I think you got that backwards - the caveman is the one scared of the microwave and its spooky woo-woo magic that damages the water’s aura

Can… can they do that? Just shut you out of the room if you annoy them?

I love it when they pretend to be asleep like that. They’re about as good at it as a 5 year old child.

How many people listed in the credits of your favorite show do you truly think own one, much less multiple Porsches?

I don’t think those people are responsible for pricing. The Porsche comment was a flippant way of pointing out the whole parasitic machine that sits atop the actual creatives - the actors, the set designers, the script writers, all those people that you and I do want to support. All those people are not involved in pricing decisions or exclusivity contracts, and they’re mostly paid a salary so by the time a movie or series is out, they’re already on to the next job. By refusing to subscribe to all the myriad streaming services, you are mainly putting pressure on those executives to make a more appealing product.

I think you’re right in that it’s very reminiscent of US tipping culture (I’m not in the US), in that the people at the bottom are the ones who do the real work and yet they don’t get a fair share of the profits and instead have to take on unfair risk (i.e. the risk of not being tipped).

That said, I need to confess that I’m partly playing devil’s advocate, I pay for Netflix and just the other day I paid YouTube to “buy” a digital copy of a movie - for the exact reasons you said, I want to support the creative people behind the shows & movies I enjoy. I just don’t think it’s accurate to say that there’s a moral requirement to pay for entertainment, especially given how unfair the system currently is.

what would happen if nobody paid and everybody pirated

they wouldn’t just slowly starve to death you know. they’d start making the price more competitive and the service more user-friendly before they’d even had to pawn a single Porsche.

In all locations presumably? Do you know if it’s indistinguishable from you being at your main residence? Like are there any technical ways a service you’re connecting to could tell that you’re going through a VPN? (Just curious BTW!)

haha I was thinking that he’s wearing a penguin suit! Put a couple of yellow boots on his back paws and he’s a dead ringer for Tux 🐧

Sharing knowledge. Lots of people are not primarily motivated by greed.

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

Cute pic, but what is going on with those cat biscuits in the background? At first I thought that cat must be spoilt if the monks are shelling out for those fancy cat-bix. But they look like supermarket shelves - did the monks meditate in a supermarket? I even did a reverse image search hoping to find the original image, but just found lots of the exact same, with that same background.

Your downvotes make me wonder if I misunderstood your post, but you seem to be saying that Spain’s Airbnb regulations make it harder for people to buy flats with the intention of using them as short-term holiday lets, while not really stopping people who just want to rent a room in their own house for short periods. Which does sound good to me, given that those empty rooms in grandma’s house wouldn’t otherwise be on the market.

So is your point that this is “anti-tourist” in the sense that it does make things more difficult for tourists, but that should be expected given that tourists are generally indifferent to the long term negative effects of tourism on a city?

You must be able to see that giving your daughter your mother’s name as a middle name is not at all the same as giving your son your own name?

Vanity isn’t it? Pathetic male vanity. Never hear women doing it do you.

But… but… the children in the meme mines will go hungry tonight, you monster

I vote that all Germans should from now on refer to distances in terms of Saarland - but rather than use kilo- mega- etc, you just add extra "A"s. Actually, better idea, you should change the name of Germany itself to Saaaaaarland.

You live in a fantasy world if you think “Don’t go” is a feasible alternative. If I don’t go, someone else will, and all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Come on mate, you could say this about any kind of protest or boycott.

all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Yes that is exactly how boycotts work. You make a personal sacrifice as a protest against something that’s unfair or immoral.

If you’re not prepared to make a sacrifice, that’s OK, but at least have the honesty to admit you just don’t care enough about this particular issue.

Such a cop-out. Every boycott is a personal sacrifice, and every individual participating in a boycott knows that their one purchase isn’t by itself going to make a difference.

There’s really nothing special about Jesus, if you accept that the voices he heard in his head were not really “the all-powerful creator” speaking to him.

What I mean is that Jesus did not say anything more remarkable or ground-breaking than say Socrates, Marx or … I don’t know Iain M Banks or any other story teller. Way less remarkable in fact.

There’s this persistent idea that Jesus was some wonderful caring hippy, and before Jesus everyone was just a callous exploitive bastard. But there’s nothing new about the share-and-share-alike philosophy Jesus espoused. It’s basic game theory and has been present in society since before our species even evolved. Even chimps grasp those ideas.

Jesus was just a poor Jewish common person who thought he was the messiah. Just like his compatriots of the time, he believed the Jews to be the “chosen people”, and his message was only directed at his compatriots. He had no more grasp of humanity as a whole than any other common person of his time. As the messiah, he believed - as did his followers - that he was going to usher in the end of the world.

It’s complete nonsense, and if you truely understand what a scam the modern church is, you would stop promoting him as some kind of revolutionary.

I feel like MAGA might not come to his defense this time.

Hope this isn’t wishful thinking. Trump thinks his son is a l33t hacker for being able to turn a laptop on. Musk on the other hand owns a major social media platform and has access to skilled technicians and programmers, as well as huge server farms which he doubtless uses to analyse voter behaviour and find the weak points where efforts should be focused in order to have most impact on electoral choices.

Trump certainly understands how essential to the disinfo effort Musk is, even though it’s way beyond the grasp of your average MAGA. IMO Trump is not going to abandon Musk in a hurry.

yes we can make an assumption that that is indeed what they think, but that’s not actually what they said with the sentence “This wouldn’t hold up in modern court let alone Victorian age court”. So perhaps they accidentally used incorrect phrasing, but even so, the logic doesn’t follow - if something doesn’t hold up in modern-day court, that tells us nothing about whether or not it would hold up in Victorian times, when standards of evidence were indeed lower.