The people who have fallen behind the most are the ones who don’t realize they’ve fallen behind. “What you know you don’t know, versus what you don’t know you don’t know” and all that. They are also the people least open to catching up when the opportunity presents itself; if you think best practices haven’t changed since you were initially trained, why would you even entertain any information that contradicts what you initially learned? Part of this is ego, as it would require admitting that you’ve been doing it wrong this whole time (so instead these people keep doing it wrong as some kind of sunk cost fallacy).

The alternatives for tortillas would be purchase from a bakery (made fresh so no preservatives), purchase frozen (so no need for added preservatives), or make at home (surprisingly easy to do).

I remember really enjoying How I Met Your Mother when it was airing. I tried for a rewatch recently and only made it a few episodes in because I was so disinterested. It felt empty, and the humor wasn’t hitting. I think it’s a combination of I’ve changed (I’ve aged out of the “20-something singles fool around in a fantasy version of NYC” demographic) and TV has evolved (good comedy shows are no longer just goofy hijink situations and setups for one-liners).

So instead I rewatched Archer season one (same era as HIMYM) and fortunately that one still slaps.

You’re completely correct on the exposed demand issue. I would also add that in most cities (in the United States anyway) hotels can only exist in very specific corners of the city due to zoning, often in just three places: downtown (expensive!), the suburbs (so not even in city limits), and “motel alley” (which is usually an old highway in askeevy part of town lined with mid-20th century fleabag accommodations that are slowly being abandoned/bulldozed). For some cities this isn’t an issue, but in others it’s a problem for accessing the tourist attractions, especially if the tourists in question don’t have a rental car. Then there are the non-tourist visitors to consider: if you’re in a city to visit family, you’re probably going to want to stay as close to them as possible. Same with a lot of business travelers. This is a bit of a conundrum when the nearest hotel (or affordable/decent hotel) is a 30 minute drive away.

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

I’ll check it out, thanks!

All I want to know is: will this push companies to rethink infinite scroll? Like, even to make it a toggleable option.

I really appreciate that Lemmy still has distinct pages. “I’ll stop at the end of this page” is the easiest way to quit a social media session, which is why most companies have eliminated it.

I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).

I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.

That’s a funny way to put it but pretty accurate. Like, you see a cat walk up to you and you exclaim かわいい! (= cute). You wouldn’t say “that cat is cute!” or “what a cute cat!” like you would in English. Because if you did say the word-for-word Japanese equivalent あの猫がかわいい it implies something like “that cat is cute, unlike all the other cats,” because why would you go through the trouble of saying all those words that were obvious from context unless you were trying to call out this cat specifically?

Sure, but “fridge” is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. 行った (“went”) is a complete sentence. You don’t need a subject or an object in Japanese, whereas you need at least a subject in English (e.g. “He went”)

Learning Japanese (especially colloquial Japanese) also gives me a strong “why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick” vibes. Articles? Don’t exist. Prepositions? Only if you want to sound like a dweeb. Subjects/Objects? Used unnecessarily you’ll change the meaning of the sentence.

“Went” is a complete sentence in Japanese.

When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.

I think it’s because a lot of things are bad (and many are getting worse) yet the only power most people have to do anything about them is to raise awareness of the issues, which means engaging with negative news. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what’s real news and what’s rage bait; sometimes non-news can seem like news when it’s part of an ongoing pattern (such as “Elon’s dumb take of the day”). I think there’s also some degree of trying to maintain one’s sense of reality. To the previous example, despite being a massive fuckwit, Elon is still among the wealthiest people in the world, is incredibly influential, and has maintained some degree of fanboy army; posting/reading/discussing/upvoting an article about what dumb thing he said today is grounding for some folks because it reinforces reality by demonstrating that yes, he is still a fuckwit, even though somehow everything still hasn’t come crashing down around him like it karmically should.

Skimming through the photos, they completely neglected to connect any of the sidewalks in the new dystopian refugee village. Whole community went from 100% car free to 100% car-reliant.

Arcane, the animated Netflix show that was based on League of Legends.

Basically all the media.

There is (or at least was) a special kind of joy in discovering a new piece of media (movie, TV, book, video game, comic, etc), getting to the end, and hopping over to the relevant subreddit to sort by “top of all time.” Bonus points if you loved the series and would get to essentially relive it all over again through the sub, but even media that you hated or were neutral about could be fun subs to peruse; maybe you would get to revel in seeing something you hated turned into a meme highlighting how stupid it was, or get to feel justified in your negative assessment upon reading an epic rant from another user; maybe instead you’d find hidden details or explanations pointed out by other users that made you reassess the work (“huh, I though that was a stupid plothole but it actually was perfectly explained by that one scene that apparently went over my head”). The ATLA subs especially were treasure troves of tiny details and “holy shit I just noticed on my fifth rewatch” posts that really elevated my opinion (and thereby enjoyment) of a series I was initially kind of “meh” on.

When I think about what it would take to feel like Lemmy had sufficiently replaced Reddit for me, the number one practical answer is for comprehensive news (political, world, cultural, meme, etc… Reddit really did at one point feel like “the front page of the Internet” if there ever was one), and the second is to have the critical mass to be able to ask a question and get a good recommendation for any specific product or service, via regional subs, hobby subs, etc (although thanks to LLMs and corporate astroturfing that may simply be a bygone part of the Internet). But the “fun” answer is to have the critical mass for a wide range of specific fandoms.

I’ve never seen (or even heard of) it, but that movie poster is not doing it any favors. IMO it reads like a fake/parody. Maybe it hit harder in the 80s?

Wow that map of the wiggly London-Singapore flight route really drives home how many airspaces these Europe-SE Asia flights have to skirt around.

I haven’t watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it’s aged (or how my tastes have changed as I’ve aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray’s Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn’t a shonen power fantasy, you can’t just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.

For instance, in a very early season there’s a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of “didn’t we go through this already?”

I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.

I’m digging deep in my memory here so I can’t provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey’s Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, “wait, did they ever solve this episode’s medical mystery?” There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there’s a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn’t the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I’m still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.