Really depends on conditions. Many “bike lanes” have unsafe road hazards, glass, are immediately in the door zone of parked cars, etc. Getting doored is one of the most common causes of cyclists being sent to the hospital with major injuries.

A well laid out, well maintained bike lane is a better alternative to taking the lane. However, in the cases where the bike lane is hazardous it’s always better to take the lane than to risk getting injured in an unsafe bike lane.

I live in an opulent old Victorian with all the associated trappings you’d expect from the era

It’s glorious

Not washing cars results in long term damage to the car. If you have a 200k mile shitbox with peeling clear coat, sure, you don’t need to wash it because it probably won’t matter.

If you have something nice with good paint, washing is an important maintenance item

Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.

Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.

Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.

People still buy the games.

Yeah that’s not an option for many people.

Not everyone’s parents are reliable, still alive, willing to watch the kids, and conveniently nearby. You kinda need all four.

Also you can’t just leave your toddler at home when you go out for dinner, or drop your kid off with a boarding facility when you want to go on vacation

Only if we value safety and convenience over freedom.

Personally, I’ll take the freedom.

If you think that’s a satisfactory replacement for the average person you don’t know much about motorsports. The costs alone are outside the reach of most people.

That’s when we find out the player’s wizard character, Ehariel, has a long lost brother named Aharial with a suspiciously identical set of stats and backstory

He also has been looking for his brother for years only to conveniently find the party minutes after his brother dies

I hope so too

We stopped talking after she got herself stranded in a different city to manufacture a big crisis where people had to rescue her from south central LA at 2AM. She said it was a mistake but we later overheard her bragging about how she did it on purpose to get attention.

I had a friend who would watch this movie over and over. She said it was her “favorite movie”

I later found she was a little messed up in the head.

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

A geas is a magically enforced taboo against something. Following the requirements brings power but violation comes with grave punishment, often resulting in a character’s death or undoing.

It’s worth noting that the lack of second language proficiency isn’t a result of laziness or ignorance

In Europe, most people are a short train ride from another country. There is also a lot of cultural exchange between countries within Europe.

Most Americans are multiple days of driving from the nearest non English speaking country, and that’s just to arrive in an area of Mexico where the people they will interact with overwhelmingly speak English.

In that context, there is little utility for most people in learning a second language. It’s also very difficult to achieve true proficiency when you are so rarely exposed to native speakers of a language.

Yes I agree with most of this. If the original post I responded to had said this instead of misleading statistics and “now we have billionaires” like that class of people is a recent development I wouldn’t have said anything. We can make our arguments without those sort of rhetorical devices and people will take us more seriously if we do.

People like to look back with rose tinted glasses and act like things were so much better in the gold ole days. They weren’t and we are arguably better off now than in almost any other time in history. I see value in appreciating that fact.

That said, just because we have benefitted from automation and technology development doesn’t change that we could do better. I’d love to see more social safety nets, more affordable housing, reduced working hours, and so forth.

…

A century ago was post Industrial Revolution and after the advent of mass production as a common means to produce goods. This was also past the time where many European countries had moved to a parliamentary system.

I’m not sure if you are just ignorant of history or what.

It’s not inflammatory to argue for better systems.

It’s inflammatory when the statistics are being presented in a misleading way, which you and many others are guilty of. We can discuss how to improve the system without that sort of thing and it’s not productive to actually seeing change get made.

It’s not a lie that while we’ve had a massive industrial revolution that increased the productivity of workers, those benefits have not been seen by the workers.

It certainly is. Our living conditions have consistently improved in many ways as a result of industrialization.

You can argue that we could see more benefit and I’d agree with you, but to act like the average person hasn’t benefitted from industrialization is disingenuous.

If you think we are materially worse off now than we were before the introduction of automation you are either pushing hardcore propaganda or absolutely delusional.

Real median middle class income has stayed effectively constant since the 1980s. However, with automation the variety of goods available at that income level have dramatically improved. This is the benefit that the consumer sees and pretending it’s not a real benefit is disingenuous at best.

Maybe if you shill for billionaires a bit harder they’ll give you one of their yachts.

You really think so? That would be amazing

You said “now we have billionaires” like it’s a new phenomena. The graph I posted tracks the total wealth share of the top 1% wealthiest people, which is a much better picture of income inequality than the “average CEO”. Notice that the total wealth share went from 30% to 35% since its low in 1970, which is a much smaller change than the 200+x difference that people like to quote.

While inequality is growing, it’s not nearly as dramatic as people make it out to be and in 2023 we are far closer to that 1970s low than we were a century ago

In a world where we’ve so much automation and wealth in the world that we could care for everyone why do people still have to work 40+ hours a week just to get by?

I don’t disagree with you. Most people in white collar jobs realistically don’t get more than 5 hours a day of real productive work done to begin with. Why do we need to be at the office for 8 hours?

I just think it’s important to look at the data in an objective way. Instead of posting inflammatory comments on Lemmy that exaggerate the situation, you could try lobbying your representatives for better worker protections.

Funny you should say “we” and “American History” though :) Maybe the American model is the problem here.

Well, I’m American lol. But the trends are similar in almost every developed country so I don’t think this is an American problem.

I don’t think that is the case. A stratified fluid, in the absence of continued energy exchange with the outside environment, will eventually reach a homogenous temperature distribution due to diffusion.

That said, even if you are were correct, in the context of brewing tea we would only have a few minutes of brew time in which the stratification would have an impact on the extraction.