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People answering "AI says...". They turned themselves into meat AI bridges.
The public acceptance of gambling. It's fucking everywhere. Even things that seem relatively innocuous on the surface, like trading cards or blind boxes, are less about the fun of collecting and more about the rush of ripping through multiple packs or boxes to focus on the resell value.
I never imagined a world where we can easily bet on natural disasters and cancer on a whim. Please fire me into the sun.
Holy shit people bet on people getting cancer? That is so depraved
Yeah and also that gambling is normalized on two fronts: For adults we’re normalizing betting on fucking everything like if it’s gonna rain tomorrow,
And for children we’re normalizing gambling in video games.
Gambling used to be a niche, almost something you’d be ashamed of. „I lost my money on the ponies“ would be something you’d tell your best friends when talking about your dark past.
There's a great irony that MLB banned Pete Rose for life until his death from baseball or getting into the hall of fame. Only for them to openly embrace gambling.
Over under on your body's liquification time on approach to the sun?
Flagrant acts of racism.
Portland pretends to be better than that, but I keep having casual reminders that we're really white-coded. A black guy walks into the liquor store at 10:00 am and both the women behind the counter have a collective sense of panic when I'm walking up to check out. There was nothing off about him. They just had some immediate sense that he intended harm. The one checking me out said, under her breath, "oh, I thought we were getting robbed".
It was obvious the dude noticed their reaction, and it made me feel fucking horrible.
Post-Brexit Britain
Is it too obvious to say a Hitler-like figure running a country I thought such things couldn't happen in?
Okay, less political answer: reality shows that go too far with exploiting people. An early season of Big Brother had long lost siblings find out they were siblings on tv. Such moments shoukd be private. There was a reality show where a guy thought he was called for jury duty but it was all fake. I don't understand how it's even legal to film a reality show without telling the guy he's in a reality show. There was a reality show where a woman has to guess who her biological father is. that's not something we should be making a game of.
The reality show that freaked me out was Solitary. It ran on Fox from 2006-2010. No healthy society would ever allow something like this to exist as a form of entertainment. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/03/voluntary-confinement/
On the jury one the guy knew he was being filmed the whole time, they just mislead him to believe that the trial was real and the subject of the reality show and that the rest of the jury weren't actors when in reality he was the only person in the show who was not aware that the whole show was staged to look real
Thanks for the explanation. I haven't actually watched the show. I have seen a season of the Joe Schmo show, where the guy knows he's on a reality show but doesn't know that the rest of the cast are actors
People being 'anti-science.'
I grew up with Star Trek and old school science fiction stories where the rulers were 'The Council Of Science' or some such. There used to be a Presidential Science Advisor in the White House.
Man, 2020 (Covid) was so depressing with all that. Nurses not wearing masks and denying the effectiveness of vaccines was such a kick in the crotch for my morale.
Is your user name based on Hai Karate aftershave?
But seriously, yes. All Trump had to do was say something like 'I'm a businessman, not a doctor. Let's all follow my friend, Dr. Fauci's guidelines and stick together.'
Our leaders aren't as smart as nine year olds.
Is your user name based on Hai Karate aftershave?
Ha! Nope. It's just a bunch of gobbledygook. I was in karate as a youngun, and Hideaki was the name I took in Japanese class.
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The entire 2020 pandemic convinced me as to how many people who did not trust science. It was the biggest dying on the inside moment I have ever had.
The problem with science is that consensus changes but often with tremendous lag.
The whole anti-fat movement I grew up in, for instance. It never made sense to me so I've always been a fan of fat. I always eat my chicken skins, always eat (at least chew) the fat on my steaks.
People used to worry about cholesterol a lot but then we found out dietary cholesterol doesn't really matter for most people.
Turns out sugar is a lot worse than fat for you. Which they knew back then but industries being what they are ... They use money to influence the research. Now they're finally removing the refined sugars but now they're pumping like three, four maybe five artificial sweeteners in there and pretty much all of them are linked to various problems...
That's great for science, when done honestly, it's striving to be better and it can change when it needs to. But these days there's a lot of bad science out there and it can be difficult to discern what is good science from what is total bullshit.
To discern the bad science aka pseudoscience from actual educational science, is to follow the money as to what research is being fixed.
Science was always a practice of trial and error. Always will be. Science may not have all of the answers but it dares to challenge itself at all times to find those answers and is not afraid of being wrong.
There's no point to follow the money. You follow the science. Both good and bad science are funded by drum roll please money!
Yes there is. You follow the money, find out who's orchestrating researches and then you just brand them as the problem. Stop being a defeatist.
Nothing is ever 'pure.'
The old name for Down's Syndrome was Mongoloid Idiocy, because mostly European doctors thought the eye folds made people look 'Asiatic.'
The point is that you have people who are trying to discover an objective truth, and people who think that their Truth is already perfect.
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Trump's second term, specifically. The bar is in free fall and apparently rock bottom is not the lowest you can go.
Reminds me of the south park episode of honey boo boo. The bar just keeps sinking... Someone send James Cameron out to do what James Cameron does best, being James Cameron. So he can go pick up the bar at the bottom of the ocean.
