternative is Masterfoods BBQ sauce and it’s great but it’s never hit the same. I tried other plum sauces since there are hundreds but it seems Cornwell’s take on it was really different to everyone else’s in a way I can’t describe so I don’t know what to look for in an alternative. Even if I did find another plum sauce as good, the bottle design and logo are iconic for me and part of my childhood.

I wonder what the reasoning was behind it being the 2nd place prize. Is that inherently more believable?

My parents have a well worn story of the time they were students and very poor and they saw a homeless guy outside the kebab shop and asked if he’d like a kebab to which he agreed. They brought it out to him and he examined it and threw it on the ground and yelled at them about something they now don’t remember exactly but they think was something to do with not wanting chilli sauce. Guessing that guy wasn’t in the best state of mind at the time, bit of a bummer for them though because they scraped together the last of their cash to pay for that and it would have been better if they could at least have eaten it themselves.

I really can’t see a downside. If they seem to be obviously homeless or they’re actively asking for help, they probably need it. Though it’s extremely unlikely that your meager contribution will be the change that suddenly allows them to magically overcome poverty and become middle class home owners with well paying jobs, that doesn’t really make them need it any less. Whatever they use the money on, it’s going to be what they need in the immediate term, be it drugs or food or anything really and unlike others this is the only way they can really get that money so they do need people to occasionally part with it. You’d only give it to them because you had it spare anyway and it’s not going to make them more homeless than they already were. If the concern is that it’s not addressing the root personal problems that put them individually on the street or the root social problems that put many on the streets, that’s completely true but if you’re serious about doing that you’re going to need more than the couple of bucks in your pocket anyway. That’s going to be concerted massive political will and financial effort and several people’s lifetimes worth of work all at the same time, besides you can always involve yourself in some way in such efforts and hand over spare change. The only times I can really think of where it makes sense not to give directly are: you can’t afford to do it, the physical circumstances of handing it over are dangerous/impractical, you don’t care about homeless people or other people in general or you subscribe to some nasty Malthusian ideas and think yourself somehow benevolent for condemning people to destitution as some kind of “cruel to be kind” doctrine in which case you’re unlikely to have given this a lot of thought anyway and don’t really face much of a dilemma.

Shit was crazy, random conservative shock jocks and mainstream conservative politicians all over the world were losing their minds over this kid it was hilarious. It was so funny watching them just fucking PR faceplant over and over again when all they ever needed to do was just shut the fuck up about it and wait for her to disappear from the news cycle in time as she herself said she fully expected would happen. I’m pretty sure her continuing relevance is at least in part because of the Streisand effect generated from a whole international cabal of right-wing old men desperately trying to destroy this child and fucking losing hahaha.

Good old klapaucius:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:! I wish there was some use to me still remembering that word today.

Or to market paid privacy focussed products towards you lol.

“You can always choose not use the street, no one forced you to sign up for an outside account”

Yeh, it’s not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don’t live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it’s a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there’s never a point at which it’s entirely too late. It is worth noting that it’s near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that’s years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I’m sure it’s useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.

NES is a good one, it was juuust about part of my time in that a couple of people I rarely saw had one and I loved playing it with them when I did seem them, but really that’s because I didn’t at the time have a games machine or a computer so anything would have been good. I’ve played a few of the games and they were alright, pretty good. I got an original NES console with several games as an adult and was super excited because it’s so classic and retro and I found that much as I love owning it, I really couldn’t stand playing it for more than a few minutes. The games are just, kinda boring and they feel very, incomplete. They suffy some of the same problems as the Atari games I played just to see what the time period was like, those Atari ones in particular feel very unfinished, like someone thought it’d be interesting to try making a game, had one attempt, made something like a sort of prototype and then got bored and just shoved it on the market and moved on to a different hobby. The NES games weren’t as bad as that, but there was a similar feel of lack of consideration for the actual player. To me, it the NES kind of represents when games were starting to get good, which I think would annoy a lot of people that were gamers for a long time before that, because it’s always annoying when younger people make these proclamations totally ignorant of the time they’re speaking about, but in my head at least that’s what the NES generation represents. It’s the starting point of what was to come, with some flashes of brilliance and a lot of meh and even the really good bits aren’t as good as their later more refined iterations.

