gila

They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.

In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.

Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)

Only for citizens of countries part of the visa waiver program, which doesn’t include China. Neither is there any visa waiver program for Australians entering China

Originally, undiagnosed ADHD. The pathway to get licensed was somewhat annoying for me, and I couldn’t be bothered engaging with it. I’ve also always had great access to efficient public transport, which I took to school so was accustomed to using it.

There’s been lots of secondary reasons over the years - for a long time I had fines to clear before I could progress getting licensed. The fines were bullshit, and I wouldn’t pay them out of principle. Now they’ve expired, that roadblock is no longer in my way, but I’m still not licensed.

Sometimes it’s annoying, but only really in the sense that I’m proud of my independence / don’t like the rare occasions that I’m dependent on others for travel. I’m in the US on holiday now, and there is comparatively almost zero public transport - that sucks. When I’ve travelled around Europe, Asia, New Zealand, or at home in Australia - the issues are pretty few. I don’t feel held back enough to care, and it seems like a money pit.

I have learned to drive a car, though. I’m just not licensed to, and don’t. M 33

So that the timestamp adjustment can be propagated via uploader or user comments across YouTube clients on all platforms… i.e. to avoid having to hardcode each adjustment for each ad on each video on every client

Wouldn’t that need to be done via some kind of API for cross-platform compatibility? An API which could be exploited to detect ad segments?

I think it’s 2 names for the same thing. Either one sounds fine to me!

aka pinkwashing

2 simultaneous sessions on different devices/IP’s = inconsequential. A 3rd simultaneous session = auth tokens revoked on all authorised devices, and you get a warning that lasts for 1 week. If 3 simultaneous sessions occur again within that time then your account gets removed.

https://archive.is/96Woj

The company made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Overviews …

… making the feature rely less heavily on user-generated content from sites like Reddit

So it prefers the results that Google normally deprioritizes? I guess we have that in common

They didn’t make that the default. What was discussed was a way to make it default (add https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 as a custom search engine)

And the comments on those posts said we should actually use DDG instead lol

I’m mostly only using CCWGTV, both the original 4k model and the budget 1080p one. Neither have performance issues for me (except before filtering out 4k releases on the 1080p model)

I’m just aiming for the simplest/smoothest experience as possible, not so much for myself but so that I can mail it out to my mum who lives out in the bush and just tell her to enter her wifi password and open kodi. She’s able to manage from there without having to worry about hdr/dv content compatibility with her display, or default audio language/subtitle display etc.

In kodi you can edit settings.xml for IPTV Simple Client addon to point playlist items to a given category in Seren, make a playlist linking to those categories a favourite, and configure Kodi to open to the favourites menu on launch. That way she has a fully on-rails and custom experience based on her preferences from the point that she runs it.

I’ve heard good things about Stremio + Torrentio. Does it have trakt integration or similar equivalent? I think the discovery in addons that have this makes a big difference. I have many different categories to browse that might sound similar, e.g. Trending, Trending New, Most Watched, Most Popular. But each one has a specific and plainly disclosed ranking methodology and that’s very useful to avoid constantly being recommended to watch The Office, Breaking Bad, cowboy soaps etc

Pay for real-debrid and set up a kodi addon like Seren on a streaming box. You’ll get an equivalent experience to paid/official streaming platforms without having to pay for them all, including browsing popular shows without having to download them ahead of time or manage a home server. It’s still torrenting under the hood, just a lot more convenient

What about Gitmo or Nauru? I kid. I didn’t mean to praise it, my bad. I avoided it personally.

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate the nuance where it’s offered. I think the difference in my summary perspective of these issues is in considering its intended targets. I’m aware f2p players in Immortal don’t have a hope of catching up - I do think that’s a predatory part of the summary monetisation of the game - but I think it’s mitigated by being targeted at whales. Because paying in that game doesn’t only gatekeep player power; power scales linearly with the amount you pay. So even people tricked into paying for some power aren’t really able to realise that advantage. IMO this changes the paradigm a bit, because the material effect of the monetisation to the informed consumer (regardless of their level of participation) is to part rich people from some of their riches - something I don’t really find compelling as a summary argument against it. The main other group predated on would be those that choose to be uninformed, which is something that I can’t really think of a good a reason to take some kind of moral stance on

I think you’re somewhat demonstrating their point, given that I’ve fairly consistently liked D3 and D4 and don’t have any experience with Immortal. I’ve seen lots of critique about 4 that doesn’t necessarily ring true (I can’t imagine playing well at all on mobile, especially given my choice of skill rotation) and that makes sense mostly when it’s grouped with Immortal in a way I find somewhat arbitrary. Immortal itself isn’t especially predatory within the context of mobile games, though being one is a factor in why I haven’t tried it.

I think it’s easy to dunk and point out things like “you can’t earn enough currency to get the next battle pass for free” without honestly examining what the battle pass in D4 is and realising that it offers extremely little. The free armour is cool and interesting enough that I get the dopamine reward when looking at my toon on the loading screen without paying for it. Indeed I think paying for a set to some extent cheapens that experience vs. getting that reward multiple times via picking up gear and not using transmog at all.

Might be some other parts of its monetisation I’m not considering in my assessment but I don’t think it’s predatory. So when I constantly hear all about how predatory it is, often it instead serves to drive me toward the brand loyalist lapdog tribe. I wouldn’t say it’s shameful at all, but it’s tiring to engage with as though there’s a more nuanced perspective behind it than just general naysaying, when often that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

They’d still resolve via DNS to an address in ASCII though, right? Wouldn’t that only be an issue if ICANN didn’t have a monopoly on DNS registration? i.e what we already depend on for a semblance of convenience without totally compromising opsec

It dominates the market in vertical tabs IMO. I tried Vivaldi, Firefox extension, the works. The best-feeling alternative was Safari