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What was the worst book you’ve ever read?
  • I felt the same way (spoilers for whoever hasn't read it). The protagonist just kept encountering significant people where it seems like there's going to be a struggle to overcome, leading to character development and newfound maturity, but no. He just moves on to another scene instead and they're not seen again. It was just annoying.

    The teacher that feels he's not living up to his potential? The private school friends that he hangs out with but often finds frustrating? The childhood friend who he shares unexplored romantic tension with? The nuns whose meals he pays for despite having dwindling funds? The prostitute he just wants to have a conversation with? Her pimp, who attacks him? The potentially rapist family friend? For pretty much all of them a relevant conflict is initiated just for him to leave it unresolved, probably after labeling them a phony.

    The only exception is his sister, who he sees like two or three times. And then the final conflict at the end is like: "Hey sorry for taking your birthday money so I could keep wandering around these past couple of days instead of talking to our rich parents." "That's ok, I forgive you. You're my brother and I love you. But I worry about you sometimes." "Yeah anyway, I'm bitter about the world so I kinda want to disappear into the wilderness." "Please don't do that." "Ok I won't."

  • She is someone rule
  • I always took the phrase "She is someone's [whatever]" not to suggest that the recipient isn't thinking of them as a person, but that they are thinking of them as a stranger. As in, "How would you like it if you knew someone was treating your [person you care about] like that?". It's still a criticism for the recipient, but it doesn't go as far to accuse them of dehumanizing anyone. Instead, it suggests you should treat them like you would someone you are close to and care about more deeply.

  • Teach the children.
  • The entitlement comes from the idea that these are basic features that should be available to them for free, in addition to everything else included in the free service. They are the sort of things casual users may not even be aware of. If they don't think the extra stuff is worth the price, they can just not buy them. But thinking they are overvalued is not the same thing as thinking they should be free.

    If you think the standard experience is adequate then why resort to piracy?

    Because I use these a lot and want something better than the standard service when it's an option. If you wanted to sell a car for $5000 and someone offered you $10,000, would you say no because $5000 was adequate?

    Because you don't think they are important, as if the important features to you are universal?

    I guess "importance" is relative, so I'll clarify; they do little to contribute to the main function of the apps. Youtube is a video platform, so it should allow you to watch hosted videos. Discord is a voice and text messaging app, so you should be able to send messages and join calls. They are robust enough that you can do many other things with them too, but these secondary offerings are sometimes more limited if you don't pay. The people that do choose to pay supplement the cost of offering the basic services to those that don't.

  • Teach the children.
  • Maybe this is a hot take, but this post is very entitled. Custom server emojis and using a video platform for audio only while your phone is sleeping as basic features? You can be annoyed that these are the features they chose to be premium or you can be annoyed by how much premium costs, but you are hardly missing out on the standard experience without them. Frankly, there are better choices to complain about being premium, but compared to the past the amount of stuff we can get from the internet for free at great convenience is incredible.

    Also, piracy is easy. If you use the platform a lot and don't want to pay you can often get a premium or better experience with a bit of time invested for some setup. I use xManager for Spotify and ReVanced for Youtube. Both give me an ad-free experience for free and are more customizable than the legit application. ReVanced especially allows me to get rid of a lot of the UI I don't use, change input actions, skip sponsor/intro/afk segments, and a lot more. There might be something for Tiktok too now but I haven't looked.

  • What are your favorite leftist news sources?
  • I'm not saying it can't be done, but getting a compromise from a debate is not a primary goal. For competitions, the goal is usually to demonstrate and practice debate skills and the topic and positions matter less. For more serious debates, it is meant to be a way to expose people to the strengths of your position's arguments and expose the weaknesses of your opponent's. It's valuable as an opportunity to persuade an audience of people who haven't been firmly entrenched in either position, or who may have only been exposed to one side's arguments in earnest.

