... towards the poles. It's clearly noticable here in Europe and the pace has picked up notably in recent years. I'm mentally preparing to relocate to Scandinavia if the need should arise in the future. 3 Years ago I took an extended summer trip to Portugal. The heat was unbearable during the day, I only could go out in the early morning or late afternoon and evening. Desertification of the Iberean peninsula is in full swing as is the water table dropping in more northern parts of Europe. The German Harz mountain region has abandoned winter tourism because there is no snow anymore to speak of. At the same time the dutch have fewer and fewer hours in which low-tide allows for water to be let out into the ocean again through those massive flood-gates they built. It is likely that we're going to have to look where we put the dutch during my lifetime. We're pretty screwed. How hard is still largely up to us but time is running out fast and my reluctant optimism is fading.

I hope you're trying to be funny. Because the amount of people who believe this horse shit continues to amaze me.

It's subjective.

My wife and I went to see a couple of movies last year because they were big deals to us (Terrifier 3 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice). We enjoyed the recliners, the limited edition popcorn bucket merch, the time out together, the reclining seats and the big screen.

What we didn't enjoy was the other people in the theatre talking through the movies, using their cell phones, coughing, breathing loudly, chewing food loudly, opening wrappers etc.

I'm with the parent, personally. If other people still enjoy the theatre experience then there's nothing wrong with that and theatres certainly don't "deserve to die." But there are those of us who don't consider watching a movie to be a social activity, and get extremely resentful and triggered when the presence of other people in the space pulls our heads out of the film we're trying to feel immersed in.

TFTFY.

The Internet was "messed up" before. Yeah, those cookie regulations are silly and obviously written by people overwhelmed with computers and digital networks, but fixing them would take 5 minutes and this bizarre cookie pop-up nonsense would vanish overnight.

Cross domain de-anonymizing tracking is prohibited.

There, fixed the law. No more pointless cookie bullshit.

As for the Internet: De-centralized crypto signed DNS as a replacement for the existing DNS. There, Internet fixed.

More people die in the aggregate when censorship is status quo. You start by censoring things you feel are absolutely justified because, allegedly, those ideas "cost lives." But then someone comes along with different ideas as to what is justified. Maybe they are threatened by ideas that challenge their power status. Soon enough science, research, innovation, investigative journalism .. .things that objectively improve people's lives and save many more lives than a virus has ever taken are silenced out of fear of repercussions for saying the wrong thing.

Freedom of speech is not a "laudable ideal". It is a fundamental human right that exists because reason is our primary tool of survival as human beings. But like with everything, there is good and bad to be found. There are bad actors out there who will lie and cheat and steal. The solution is not to prevent people from being able to share information, no matter how justified you feel in doing so. The solution is to counter bad ideas and lies with better ideas and truths. Individuals will make their own individual choices and face the consequences accordingly. Reality always wins.

... and be glad it's not nearly as much economic damage as that recent absolutely epic hydrogen bomb of a Jaguar rebrand did. ROTFL!

Point in case: I dance Argentine Tango. There is a very specific evolved etiquette to avoid embarrassing situations for all involved when probing/asking a woman (or man) if she/he'd like to dance. It's a non-verbal cadence of positioning yourself within the space around the dancefloor, of glances and nodding or gently shaking your head while being friendly when glances meet. It's accompanied by other details to avoid misunderstandings and enable a completely non-verbal communication in a full room while dance music is playing. And it's an excellent place and mode to get (very) quickly get (very) close to beautiful ladies (and handsome men) you've never met before.

Anyway, in recent years the woke crowd and their flat-out toxic fad has started infesting the Tango scene and behaving as if it needs to push on it and reinvent a "consent culture" that in reality already has been around for 100 years. And it's effing terrible! They come up with all kinds of bizarre and convoluted rules instead of learning the old etiquette which perfectly solves just about every problem you could have in any social situation at a Milonga (the event where Tango is danced) and base their behavior on their own feelings rather than the classic and very efficient etiquette and display a somewhat more elevated level of immaturity due to that. It's become so bad that I've started avoiding certain events with young people(!!), because they've actually got way more of a stick up their ass than my at 55-year of age. True thing!

This persian culture thing seems to be of the same ilk. It's not really a surprise that cultures still deeply stuck in early bronze age revelation cults have this sort of convoluted ritualistic modes of encounter that are designed to hide real intensions, elevate dishonesty and often carve out petty short-term gains in social situations.

Because SMS is just ONE of the several things they are used for. They are used to get 100s of thousands of different IP addresses to click on links at websites for all kinds of fraud and manipulation. Ad revenue theft, voting on polls, posting bot comments with fake accounts, etc.

That's because that's not their primary purpose. They were used to send SMS spam, bots to click on links on facebook, youtube, etc. They got busted because one of their customers used them for something nefarious.

For me, just being at the Dr. Office causes it. Medical, dental, hospitals, all give me terrible anxiety. It stems from an operation I had as an infant. It's just engrained into my brain that these places are bad. Its irrational, but the second I leave the facility the anxiety goes away.

The natural cascades of man-made global warming have only kicked into overdrive in recent years. Basic common sense tells us that the rate is only going to increase in the foreseeable future. Meaning that regular heat itself will be the main problem. And way earlier than 2050.

Point in case: It's nearing the end of September and temperature and humidity was flat-out tropical this weekend in western Germany. The water table here has been nothing but dropping for the last decade or so with zero replenishment happening and it ain't looking like that's gonna change. Rains have mostly reduced to short warm drizzles or the occasional 3-hour long flash-flood with a years worth of water coming down in an hour in selected counties. And flowing away within 24 hours. The first farmers in Germany are starting to move towards dryland agriculture (in effing Germany!), the complete vanishing of alpine glaciers is due in 5 years or so, perhaps even earlier and the famous German forrest with their Beeches, Oaks, Sykamores and such are officially a thing of the past because the water-cycle can't support them anymore.

Tourists have been steering clear of the mediterranean in recent years because the water was too warm. Not the air (although that too), the effing _water_ was too warm.

So I'd say in 2050 smoke from forrest-fires is likely to be one of our lesser problems.

I have really bad White Coat Syndrome. When I go to the doctor's office my blood pressure is always very high, as in they always freak out.

However when I leave the doctor's office and go home, my --multiple-- blood pressure machines always have a reasonably normal reading.

I found this out, because every doctor I've ever been to wants to put me on a higher dose of BP meds, and when I go on them, I get dizzy. Then on the follow up visit they say, I still have HBP and need to increase the dose again. Then I pass out in my living room a few days later. This has happened with three different doctors over about 10 years. New doctors think I am crazy and don't want to believe me. It's super frustrating.

My wife recently bought a new laptop and, to both of our surprise, it was configured out of the box to save data to OneDrive instead of C:. She's not particularly tech savvy and one day Chrome complained that storage was full. She did a web search of the error and it recommended deleting data from OneDrive, which she did, assuming that her family pictures were only backed up there - not primarily stored there - and ended up losing important data as a result of this.

Thankfully it must have been that particular OEM that chose to do this. I had installed "vanilla" Windows 11 on a custom PC build and that didn't happen - and we just bought a new laptop for our new business, different brand, and that was the first setting I checked (not an issue).

Still... companies pushing this type of crap on users is just batshit. Offer as an option, sure. But fundamentally re-configuring core functionality that people who have been using the OS for decades take for granted is just madness.