For me, it's board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I'm sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.
No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.
Herbalife, fucking herbalife.
This weekend, I went into what looked like an indie smoothie shop and dropped an ungodly amount of money on a delicious sounding shake... only to watch the lady drop a scoops of powder and ONE freeze-dried strawberry into a cup with ice. Tasted like ass.
Yet they do have regulars to that shit, and nobody is taking them out of business. I want my fucking $11 back. So anyone reading this doing a class action against Herbalife, I want in...
But I doubt it, since it's a scam that's so normalized we don't realize it's a scam anymore.
In fairness, I think it's because the tech barrier of entry went down, WAYYY down. "Free Data" is an easy sell to people who were dialing into usenet in the 90's, and us stupid ameteur hackers who would break into systems like they were puzzles because we thought it was cool and the maximum penalty was a fine and community service (the good old days, we all did it at least once and thought we were Zero Cool... unless we thought Zero Cool was lame, whatever). A lot of the people who think IP jives well with the internet were the ones who looked at me weird when I said I had online friends circa 2000, and who couldn't understand how I couldn't make some party because I "had to spend Saturday hanging out on IRC for my D&D campaign"
Even more technical folks now, they just never lived what made the internet beautiful when it was smaller. Back when "FOSS" was "Free as in Beer" and fuck that Richard Stallman with his "free as in speech" bullshit. They don't remember how this dark storm of people's hobbies turning into other people's IP, people like Bill Gates stealing the foundations of technology to build his empire (for all the good he does now, he was truly evil to his core).
Ok, old-fart rant over.
Exactly. When I supported this, there was that wince of "this won't get the people it really needs to hit"... but it does enough.
And tbh, I know some wealthy fucking people who legitimately don't cross the line. $1M/yr is a lot of bloody money. That means if I found a way to "only" make $900,000/yr, I'm immune to this tax.
Also, anyone hiring for $900,000/yr?
That's what the campaign to quash the bill did. That, and tried to convince people that they might have a single multi-million-dollar transaction in their life (like selling a large successful business) and have to pay an extra 4% on it.
Always a push to get the "temporarily embarassed millionaire" to support the reach. "Yeah, yanno. My little lawmowing operation that makes me $20,000 coild sell for over a million and then I'm fucked"
Oh god you're making me feel old. I can't see the "at that time" context because lemmy.ml is screwing up backlinks for me right now, but I'm assuming it's either when I got into the net (early 90's) or when I was all-in on IRC (late 90's). This wil be a bit of a cluster of answers to both :)
Back when I got into IRC, there was quite a bit. It's hard to keep track of exactly what I started using when. Back in the early 90's, those of us online ended up on IRC or places like Delphi Forums. I lived on Delphi and it reminded me back then of Lemmy now. Arguably, the biggest problem with back then is that either a group had some technical following, or you just didn't see much about it. Interested in some fringe philosophy? If you just looked at numbers I swear you'd think Discordianism or the Church of Subgenious were the world' majority religion back then.
Otherwise, there were lots of Bulletin Boards forums. Google may be advanced, but it also spiders orders of magnitude more pages than existed back then. Yahoo was surprisingly good for the smaller web. Otherwise, honestly, things felt very similar to me.
Everything was simple, though. Had to be. 56k modems were real, really did make that crazy noise, and downloading a movie was genuinely an investment of time and effort. Everyone knew somebody who would sell them something like "Everything Metallica" on CD for $5, usually to pay for pot money or whatever. Why? Because even if you had access to everything metallica online, it would take you days to download it and clean that shit up.
Ironically, I think messengers were more used/useful back then. Perhaps because there were fewer, so you could talk to all your messenger-using friends by just running 2 or 3 on your computer? I STILL remember my old IQC number, and was always proud it was only 6 digits! I never got into AOL, but I had AIM for one or two friends, Y! for one or two friends, and IQC for 20-30 friends. Most of them were people I never met or would meet (super nerd). But it was great because you'd get to KNOW the people you got to know. I had a buddy in Norway who had so little in common with me, but we hit it off so good he ended up getting me into Melodic Death Metal and one of my still-favorite bands Theatre of Tragedy. Early side of that window, about 20% of IRC rooms were something between piracy, sex chats, or RPGs. The rest was a random mishmash. Later on, I swear there were more RPG chats.
I could probably talk for weeks on it. There's a few products that came and went that I swear should have been the "next big thing" but failed due to bad business. There was a community game engine I worked on a game for called BYOND that still runs with a couple thousand players. It would've ended up on a front page if the founders either had more business savvy or just open-sourced it. Then there's Digg. Talk about a mirror image of the reddit bullshit, but Digg was smaller AND fucked up bigger than redit did. None of us were happy to go to reddit, but digg turned to shit. We knew reddit was crap (nobody ever thought their leadership was ok) when we went there, but there were no other options anyone took seriously.
That about gets us to the end of "the good old days".
Fun Fact. I'm fucking old. Every time someone says something like this, it's like "aw shit. I was on IRC when this person was in diapers"
Yes, bread can be healthy. The right one in moderation. The same as red meat (per your reference), actually :).
But 80/20 extra-fattened with liver for a delicious burger? Definitely not healthy (but like a candy bar, it's ok to have one every months or two)
It seems odd putting meat in the same category as bread.
In terms of pure health, there's not much out there better than most meats. Yes, beef is a bit lower than pork and chicken, but properly portioned (looking at most of us Americans) it has very few downsides.
Bread on the other hand can be one of the worst foods we can eat. Of course, it is still all about moderation.
EDIT: Why the reddit-like downvotes folks? There's really no cohesive argument that puts meat below bread healthwise in most situations. If you want to avoid meat, avoid meat. If you want to be morally opposed to anyone eating meat, so be it. Facts are still facts and misinformation isn't the right way to fight that battle.
I mostly miss my niche subreddits. If the subreddit only has 20-30 active users, that means 1-2 people hopped to Lemmy who might be interested in it.
And my axe... whoops, wrong line.
Yeah, I had RIF on the last 4+ phones as my primary drivers for reddit. So now, I'm on Lemmy. I miss some of the niche subs I was on that simply aren't showing up here yet, but it's a good opportunity to reduce my "reddit obsession".
I'll throw my support behind cops who are standing up to the bullshit.
But they are usually fired (or worse), which means the people I'm supporting... aren't cops anymore