    The framework does presume both viewpoints are valid, since both sides are expected to believe in their position, be rational, and be reasonably well-informed. An invalid perspective would not be argued by someone meeting these criteria. It does not presume equality as that would be preemptively judging the quality of the argument. Either the debate platform or the other debater would presumably not agree to a debate with someone who cannot be expected to meet these criteria.

  • I think everyone should listen to Taylor Swift.
  • Wikipedia describes the first two songs as

    A 1980s-inspired downtempo electropop and synth-pop ballad

    and

    A synth-pop song

    Both those are still pop. I listened to the first few songs in the album. They're not bad, and imo they're more interesting than her earlier hits. You're right that she has matured as an artist. But I imagine someone that disliked her earlier stuff would also dislike these. Music taste is something you can't really be right or wrong about. You shouldn't accuse someone of lying about listening to something just because they didn't like it.

  • Standoff
  • In the US, brokerage companies legally have to send you a Form 1099 which covers all investment income over the year. You then include this when submitting your taxes. They probably send a similar report to your government instead.

  • Unity scraps runtime fee, hikes subscriptions instead
  • This wouldn't be 25% of your profit, it's just increasing one of your expenses by 25%. It looks like it's going up to $3000.

    Edit: Enterprise price is negotiated with each company, so there's not a set subscription price. But it's still just the price of one expense, not a portion of total profits.

  • JD Vance spreads racist rumor that Haitian immigrants are abducting peoples’ pets and eating them in Ohio
  • But it came back to bite them in the debate. Trump sounded particularly unhinged when he brought it up and wanted to change topics quickly when he realized how it sounded. Even his supporters must have been confused about what he was talking about.

  • Reddit is a disaster and it's ban/appeal system is a joke
  • People already can block individuals easily though. But I agree on the problem with centralized control. Preemptively removing posts/comments should only be done for things that clearly violate rules or are such low quality that it is very likely seeing the content would be to the detriment of most viewers, such as spam or advertisements.

    It would be interesting to be able to vote on tags that apply to content so you could ignore stuff that was political for example, but that would just be abused more than current systems.

  • Risk of Rain creators Hopoo Games join Valve
  • It also helps that there isn't a competitive mode yet. Until recently it didn't even track your stats in a visible way. Also, people can only get in by being invited, so you have to have had at least one person who has vouched for you in some way, which probably selects against the most toxic personalities.

  • Locked
    I was only gone for a day or two...
  • Yes, there is the possibility that self-reported cases are untrustworthy. But there is no reason to think vegan cat owners would be more biased than non-vegan cat owners.

    My desired outcome is simply showing that it is possible for cats to be healthy on a vegan diet. I only need one example to show that. And there are examples of such cats in the study my link had. At least for its tested disorders, reported vegan cats on average were slightly less likely to have at least one. The majority of both groups were in fact "healthy" (having no measured disorder). The difference between the healthy rates is small enough that it can be explained by variance and other factors contributing to health besides diet, and that's fine.

    Before anyone starts, yes there could be health metrics not being measured that are relevant to the spirit of the idea being explored. But you need to measure easily quantifiable things. If you just asked "Is this cat healthy?", you would have some owners disqualify a cat for having a cut on their paw, and others disregarding serious concerns just because there hadn't been a diagnosis. This is as wide a scope as you can expect to explore a qualitative idea with.

    Unless you are suggesting that literally every owner reporting a healthy vegan cat in the study is just lying, my claim is supported by the study. And if you thought otherwise, you invented a different claim and assigned it to me.

    I genuinely want people to engage honestly with other people's arguments made in good faith. I know Lemmy is ultimately a collection of largely anonymous internet users, but still, I expected better than what I have seen in this thread.

  • Locked
    I was only gone for a day or two...
  • See, this is actually good reasoning for why owners shouldn't force a vegan diet on pets. It doesn't mean it can't be done well, but the difficulty in meeting dietary needs creates significant health risks for many owners' cats. And it's fine to leave it there, but it doesn't close the door on the idea forever.

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    KombatWombat @lemmy.world
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