Public payphones in the streets and emergency phones alongside highways have also been removed (at least in my country). So yeah, our society expects us to have our own phones with us whenever we’re away from home.

Iirc, they knew that it was stupid, their publisher forced it on them. They weren’t happy about it either.

Personally I’d call it buy to play with an unlimited demo and optional mtx. Back when I played it, the default stash tab wasn’t remotely enough, but after spending 20 euros I had enough tabs for all my needs and I then played several seasons without spending anything more. It’s still the best freemium model that I’ve ever encountered imo.

Civil + military capital punishment was only officially abolished in 1996 in Belgium, so about 133 years between the decision to stop doing it , and actually putting that into law. And a few months after the law was officially changed, the serial murderer + pedophile Dutroux was arrested, after which there was a lot of public support for the death penalty again. A bit of fortunate timing in unfortunate times.

Wrong Lemmy headline, the graphic is about “death penalty for non military crimes”, which implies that there were death penalty executions after those years on the map.

As an example, in Belgium the last execution was in 1950, by firing squad. The Belgian state had extended the state of war to be able to put war criminals & collaborators in front of military tribunals. That last 1918 execution by guillotine was also ordered by a military tribunal, it was a Belgian soldier who had murdered one of his two fiancées plus her unborn child: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Ferfaille Had he not been a soldier, he would most likely not have been executed. The last execution in Belgium that was ordered by a civil court happened in 1863.

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

As I understand it, the public perception of Trump was distorted by how he was portrayed on The Apprentice: https://www.psypost.org/new-research-sheds-light-on-the-influence-of-the-apprentice-on-donald-trumps-political-rise/

The producers at NBC had to jump through a lot of hoops to make Trump appear competent. Their chief marketing officer from that time is very sorry for what he did: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-10-16/we-created-a-tv-illusion-for-the-apprentice-but-the-real-trump-threatens-america

Once Trump became the republican candidate, the right-wing media took up the responsibility of filtering and distorting what their audience got to see and hear about Trump.

Republicans really have something against the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, it seems to get targeted at every opportunity.

Edit: as it turns out, republicans really do have a grudge against the agency, they’ve been targeting it since before Trump got reelected: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/22/conservatives-cyber-cisa-politics-00122794 Countering misinformation campaigns was a bridge too far for republicans.

Would the outcome have been the same without people in the media repeatedly bringing this to everyone’s attention? Probably not, because there would have been no public pressure against it, while the shadow groups that want this would have still been lobbying the politicians.

Something bad is going to happen.
Some people advocate to stop that bad thing.
Even more people are holding their clutches that the bad thing might happen.
Because of public pressure, action is undertaken to prevent the bad thing from happening.
Thanks to those efforts, the bad thing is successfully averted.

Some random person: that bad thing was never going to happen, look at all those gullible people who were panicking over nothing, we could have just done nothing and the outcome would have been the same.

Also known as the “preparedness paradox”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

Personally I’m really glad that we don’t have karma farming on Lemmy. It creates a lot of content for reddit, but it’s mostly regurgitated low quality filler.

That’s good for office work, the constant ringing gets annoying and when sitting behind the desk, you’re going to see the display light up anyhow. But yes, those settings shouldn’t be used for a house phone, I wouldn’t be surprised if that telecom company uses the same standard install for small businesses and households.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia

Tldr:
Fled from gang violence in San Salvador as a teenager, married to an American, has american kids, was living and working legally in the USA, was still illegally deported to a prison in San Salvador, had to be brought back under court order, is then falsely accused of crimes in Tennessee and now they want to deport him to a country that he has no connection to whatsoever.

Ironically, to get the Tennessee accusations, the usa government struck cooperation deals with convicted criminals, one of which was going to be deported after his sentence, but now not anymore.

The cost for the USA government to persecute this 1 single person has to be already in the millions by now.

A non exhaustive list of what makes them awful: https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-paypal-so-bad/

Afaik, the issue that was making the most victims, was that they were facilitating scammers that targeted sellers:
5. Good Luck Recouping Losses as a Seller in Disputes.
89% of sellers experienced dispute resolution problems with PayPal in 2021 surveys. Despite providing evidence the item shipped or service rendered, they lost cases and sums averaging $622.
This is driven by PayPal‘s buyer-favored review round taking 1-2 weeks. This favors scamming buyers at the expense of legitimate businesses.

Iirc, there was a time when Paypal always sided with the buyer, irregardless of evidence or past track record, the review process was useless. Once scammers picked up on this and began scamming sellers en masse, Paypal still kept their policy unchanged for years and sellers started to raise their prices on platforms that forced them to accept Paypal (ebay used to do this). Ebay has since tossed Paypal off their platform. I don’t know if Paypal ever improved.

When calling that number, the caller will need somekind of proof that they are in control of the car that they are trying to opt out of ads. Afaik, the easiest way to accomplish that when requiring a phonecall, would be pairing phone and car. But obviously Stellantis is not going for easy with this setup, so this is purely speculation on my part.

? Where did I say it was about cost? I don’t live in the usa. The 3 hospitals that I could potentially pick from are public hospitals and their cost for the same procedures would be exactly the same, since they have to stick to a government price list. But between those 3, I still have a preference.

Some people will already have a preference and not need to look up anything. I would have if the accident happened near where I live. Imo it’s not a bad question at all.

Apart from how insane it is to put obtrusive ads on a car dashboard, having to link your phone to your car and then call a phone number to opt out of touchscreen display ads is 🤯

There is going to be a reason that they’ve set it up like that.

It appears that in the future, Itch will allow creators to opt out of payment providers, meaning that it’s probably on a per game basis, not per platform. That Itch and Steam are not making a per game solution now, is most likely because their current software doesn’t allow it and they need time to rework it. Itch has promised various changes already, Steam has been mum afaik.

Source for Itch: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”. https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

I only use Steam myself, so I hadn’t checked Itch Io’s communication yet. I don’t know the platform myself so it’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting this, but to me it appears that Itch Io will allow creators to delist payment options that they are not compliant with: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”.

Source: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

Do you have a source of where they are saying that?

I have seen an article about the Australian political action group that was claiming credit for getting the games banned. The story behind the start of the controversy.

And I have seen an article about the communication from Steam that they were banning games which were in conflict with the rules of their payment providers. The result basically.

But I’ve only seen conjecture and speculation about what went on to get from the start to the result. I haven’t seen any article that spelled out exactly what the different payment providers demanded from the gaming platforms, nor anything about what they discussed in between them.

Edit: after 12 hours there’s 4 downvoters and 0 sources. Another victory for vibes over facts.