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Trump as president? and again?
I wish that were a surprise, but it was all so dreadfully predictable. There's an author that I used to follow around the 2010 timeframe, who wrote on his blog that when fascism came to America, it'd be in the form of "corn pone Nazis," not the stylish Hugo Boss-wearing ones. (Sadly, he's scrubbed those old entries, perhaps because it's too embarrassing after he went MAGA.)
There were plenty of warning signs earlier than that, too. The only thing we didn't know then was the exact timing.
Reports on the high rates of illiteracy and semiliteracy among American adults.
News reports on measles outbreaks.
Over the course of my life, DRM-restricted streaming services. I once thought people would be naturally against that. You're going to want to have your own copy of media you love to keep forever, right? Apparently I was wrong.
I can kind of understand DRM in subscription streaming services. What I don't understand at all is people paying to "buy" DRM-protected media where you don't even get a local copy, like all major digital movie purchase platforms.
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Conspiracy theory nuts start to get big bucket things right. Like a giant cabal of child sex traffickers running global political and financial systems, including Hollywood.
I mean, it's pretty much just that one so far, but damned if that wasn't an evergreen theory over the last few decades.
This reminds me of a Belgian case that implicated their elites in child sexual abuse in the mid-90s, yet the alleged wider network was never fully investigated. It always surprised me that that case wasn't referred to when the whole Epstein case blew up in the media given the parallels of the elites being involved.
WARNING: VERY DISTURBING STORY (makes Epstein look like a saint) https://torontosun.com/news/world/crime-hunter-how-high-up-did-killer-belgian-pedo-ring-go
The US government going all out to destroy the renewable energy industry. I knew the coal and oil industries would lobby like crazy, to their death. But I naively thought that once we hit the critical point where renewable are more cost efficient than fossil fuels even the conservatives would begrudgingly start pivoting towards them.
Every time I hear solar being belittled by a government official, or wind turbine referred to absurdly as cancer-causing windmills by a certain fake-tan narcissist, it reinforces the sad realization that our country is filled with ignorant people, and our planet is being destroyed purely to stroke the egos and fatten the wallets of the ultra rich.
There's a really weird billboard by my house that always shows religious alt-right stuff. The one I'm thinking of in particular is the 'abortion undo pills'.
Like, if you took a morning-after pill, you can take an after-morning-after pill?
Gmail has ads that look like unread emails so that you’ll be tricked into clicking the ad. They appear partially down the list so that when you’re checking each email to trash them all you’ll click where the checkbox would be but you’re actually clicking on the ad.
Full disclosure: I run an email service called Port87. If I ever thought tricking my users into clicking ads was ok, I think I’d just go ahead and throw myself off a bridge.
Ads in your fucking web browser. I tried searching up something and got a "Sponsored" recommendation. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!
Ads stuffed into everything.
Native advertising in my Reddit feed before I quit Reddit.
Unskippable ads in YouTube. Remedied only by Firefox and uBlock.
The sheer quantity of ads on Amazon Prime and CBC Gem keep me from those streaming platforms. Others will go that way soon enough.
The last straw were the ads in the launcher I used to use for Android. NovaLauncher got dropped in a hurry.
I'm worried about ever buying a car that will hold me as a captive audience to be advertised at. Ads on screens in bathrooms, elevators, and at gas pumps all irk me.
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Driving straight through a stoplight from the right turn lane. There’s this intersection where I live that looks like this:
Most people going straight through that intersection want to take the exit right after to hop on a freeway. Twice now I’ve dealt with people following the red line from the right turn lane, forcing everyone else to merge around them to take the exit.
could be worse, every single part where roads cross here has a light btw. 4-5 lanes
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I never thought Saturday morning cartoons would be horrible.
They are, now, horrible. That's not just my "old" talking. With reboots, similarities, and call-backs, there's not really anything that is groundbreaking. Safe-bet, focus-grouped, merchandisable intellectual properties.
At least, all the ones I've stumbled upon.
Dude come on. That is just your old guy talking.
Have you ever watched the Saturday Morning Cartoons that you loved as a kid? They are utter dogshit.
Leave them to the sweet emotion of nostalgia.
I had these fond memories of Space 1999 as this elaborate Space adventure… OMFG it was utter cringey dogshit.
Remember how Thundarr the Barbarian was so cool and how he and his trio saved the magical world with the train… OMFG….
Yeah, I was gonna say that cartoons have gotten way better than some of the stuff I watched as a kid.
I'm sure there is still a ton of garbarge, but the top shows are way better.
I will agree that what you remember from those shows isn't quite how they are.
I loved the "Real" Ghostbusters (based on the 1984 movie) cartoon. Thought it was brilliant. Scary, funny, everything in between. Had some of the toys.
Watched an episode a number of years so, and I was shocked at how bad everything was. Jerky animation, terrible dialogue, a plot that made zero sense.
I think some of the current shows made for preschoolers are actually pretty good. Sofia the First. Spidey and his Amazing Friends
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My 40's
My dad! Thanks, dad!! /s
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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