But when he took the red pill he was relegated to eating a bowl of snot as his only food and living in a hellscape and had to fight a never-ending war whilst still having to regularly go back in to the matrix he was supposedly escaping. I mean I guess, great, for humanity but it doesn’t make picking Linux sound like a great time if you’re going to use that analogy.

Do you ever find that sometimes when you intervene in to other people’s conversations to pull out some of your best absolute cracker lines like “why don’t you google that?” that people just don’t react properly at all? Like you’d expect an appropriate response like some light cheering and maybe lifting you up on their shoulders and handing you a medal and at least a couple of trophies. You know, something befitting of your incisive and insightful contributions, and instead they just kinda stop talking to you? That’s so weird huh?

Is it true they can hold on to a charge for decades? I was told that but it seemed unlikely.

You deadly seriously didn’t know if they were talking about the Pacific Ocean? In a post about someone who has trouble speaking clearly, in a reply clearly establishing you were aware there were writing errors, zeroing in on a word well known to be accidentally substituted for the word “specifically” by some speakers. You deadly seriously didn’t know?

Unfortunately you just cannot simply take English as it’s spoken in your country and assume it will apply universally and without change across all English speaking countries even as you and I now mostly successfully converse in English. The roots of words can be interesting and sometimes informative to know but it’s not the whole story and ignoring actual usage will never garner a true understanding. It sounds like it’s pretty important avoid the word in the US, but not so in Australia. It’s not totally neutral here, it’s still swearing and you won’t hear a school teacher saying it to children, but it’s also not coming from the same place in terms of meaning as in the US or UK for example. Sometimes it’s an insult, essentially meaning a bad or objectionable person, sometimes it’s used in much the same way as “mate”, other times it can simply mean “person/people”. Much like English itself, context is important and you have to know the background and contextual cues to understand which meaning to take.

You should come over here some time, you might like it, the weather is nice, we share a lot in common with the US, so you’d feel right at home but there’s just enough interesting differences to be exotic and provide opportunities to learn something about the world you didn’t know before. I can tell you’re well meaning and I think people will probably appreciate that too.

It’s about cultural context, c*nt is deployed in reference both to men and women in Australia

Hanging out for the next one. Dude’s so funny.

I don’t know I thought it was pretty good.

I don’t, in general make this same bargain, and I’m not more than happy to give my data, and thus sacrifice my privacy. However, I have had to reckon, and I think many of those who value privacy must too, with the fact that it isn’t inherently valued by everyone, that simply adequately communicating this in a way that’s better understood won’t translate to people suddenly realising what they’re giving up. We aren’t always simply one great analogy away from changing every person’s world view and likely many have come to their view from a place at least as well informed as those of us who jealously guard our privacy. I also have to reckon with the fact that to some extent, my own desire to protect my privacy is at least not fully explainable by logic and rationalism, especially in light of how difficult it is to protect and how easy it is to have unwittingly ceded it. You might call that defeatism, and to simply conclude “well I lost some privacy, so I might as well give it up completely” is accepting defeat, again not something I’m yet prepared to do, but it is also perhaps important to acknowledge and factor present realities in to one’s thinking. It might sound defeatist to point out an enemy’s big guns pointed toward you from all sides, but it’s insane to ignore them. That quote that you’ve produced, while antithetical to my thinking, really isn’t irrational or illogical, and only defeatist if you were onboard with fighting to begin with. If you do not value your privacy and you get something useful in exchange for its sacrifice then it would seem obvious to part with it gladly and it’s difficult to offer a rational reason why someone shouldn’t. My strongest motivation for protecting it is more idealistic than personal and has more to do with a kind of slippery slope argument and a concern for hypothetical power grabbing and eroding of our rights and autonomy. I like to think that’s reason enough, but at least right now, for almost everyone, none of those concerns represent clear nor present dangers and I can’t prove it definitely will become such in future though I certainly feel like it has accelerated trends firmly in the direction of my fears.