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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 22nd, 2025

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  • I’ve always assumed this (and assumed that other people assumed this), because if you talk to homophobes they’ll eventually say something like “it’s a choice!” because it’s a choice for them. It’s not a choice for me because gay porn doesn’t turn me on – and if it did I wouldn’t care anyway because that’s how I was raised. But it DOES turns them on, AND they were raised in an environment where this is THE WORST THING EVER, so it upsets them and they get all irrational and punchy (lesson learned: DO NOT discuss this theory with a homophobe.)

    TLDR; IMHO Homophobes who think orientation is a choice are closeted gays because logic.

    It would be nice to see a better study. Interesting if one hasn’t been done in all this time…


  • It’s likely your phone, specifically Apple, Google, or Facebook location services. A bluetooth beacon in the vending machine gets the identity anyone standing near (and everyone walking by!) directly from any number of advertising vendors, including the big three scumbags mentioned. Even if the identity code is “anonymous”, the machine knows it’s you because it’s the same “anonymous” code as last time – so not really anonymous and easily demasked with enough datapoints.

    Could be facial recognition too, but the above method has been used for more than a decade now and is everywhere since it’s built in to all ecommerce platforms.

    If it is facial recognition then it probably just stores datapoints like the distance between your eyes (etc…) and doesn’t know who “you” are until you pay with a card.

    I think all of the marketing and advertising industry is bullshit. It’s manipulation and propaganda made to appear normal and proper. If it all suddenly went away nothing would happen other than a mad scramble for jobs and alternate revenue sources.





  • That happened a decade ago. You can’t find many pet supplies anywhere anymore because one company owns the distributors and the stores – and they don’t give a shit because they’re American and Canada is too small of a market to support, so it’s left to wither and die.

    The same with Veterinary services. They’ve all be bought up, made into chains, or signed bullshit distribution or service agreements by a single (American) company and now it costs many multiples what it used to for no reason except greed.




  • Americans are brainwashed to believe that there’s only one particular and specific way to protest, and beyond that all you can do is kill people.

    They haven’t yet realized that there is a huge swathe of options in between, and it requires no organization or depending on others, and no violence against anyone. You can just quietly do stuff. Probably less risky than doing anything publicly in a country with ubiquitous surveillance and the law no longer matters. Protests are great for showing the level of public support for a movement, but if the government doesn’t represent the people their effect will be minimal for producing real change.

    There currently is no cost for ventures into fascism. Make it so expensive they’ll think twice next time (if there is a next time.)






  • Trying to be a Reddit clone.

    Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).

    Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of “Reddit”-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as “insightful”, “funny”, etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out “funny” comments saved soooooooo much time.

    Another thing: Why don’t creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It’s their thread! It wouldn’t be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It’s pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn’t quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)

    Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?