hello_marmalade

He could include himself. I have been involved in plenty of conversations about topics that don't interest me.

Yes, because the only way to drink, is to drink to excess. There are no other ways to drink alcohol.

"If it's a big enough group then the obvious solution is to have a selection of prizes"

Why? Is this really necessary? Everybody has gotten a gift or prize that they wouldn't use or didn't really care for. You can gift it to someone else.

If you wholesale abstain from an activity that the vast majority of people around you do, yes, you are a little alien.

What is it with people who don't drink being particularly disparaging about people who do and how and why they use it?

"depending on alcohol for team building sounds like the worst idea ever.

i don't want to be friends with people if their ability to develop friendship depends on alcohol. actually, i find it deceptive. i want to be friends with the real person. not the drunk person. it's dishonest. it's telling me that this person doesn't actually like me, and it's only the alcohol that makes them friendly. for an introvert who already has difficulty trusting people and making friends, this makes it worse, because it's a friendship that can't be trusted."

People aren't "depending" on alcohol, they're using it. Getting wasted is not a requirement of drinking alcohol. Alcohol reduces inhibitions. In small amounts it's enough to make a person feel less like they're going to sound stupid if they try to talk to new people. It's not deceptive any more than not opening up to others because you're anxious is "deceptive".

You are not better than other people because you don't drink.

The reason people are skittish about nuclear is because when it does fail, it fails catastrophically. The biggest failures in memory are all failures that risked making a multi kilometer area potentially completely uninhabitable for decades. Even if the risk is only 1%, coal is a much less scary prospect.

My biggest problem with Mastodon is it’s psychotic user base.

As much as I love FOSS, Element isn’t even close to Discord. Discord has one click streaming, easy to understand voice rooms, etc. You don’t have to sort out hosting, and the overall UI experience is sharper and feels more polished. Visually Element is nice, but it has some clunk to it.

One issue is that they won’t add fillets and chamfers.

This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole.

This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.

Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part of it.

The market was less established, so there was a lot more experimentation and people just trying to do completely random shit. That's why there are so many cool little tech artifacts from the 60s - 2000s. Now everything is cloud hosted, and web based. We know the form factors: phone, laptop, desktop, tablet. The market's solidified. What will work and what won't is a little more clear, or at the very least that's how people think about it. Nobody's really trying to do some kind of bespoke chip work for a calculator that doubles as a lighter anymore.

Yes, strikes are okay as long as they aren’t inconvenient or worse, effective.

That’s pretty heavily oversimplifying the issue. There were some pretty serious accusations levied against Kellog’s.

As someone who is an avid Linux user for over a decade and MacBooks daily at work, this is 100% sour grapes.

There is absolutely a visible difference between HiDPI displays and standard ones.

The problem is that it causes those people to become more extreme because they get put into an echo chamber.

It’s like putting a petty thief in with hardened criminals. They’re not coming out better than they went in, they’re coming out much, much worse.

It’s the difference between seeing people say racist things on Twitter, and having someone shoot up a church. Extremists aren’t created out in public.