• 1 Post
  • 39 Comments
Joined 2 年前
cake
Cake day: 2024年3月16日

help-circle
  • Hi. Been in, worked in both. My experience with bathrooms doesn’t invalidate yours. Both can be true. Hell, we’re probably not in the same country, so social norms can play a factor, and like I said before, demographics make a big difference in a lot of things. Which drug residues are left on the back of the toilet, for example.

    I’m sorry you have such strong feelings about people and public bathrooms. It’s definitely a shitty experience (pun intended). It’s a weird hill to die on though.


  • From my experience, it depends on where. Malls and things like that where there are many people of all different demographics absolutely are equally disgusting. Semi-private washrooms tend to be less disgusting overall, but women’s are usually at least a little cleaner. Standing to pee causes splashes. Enough human traffic and and the whole place smells like a hamster cage that doesn’t go away unless the whole damn bathroom is flooded in sanitiser.



  • Pirated games can be one or several of the following:

    • a means of participating in a chosen culture when players can’t afford/justify the price tag (one Nintendo game now costs the same as a week’s worth of groceries for two people where I live)
    • a form of archive because game publishers are notorious for killing games
    • a form of backup because things happen to disks/cartridges
    • a form of backup because servers go down
    • a form of backup because not everyone’s internet is reliable
    • a means making the game more accessible by adding features (eg. the option of infinite lives/health for someone with muscular dystrophy)
    • a form of protest over ever-increasing prices at the same time as ever-increasing layoffs, and ever-decreasing quality.

    More directly relevant to you: the money you give Nintendo goes to their legal teams, to continue to find loopholes around the protections you have. They’re the ones fighting the “Stop Killing Games” movement. Nintendo recently won a lawsuit against 1fichier in France for hosting emulated games. It has been marked as a “significant” win against any level of piracy in the EU. Nintendo is continually working to make sure that despite living in the EU, you won’t be fine regardless. Your purchase directly funds that.

    Maybe you have no intention of playing pirated games, but I hope you can appreciate that this is larger than just some teenager feeling powerful because they stole something?



  • Telecoms tradespeople in Canada are paid like absolute garbage. They used to be (and some still are, but they’re dwindling) part of the steelworker’s union, but they were hit hard by union busting, so now the majority are contractors who get paid by the job. This means a full 5 hour run of fibre to get a home set up pays the same as plugging a single wire in at the CO. But it’s luck of tue draw, and with the telcos cutting corners on everything, the “plug in a wire” jobs are like unicorns.

    Plus the rack people have all been laid off, so the guys have to do that job on top of their own, and the IT side has all been offshored to folks who are not trained or paid enough to be competent. So what should be a 45 minute job that they could do 11 of in a single day now takes 2 hours, meaning they’re only getting paid for 4.

    It would not surprise me if other blue collar industries started following suit.


  • They’re saying they’d rather have had the money that went towards the purchases of switch 2s left in the form of cash, rather than spent for them.

    It’s a relevant critique because with their latest releases, Nintendo’s doing the same ‘cost increase to the detriment of employees and customers’ dance as the other big gaming corpos.

    A person can agree something is better than the horrible baseline, and still bring up a topic of discussion on something that isn’t great.

    Also, re: 2 weeks paid time off; look outside of 'Murica once in a while. The global average of paid days off is ~25. So 2 weeks, while lovely for America, is below normal.







  • Agreed; it’s not worth the rhetoric and actions. And while there’s definitely merit in assessing trans athletes to try and keep things as fair as possible (though they never stopped Phelps from competing, so “fair” is kind of a joke), it’s far more complex than a simple “there was testosterone so they have an advantage!”

    For the “nonathletic” groups - think community-level sport - based on what data is available, there is effectively no statistical difference between cis and trans women’s physical performance after 2+ years on hormone therapy.

    When it comes to elite athletes, trans women outperformed cis women in Fat-free mass index, Absolute hand grip strength, and Absolute Vo2Max, but under-performed in Relative VO2Max to mass, Ratio of expiratory volume to vital lung capacity, and Absolute countermovement jump (lower body power). The lower Relative VO2Max, and Expiratory volume can lead to disadvantages in terms of speed, recovery and endurance.

    While hand grip strength is considered an indicator of overall muscle strength, to quote the first article linked:

    The correlations between hand grip strength and individual sports are reviewed comprehensively in Cronin et al. Though maximum hand grip strength has a strong relationship with maximum upper or body strength in some movement patterns such as in powerlifting strength, there are weaker relationships with other movement patterns. There is evidence that hand grip strength is a poor correlate of knee flexion or extension strength and is far more reliable as a marker of physical function if used together with lower limb strength. Hand grip strength is more relevant for some physical performance activities such as rotational movements that transfer force and torque to the hand (ie, ball throwing), but shows poor correlation to movement patterns that require technical ability, physical capacity, aerobic fitness or tactical ability (ie, tennis stroke placement or cricket fielding performance)

    It will require a lot more information before any athletics group would be able to make a truly informed decision, and it’s going to have to be sport by sport. Elite athletes are all outliers in their genetic makeup (Phelps, The average height of a WNBA player, etc). We know athletes have different hormone levels depending on the sport they play, but it’s chicken vs. egg on whether the hormones or elite performance came first. So trying to decide what is an acceptable advantage re: “pro athlete genetics”, vs. an unacceptable advantage re: “transgender genetics” is little more than opinions and politics at this point.

    /info dump


  • Around my area, “contactless payment” became further normalised during the initial Covid lockdown (of all the changes to keep, we went with that one 🙄). Many of the smaller businesses seem to prefer it. I suspect it reduces error and effort - fewer errors during the transactions and direct data-to-data conversion in the accounting. I wouldn’t be surprised if it saves them money on insurance, too, as there’s no reason to rob a bunch of debit receipts.

    I’m sure you -could- insist on paying with cash, but unless you’re have exact change, it’s not going to be a smooth, unremarkable exchange. And that also defeats the anonymity factor of privacy: they’re definitely going to remember the “weirdo” who insisted on paying cash, who argued about your sign being illegal, and then the PITA it was to find them change.

    Don’t get me wrong, I make an effort to dominantly use cash. And I also recognise there are some places I either have to accept I can’t use cash (my pharmacy, which talks to my insurance, so moot point anyway), or have to find an alternative that does take cash (my favorite ramen place, RIP).






  • I’m sure this plays some role. I’m also certain that the countries those same corporations offshore their labour to countries who do the same thing, and no one cares.

    I also don’t think we can ignore that real estate is a big money maker for people with wealth, and WFH impacted their bottom line.

    Or that many of the CEOs, boards, people at the top have a certain predisposition for wanting power and control, which is harder to flex if people might be able to also do laundry while working or, gasp, take a longer lunch and -still- get their work done.

    Anyway, I’m sure it influences the decision, but I don’t think it’s the top driver.