Amen. You have to stay away from that toxic commercialisation. It messes with your brain and stalls your progress in any hobby.

I think one of the best things about arts, crafts, sports, music and the like is that it has a built in resistance to that kind of commercial takeover. Having good pens will not make you better at art, good shoes won’t make you better at soccer, a fancier gym won’t give you bigger muscles. These things come from hard work, perseverance, dedication. You can’t buy skill no matter goes much money you have, I love that.

Any art or craft or sport is pretty much free when you weigh up the hours vs the outlay required.

Except skiing and motorsports. That eats money.

Made a deal in September, it’s gone by December.

What’s the point in even negotiating with this administration? They can’t tell their friends from their enemies.

Every time I see the names of the Xbox lineup my brain just feels tired and kinda shuts down.

I am never going to remember it.

When you add sugar to a dish you do it by the cupful or spoonful but when you add salt you do it by the pinch. It’s definitely true.

I think that was potassium-permanganate and sugar. It was one of the saner recipes ( who really wants to blow their face off or smoke banana skins ) with somewhat easily available ingredients.

It was legit. But the temperature window between melting the ingredients together and igniting it was very narrow. We did what your friend did, we made the smoke bomb and also set it off in one go.

Your friend must’ve been in a while ton of shit.

100%. Constant sane washing.

Duplicating the data many times over isn’t progress.

Petty protectionism dominating EU policy even in the midst of existential threat from Russia. Absolutely pathetic.

https://www.euractiv.com/news/canada-to-pay-e10-million-for-preferential-access-to-eu-funded-defence-deals/

The EU wanted Britain to pay 6 billion to join the scheme on equal terms and they walked. Then the EU let’s Canada join for 10 million. So Britain is expected to pay 600 x the amount Canada pays. Does that seem reasonable to anyone?

I mean if that doesn’t tell you that Europe is simply not serious about its defence then consider that they also wanted Britain to give France the rights to fish its waters as part of the deal. Finally getting serious about defending Europe but first let’s talk about fish… It’s an absolute joke.

While Europe is facing existential threat the EU is bickering with it’s closest allies over bullshit. It’s core members are putting their own national interests above the security of the entire continent and I think it’s absolutely damning of the EU’s ability to navigate this kind of situation where we need decisive and selfless leadership.

Glad to see Canada involved though.

The guy explained the rational he didn’t say it was his personal view that it should be done.

And even if was his view we shouldn’t be down voting things based on whether you agree or not. We should do it on whether it adds to the discussion.

The quality of discourse on lemmy is fucking dire.

It cost governments around the world trillions of dollars to get through COVID… The uk’s debt went from 80% of GDP to 100% in the space of just 18 months. It’s hardly a viable economic plan to carry out on an ongoing basis.

Many non essential industries and travel just completely froze And guess what? Co2 production barely even stuttered according to your graph.

The solution is to transition into a renewable, prosperous, circular economy. Not go backwards into poverty.

If you don’t think children accessing porn is problematic I think you need to give it some more thought. It most definitely normalises some extremely mysogonistic, violent/ non consensual practices.

I don’t think age verification is the answer, but let’s not pretend it’s not trying to address an actual issue.

100% they’ve started gaming the algorithm to reduce artist payouts. Ambient music is rife with ai generated tracks taking negotiated rates, other genres will surely follow.

http://web.archive.org/web/20241221144306/https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

I switched to tidal from Spotify last year and am very happy. It just does music - no audio books, videos, podcasts - but to my mind that’s a feature. Music quality is far far better. The algorithm for recommendations I think is good.

I found streaming on the move less reliable until I dropped the audio quality and now it’s solid.

I used https://www.tunemymusic.com/ to move from Spotify to tidal. I had a lot of saves and playlists so had to use a paid plan but it was $5 or something and it worked well.

and none of it is indeed by search engines. No one else will ever be able to Google their problem and find the answer. All the useful knowledge put into a box and buried. It’s just awful.

Me too mate. We don’t know what’s in these files so overstating their importance could backfire.

It also sets some unreasonably high threshold for condemning the man, as if there is not enough information out in public yet for people to make up their minds and the missing piece we really need is some list with his name on it titled ‘underage sex trafficking clients’, and nothing else will meet expectations.

That doesn’t exist and when they’re released it’ll be a damp Squibb and it’ll be framed by friendly media as if he’s been exonerated and a bunch of people will buy that. Like the Muller report.

Keeping his association with Epstein in the public mind is good but leaning specifically on the files too much is gifting them an opportunity for them to flip it around.

Same as if you let go of a kite. It’ll just tumble back down to Earth over some distance.

A little reminder to Trump that Murdoch is a king maker. Murdoch wants to keep people on the edge of power, flipped this way or that at Murdoch’s wim.

But also, murdoch shaped the dialog about what this picture depicted before anyone had seen it. Everyone is now describing it as a women instead of what it appears to be… a child.

He’s taking trump to the edge. But also preventing him going over. This is not quite as unfriendly as it would appear.

Have a look at the clock faces there using to Benchmark and it’ll make more sense.