Boomers reviewing locations they’ve never been to and products they’ve never used:

New business idea: fortune cookie text but on tampon wrappers.

“It’s not there” != “They removed it”

Please answer any of the questions I pose in the linked comment, because the plan you’re alleging exists and that Apple took part in makes absolutely zero fucking sense under any level of scrutiny.

Pay specific attention to the point about “Tyr” (it’s “Tyre”, which you’d know Apple gets wrong if you have even a bare minimum knowledge about Lebanese geography). It genuinely makes no sense to leave it under this “plan”, and yet there it is in your screenshot.

Self-plagiarizing:

Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Poland, where Poland has by far the highest rate of trust in US and Chinese tech companies. Seems therefore like the five other countries might not be a representative sample of Europeans, even though total Polish trust of US tech companies still only amounts to 38% compared to ~15% in runner-up Italy.

Coincidentally™, Polish trust nearly triples over more “Western” countries, which shows that this clearly isn’t a representative sample of Europeans – definitely not enough to claim “8 in 10 Europeans”. (Politico actually changed the headline from earlier which didn’t claim this.)

Damn, I totally disagree with your argument and think Telegram is extremely culpable for advertising as E2EE without it enabled by default or in groups, but that’s such a power trip.

I think Lemmy.World (justifiably) defederated from Hexbear a long time ago, so it’d be hard for me these days.

omg, you’re such a Maid of Life. wanna be moirails?

Here’s the funny picture if anyone wants to see how this looks in comparison to the past couple months. Source. (I’ll note that it doesn’t look better if you look at this time last year, if that bothers you about this choice of graph.)

I’d always thought it was catalyzed by the widespread shitposts which were then seen by kids who’d never watched or been exposed to the prequels before. The kids, in my interpretation, took the tongue-in-cheek love for the prequels and the way the meme community would twist the prequels’ flaws into strengths (under 7 layers of irony) and adopted it as an unironic love for them.

You get your picture taken and put on the wall of other students’ pictures. A snapshot of your soul stays in the collage, and you get it back when you graduate.

Provably so!

You already have been banned from other communities for vote manipulation

I don’t know which those are. I was banned over a year ago(?) by this carnivore-diet nutjob because I downvoted the posts in his propaganda communities for spreading provably harmful health disinformation, but that downvoting was expressly limited to my account.

And 1-2 minutes would be a reasonable time frame for switching VPN location, logging into an account, locating this and voting.

Oh, cool! That’s something I’d totally do *checks notes* approximately eight times over the course of 15 minutes. I can’t prove a negative here, but I like to think I respect myself more than wasting my life injecting bullshit upvotes into my comments. If I somehow decided my life had sunken to the pathetic depths of botting small social media communities, it would be to downvote unsubstantiated nonsense like this, not to inflate arguments that I think can stand on their own merits.

Edit: I’d like to add that my original comment has been up for ~40 minutes now. It’s 17:1 (possibly your downvote). While an initial high upvote ratio can psychologically influence people to upvote too, no amount of botting can control other people’s downvotes. Surely if I’d botted my comment, it’d be reflected in an influx of downvotes afterward because my “botted” ratio was completely artificial? Even just a few? Did you even check the other comment to see the rate it was being upvoted at as a control? I don’t really know why I’m arguing against this unfalsifiable claim, but this whole thing just seems ridiculous to me.

I don’t bot. We can get the Lemmy.World administration involved if you want to confirm that I don’t (be a bit fucking weird if I only did it here, yeah?). The fact that you’re resorting to calling a pretty normal-seeming pattern of voting “botting” illustrates how little evidence you actually need to fall into conspiratorial nonsense. My only regret is that I have but one downvote to give your bullshit post.

Starting 3 minutes in is extremely normal for Lemmy (for some reason, but that’s nevertheless been my experience). What exactly is the significance to you behind “3 minutes”? Did I need to give the “bots” time to warm up or something? Of course the real answer is that there is none and you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall because your argument is paper-thin and full of obvious holes you were too fucking stupid to consider.

“Removed” implies they were there before, and threads for this have zero evidence showing they were there before (and a lot of people claiming they weren’t). This whole thing got started because somebody posted about it on Twitter – and they claimed “South Lebanon” which has apparently metastasized/telephoned into people claiming it was all of Lebanon.

All you show here is a link to Apple Maps, and yeah, they aren’t there. This is a thread from 6 years ago claiming Apple’s coverage was so egregiously bad that they couldn’t plan a route near Beirut. Apple Maps has always been the laughingstock of the major maps services, including even OpenStreetMap whom they (IIRC) sometimes pull data from. No change on Bing or GMaps either, and why the fuck would Apple delete basically all of Lebanon? What mustache-twirling plan did they have to aid Israel’s invasion compared to the fucking PR disaster once it was inevitably proven? (And what part does leaving Tyre – which they call “Tyr” for some godforsaken reason – when it’s functionally abandoned play in this maniacal scheme?)

If you have evidence that it wasn’t like this before, then cool. If not, maybe posting your original “research” to a world news comm isn’t justified.

I totally think Star Wars could’ve pulled off a more political plot – I actually even think it could’ve been just as good for a popcorn flick as the OT and far better for the people who want deep, complex, meaningful lore while enhancing the OT. Palpatine’s plan to instigate a war and play both sides, to me, is the actually perfect Palpatine backstory. Anakin’s backstory in the (very) broad strokes is extremely compelling too, and Obi-Wan was overall fantastic. Problem is that George completely fucked up the writing, Anakin’s character development and his relationship with Padmé, a lot of the acting, etc., and squandered so much of the potential the premise had.

This new wave of prequel apologia, that, imo, was catalyzed by the influx of memes, is pointing at criticisms of the prequels from like 15 years ago while totally ignoring the more nuanced, well-argued, and – I think – damning criticisms of the modern day. It’s basically strawmanning when the criticisms are so old and so dead.

I don’t think it’s a ridiculous idea? Children these days – I’d assume – need an email address at an increasingly younger age. So you pay $1 to get an indefinite voucher for that address – which might actually be worthwhile to some if their child’s name is somewhat common and the full name is available today without a bullshit string of numbers at the end.

Granted there’s no guarantee Proton will be around in e.g. 8 years, but so far, they seem to be doing reasonably well, and $1 is, like, the price of an apple.

Yeah, how dare Proton have forced that customer to use their personally identifying credit card when they paid for the service! I can’t believe Proton AG prevented them specifically from using cash or cryptocurrency when they openly allow and advertise it for everyone else. Especially when that person was allegedly in (what the US government considers) a domestic terror cell; Proton should’ve known the risks.

And then on top of all that, they readily sent the Swiss government that credit card information completely out of the blue. Bastards!

I think that halfwit got the point.

It’s “if I can’t have it, nobody can!” In other words, Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist toddler. More at 11.