As a millennial, at no point did we actually want participation trophies. The feeling of coming in last was not changed in the slightest by receiving a junk trophy.

“Capitalism” isn’t some self aware entity that you can blame all evils on. It’s humans all the way down. And it’s not even the cartoon evil type of humans; those are rare. Everyone responsible at each step of the way is terrifyingly ordinary.

I seriously doubt that will happen. The current administration has shown zero indication that they give two fucks about what the people want.

No. I refuse to concede even one more facial hair style to the fascists.

I mean, you can. Probably shouldn’t though.

Many people do this.

Many people are insane.

The loyal cult is the result of Stockholm syndrome.

The kind of waste I’m talking about doesn’t give two fucks about proportionality. CO2 in the atmosphere makes no distinction between being emitted by a single person or three million.

Also, fuck living in a world where only things arbitrarily deemed “useful” are considered worthy. Does art have no place in your world? It’s not “useful”. Should people be banned from having hobbies? Those aren’t “useful”.

I wouldn’t say so in this case. A watch is probably about as close to “good” conspicuous consumption as it’s possible to get. Think about it: it’s generally a “buy once, keep it forever” item, takes essentially 0 resources to keep functioning (generally the expensive ones don’t require batteries), uses very little material to manufacture, and all the price is coming from specialist labour.

It’s a waste of money, but it’s a harmless waste, especially when compared to things like private jets and yachts.

Because a flat surface is an x-y plane. The ground is a “flat” surface, and so the z dimension is height.

For me, that’s the only way that makes sense. But I program robots for a living, so I’m used to dealing with coordinate systems where the flat reference is the ground. Programmers seem to be using the screen as the flat reference. If I were building a game world, I’d probably use z-up convention.

That’s pretty much the theme for most of the responses here.

Possibly out of the loop here, but what is Tabula Rasa?

We already have a definition for this, the Karman line.

In new build stuff, I’ve actually been seeing a lot more torx.

Blame Henry Ford. The superior screw head style was available to him, but he refused to use it.

I don’t currently use a VPN provider, but when I do, it now won’t be VPNSecure.

You’re free to do whatever you like, but I really can’t imagine cutting myself off of seeing most of the world, simply because of a bunch of theoreticals. I fly fairly often for work and I’ve not even experienced half of those (I’m not even sure what problem you might have with airport limos). Most of those issues are easily avoided anyway, since they are a product of your own planning.

I wouldn’t say that’s controversial, but it’s really just a matter of choosing which platform you think will enshittify slowest.

I absolutely love that his name is the first thing anyone thinks about when someone so much as mentions a couch.

They would. Just not in the way they’d prefer.