Payment processors, if left on their own, would take any money from any person for any reason. This is more to do with a patchwork of laws that are trying to snuff out anything “adult” and will absolutely sweep up every party even remotely involved in the transaction.

They’re covering their own ass. It’s cowardice, not righteousness.

Anyone who doesn’t already have a favorite may be able to find one on Wikipedia’s list of lists of lists.

They were living in 2025 when they posted that in 2023. I don’t think the stats software is the biggest story here.

Everyone’s experience will be personal to them, so it’s not anyone’s place to say your experience isn’t worse, but as a whole, things are better.

Crime, no matter the category, is down ~33% since the mid-90s.
Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is up ~25% (despite the narrative).

Here’s a post/graph I think about all the time: https://bsky.app/profile/simongerman600.bsky.social/post/3ktds56nqus25

Regardless of age, we are generally nostalgic for a time in our youth. Or even earlier. Notice that something like half (or nearly so) of people think “the most moral society” was before they were born.

Cats

He was born in 1946. The world came together to reject what he stands for before he was even born.

Dumb question: which one draws more media attention in Chicago?

In my own experience (not Chicago), the local news is dominated by where the rush-hour crash is today, while national news talks way more about gun deaths.

I’m going to go with the general vibe of Lemmy here and assume you mean that auto deaths need to get more attention in America. To that I would say there is a general cultural attitude that cars are a necessary evil (even among most people who don’t outright love them, which is a huge demographic), and fixing the zoning and infrastructure would take decades and many tens of billions of dollars to restructure a large city around public transit. Besides bumper-sticker-slogan politics (“more public transit!”) there are precious few real, concrete plans for getting from the current situation to the car-free utopia.

Even then, you’d not eliminate cars entirely. Among the more developed western European nations that are known for good public transit, Ireland seems (at a quick glance) to have the fewest cars per person at 536 per 1,000, while the car-happy US has 850/1,000. So best case, you reduce cars by ~35%.

Gun deaths, on the other hand, are easier to imagine as a problem that can be solved relatively quickly and with less disruption. From an advocacy point of view, it’s the lower-hanging fruit.

Ok, Agent Smith.

Win10 EOL is surely driving some people away, but it’s difficult to put a number on that. Measuring by market share is tricky and can be misleading. Steam Deck popularity may be driving increased usage, but those users aren’t necessarily migrating their main OS, just adding a new machine to the mix. But maybe “migrating” their time spent in a given OS counts? It’s messy.

I don’t remember who said it (so I’m likely butchering the phrase), but I’ve heard that any creative work exists in three forms: The mind of the author, the physical copy, and the mind of the audience.

For example, a book/story exists as the author intends, as the author writes, and as the reader interprets.

No one of the three is more “correct” than the other.

I mean its not even too late for this to happen starting like right now 2025, right?

No, it’s not. The US, and increasingly the rest of the western world, is infected by a bunch of politicians who think ‘1984’ is an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale.

IT being used to weaponize surveillance against the people is happening right now.

Yep. “1” is 12:00am on 1-Jan-1900

Numbers less than zero just give a weird error. Between zero and less than one give a nonsense date-formatted non-date.

The “late, great” Hannibal Lector.

That’s not an argument, that’s somebody who only looked at the cover of the cliff notes on presidential terms but didn’t read it.

Right, but he can’t read, so it can still be his position.

And of course, anything passed by the normal legislative processes can just as easily be repealed that way.

Lasting change is going to require constitutional amendment(s) to harden the democracy against bad actors.

Is this a “what happens if we outlaw all News Organizations” situation, or a “What if the world evolved without News Organizations” scenario?

From there, the answer depends entirely on how you define “news” and “organization.”

Nobody would define aunt Sharon gossiping about her neighbor’s cat’s digestive issues as being a “news organization.” Almost everybody would define the New York Times, or CNN as one.

Between them lies a million shades of gray, and any distinction is going to be arbitrary.

In the “outlaw” scenario above, even the best attempts to define clear and unambiguous rules will just lead to gamesmanship and disappointment.

The question is basically answered now, so I’ll just drop this video here for some additional context about Microsoft’s history of trying to build a file system that solves the problem, and the challenges they faced even in the early XP days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5d5H92c4Mk

tl;dw: MS tried to understand the context of each file, not just the name. Once you add dozens of pieces of metadata to each of tens of thousands of files (even 20+ years ago), the whole system became too difficult for them to properly index and manage efficiently.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-methodology/

A total of 205,100 sampled addresses were mailed survey invitations. Respondents were given a choice to complete the survey online, by mail, or by calling a toll-free number and completing the survey over the phone with an interviewer. Of the 36,908 U.S. adults who completed the survey, 25,250 did so online, 10,733 did so by mail, and 925 did so by phone.

It goes on to say the results were then weighted to get a representative demographic sample, e.g. if more older people answered, younger responders would count for more.

Even if you discount all other forms of taxation, and only focus on income taxes, the sentiment is irrelevant to this particular vote.

His support appears to be concentrated in the middle class. (Median household income in NYC is about 80k, right about the peak of his vote share)

Martavius Garantus Hawthorne IV is my real name, officer.