Yeah, that’s certainly one odd aspect. Also, there’s a ton of other methods to handle labour shortages. Like activating underused groups, such as women. Or offering retraining so people can switch to different jobs. And higher pay for sectors with shortages doesn’t hurt either, considering the already very low pay in Greece.

Running your existing workforce ragged is NOT the way to deal with this.

But hey, maybe we’re missing some cultural or political piece of the puzzle as to why they went this route.

The Greeks are insane for going along with this. Revolutions have started over less. Clearly their politicians no longer have the best interests of the Greek people in mind.

I miss forums as well, and I’m actually moving back to them. Back in the early 2000’s, I visited like a dozen forums each day. I was a member of like three watch forums, a camera forum, a Star Trek forum, some gaming forums and others. Just ‘doing the rounds’ kept you busy for a while. People also were insanely knowledgeable on those niche forums, and they all had their own specific culture and flavor to them.

Places like a niche subreddit are… OK at best. They are convenient and easy to visit, but don’t tend to have the level of knowledge and discourse that I generally enjoy. You also run the risk of your sub getting ruined by people who are into the wrong aspects of your particular hobby. For example, on a watch FORUM, the discussions are about design, mechanical features, history, photography, how to repair, etc. etc. On the subreddit, a lot of posts tended to be drive-by posters who ‘found a watch and wanted to know what it’s worth’. or ‘is this fake’. The subreddit didn’t curb that, so eventually I and many others just stopped going there. It was basically too easy for people to post there just because, well, they could. Whereas on an actual watch forum, you can do a bit stricter moderation and the registration requirement weeds out low effort posting.

Some consider that ‘gatekeeping’, but I see it as a valid way of protecting one’s chosen community.

I don’t think I’ve met any Brazilians back in those days; (online) gaming is really expensive there from what I heard, right?

One fun thing in the old COD lobbies was always to teach others slurs and general cursing in your language. I learned how to curse folks out in like 50 languages. Each country also has its own unique style of cursing. We Dutch really like to incorporate diseases for example.

I’m certainly not going to say you’re wrong on that first part. I’ve been online since 1996. At that time, the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy… well… going online felt like coming home. Those were my people. I still really miss those days.

But I also know that the experience of someone not like me would’ve been wildly different. I learned a bajillion slurs on COD lobbies after all. It’s a good thing that more people now feel welcome online, as it led to platform growth and functionality that we otherwise wouldn’t have had if it was just ‘my kind of people’.

The current safe, sanitised, gentrified gaming sphere also has benefits: COD lobbies these days are very pleasant by comparison. You even have to sign a code of conduct to get on multiplayer. It feels more welcoming, less hostile. Of course, companies certainly have been financially incentivized to attract as wide an audience as possible. For example, the very first GTA game sold about 6 million copies. GTA V has sold 200 million. And with ever-increasing development budgets, you can’t afford to cater to a niche, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to recoup those costs.

I miss that era. Companies didn’t mind a bit of edginess and weren’t afraid to market to adults. The console culture itself also isn’t what it used to be.

These days, gaming consoles all need to be safe enough for five year olds to play on them. And it’s caused everything to be just too bland and safe, both in marketing and the console itself. Can’t really have things like Xbox 360 Uno with the live camera feed and no moderation. Or the wholly uncensored COD lobbies.

This certainly sounds iffy.

I’ll say this: if this sort of thing poses an actual potential risk to passengers and crew, the people involved need to be given the harshest possible sentences. Take them out back and feed them into a woodchipper slowly if they wilfully endanger lives.

That’s pretty much what I’m assuming for an actual answer.

Though I’ve certainly read about people who spent ungodly amounts to save pets, even old ones or street dogs. Bless them for it, for sure.

Seriously though… I’m all for giving animals excellent care. But is that actually a thing people do? Give their hamster an MRI? That’s a very expensive procedure for humans with good insurance, so I’d assume it to be rather unaffordable when applied to pets like this.

I could see it for say, a beloved dog who’s got years of life left. But hamsters kick the bucket if you breathe in their general direction.

When you can pack the peak amount of players into a decent sized ballroom, that’s never a good sign for your game’s future.

At this point they’re probably better off just refunding buyers and shuttering the game entirely. Doesn’t feel like this is a salvageable situation.

Basically… fuck this guy in his new blowhole.

Well that’s certainly one way to kill a game. Heck, I HAVE a PS5, and I still would be annoyed as fuck by that.

Sure, you can offer to link an account for things like progress tracking. But it certainly shouldn’t be forced on anyone.

I got to see a total eclipse in the Netherlands back in august of 1999. It was truly remarkable. Most people really only get to see it once or twice during their lifetime - so definitely make it a point not to miss it if you’re in a region where it’s a total eclipse.

Once you’ve actually experienced one, it’s very easy to understand why they had such a profound impact on people throughout the centuries. Eerie doesn’t quite cut it.

Seems like a respected, well liked public official who enjoys broad support amongst his constituents. Which makes him a gold-plated unicorn these days. Innocent until proven guilty still applies, so we’ll see. I wouldn’t be surprised if he won.

Ooff, that doesn’t sound like a good time. Haiti’s always been rather problematic, with the colonial history, dictators, extreme poverty, disasters, several coups, etc. Etc. In 2004, the UN also sent folks there to keep the peace. They were there until 2019 and accomplished…?

So now we’re back to another round of UN intervention probably. It really feels like Haiti will forever be incapable of proper self-governance. The people deserve better, but I doubt they’ll get it.

That sounds nice on paper, but also difficult to enforce, no?

While the average smartphone wasn’t made by forced labour, what about the lithium in the battery? Or the cobalt?

I imagine if you traced a component of just about any product back to its raw materials, you’re bound to find either forced or vastly underpaid people.

But hey, at least they’re TRYING to do something positive.

Good to hear at least sometimes things like that work out well :D

At least ice skating and running are fairly normal sporting activities that average people can partake in. But some of those other facilities they build really have no use for most people.

My own city has a soccer stadium. It was built with taxpayer money. It has 30.000 seats, after it was expanded twice. It had 13.000 when it opened.

The club who uses it has been a financial mess for ages.

The stadium gets used for soccer matches and… nothing. That’s the only use. You can technically rent part of it for say, a wedding reception or business event, but by and large it sits unused most days of the year.

Now imagine if this had been an even larger, even more expensive Olympic stadium. There simply would be no way to make it economically viable to keep it around post-games.

And a stadium is at least potentially multifunctional. But something like an indoor cycling track or high diving pool has fuck-all reuse potential.

Yep. About the last thing people should want is for their country to host the Olympics. Because YOU as a tax payer are footing the bill for all that infrastructure, all the event costs, while seeing no real income from any of it. And once it’s done, it’ll keep hurting your economy. And let’s not forget all that useless infrastructure that you had to build. That needs to be demolished after all…

If someone suggests bringing the games to your country, you should boop them on the nose until they reach sanity again.

Even back in the early days of recycling, it was pretty well known that this wouldn’t work. Think about how much plastic you use in your daily life. For recycling to work, a considerable amount of that would need to be reused plastic. But it isn’t. Because a lot of it simply isn’t able to be recycled, as the article points out. So every day we end up making way more new plastic than reused plastic. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you might as well not recycle….

We really should’ve stopped single use plastics decades ago. Simple as that. Except for straws; there’s nothing else that works as well as a simple plastic straw. That’s the one thing we should’ve kept.