I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don't play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.
BenVimes
joined 1 year ago
Briefly: I didn't.
More substantively: I never owned a cell phone growing up, even though I was at the right age when they became a common thing for teenagers to have. It wasn't a money thing, nor household rule, as my sisters got phones when they were in high school. The biggest reason was probably just how I communicate. I wasn't big into IM services either, and I preferred email or face-to-face, or a (landline) phone call if it was an urgent matter.
Then there was also my adolescent brain thinking I was making a bold counter-culture statement by steadfastly resisting the march of technology. In reality, I was probably just being a pain in the neck for my friends and family, and I probably unnecessarily endangered myself at least once.
I did finally, begrudgingly, get an old hand-me-down flip-phone in my final year of university, but that was out of necessity, and I used it to make maybe only a dozen calls the 2.5 years I had it before getting a smart device.
To bring it full circle: I did try sending a text message with that flip-phone exactly once, at the insistence of my family. That message was predictably a garbled mess, and to this day my sisters still wonder how I managed to get a number to appear in the middle of the "word".
I have a number of other somewhat amusing stories about people's reactions to my lack of a cellphone, but this post is long enough already.
Am I the only person in my generation who never learned to type on a number pad? It wasn't the only thing I didn't recognize from the "test", but it stuck out to me.
My wife and I had this conversation the other day. Our kid is only two right now, but as we've learned, these milestones sneak up on you.
I used my own life as a guide to my opinion, and so landed on age eight or so. That's around the age I remember being able to go to the park or to a friend's house within the neighbourhood on my own.
Other questions about how much functionality the phone would have and how much access they would have to it at home are still to be determined.
At least last time I donated blood in my country (Canada), you could discretely indicate "do not use" by applying a different sticker to the bag. This was done in case someone got peer pressured into donating but didn't want to reveal something private that would have disqualified them otherwise.
You have yet to satisfactorily establish that. The most you've mustered is claiming that Jehovah would have known his victims were guilty and so was was justified in killing them. This excuse only works if one starts from a position of, "Jehovah is good", and then finds justification for his actions afterwards. In every other instance we would judge people by their actions, yet you want to make a special exception for your god where we reverse the calculus and judge his actions by his person instead.
I reject this backwards logic, and still conclude that the god of the Old Testament is a vindictive, bloodthirsty character, much more in line with his Iron Age contemporaries than with any modern conception of a god. This is one of the fundamental flaws of Christianity: that its god cannot be separated from its narrow, barbaric past, and thus cannot be easily squared with what is expected of a universal deity.
I do not care how local you think the myth of Noah's Flood was supposed to be, as that fact is immaterial to the point you continue to miss. That flood still would have killed innocent people, and the story frames this as a morally just action. No amount of quibbling over linguistics will change that.
The amount of excuses needed to ignore the plain implications of a passage is really telling. One could take the Old Testament as it appears: a series of books written and edited (and redacted, and co-opted, and edited again) as the religious and cultural canon in the Iron Age for an otherwise obscure Levantine tribe, with morals from a different time and place unsuited to our modern sensibilities. There are many such books and traditions from all over the world that contain tales just as horrifying as any in the Old Testament, so it would not be without company.
But the apologist wants us to believe that their ancient stories are actually true, and so they have to invent all these insane reasons why clearly immoral actions by their book's main character are totally justified. This is the sort of position that can only come about when someone decides what they believe first and then looks for rationale afterwards.
You can't even keep your own stories straight. The Great Flood myth in the Bible is very explicit that all life on earth will be destroyed, except that aboard Noah's Ark. Genesis 7:23 (NIV):
"Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark."
There is no reason to believe that Noah's family were the only innocents in the Flood story. I do not know how one can pin the supposed hedonism of the world on all those young children who would have drowned.
There is also no way to excuse killing the children of thousands of people because of the actions of one man. Blaming that one man for "forcing" supposedly omnipotent being to act in that way is also unjustifiable.
And there is no way to shift blame for genocide by simply saying, "the underlings took it too far." This excuse rings especially hollow when Jehovah asks for a cut of the spoils afterward (Numbers 31:25-31).
Well, there's the Flood and the Ten Plagues (particularly that tenth one) for starters.
Then there's the various war crimes committed by the Israelites at Jehovah's explicit instructions (e.g. the genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31).
My version of this story happened in the gymnasium. My class, along with the students from three other classes, were all formed up as a choir and had just wrapped up practicing a song for the school's Christmas play. One kid let loose, and the whole assembly made a very hasty (and disorderly) retreat, leaving the poor guy standing in a puddle of his own vomit.
I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget's review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.
Maybe I'm too old-school and impatient, but I've never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It's a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I've used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.
The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I've never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.