Not surprising when flagship devices have more than doubled in price in over the last decade.

That and the fact that many modern devices feel like compromised devices with purposeful downgrades despite the huge cost increase.

Honestly I hope WhatsApp (yeah I know Meta are date harvester extraordinares) pull out the second this passes.

WhatsApp is by far the largest messaging service used in the UK. Every company I've worked for in the last five years makes extensive use of group WhatsApps. Same with all my friends and family too.

The public outcry at that loss would potentially be enough to sway politicians away from such BS. Anything short of WhatsApp going and the British public won't be technologically literate enough to give a fuck.

It does and that's the real issue.

MS has the power, reach and financial means to completely steamroll the market by underpricing games pass to kill any competition. Then once they've done that they can set prices, control labour and production to reduce costs too and monopolise the market to their shareholders cold dead money grubbing hearts content.

To put the scale of the issue in perspective.

Microsoft has a market cap of 2.5 Trillion dollars. Or 2500 billion.

Sony, Nintendo, Tencent, Valve, EA, Take Two and Ubisoft combined don't even reach 700 billion. We take Tencent out of the equation and it's only 300 billion.

So we're talking 4x that of all their combined global competition. If we only look at "western" companies its basically 8.5x.

But getting rid of Bobby Kotick will make gaming better /s

As already said you just need to buy something explicitly listed as a monitor.

One thing you'll find is that at 55" with decent specs you'll be paying a significantly higher price than you could find a 4k TV. That's because good monitors of that size are often super high end displays. E.g. Nvidia branded big format gaming displays.

The Galaxy S5 active is evidence that you're just wrong. Classic removable battery but still IP67.

Will be interesting to see how this goes.

I'm literally in the states on vacation and visiting friends the first two weeks in November so any games I can attend would be cup matches.

Provisional plan is to visit DC, New York and Boston just not sure on order yet but does hopefully give me a decent shot at going to a game with 4 teams to work with.

Our cup competitions span large parts of the season instead of a single month. Even the truncated format of the FA for Premier league sides who enter at the 3rd Round is 5 months. The league cup again even in shortened format for teams in European competition is 4 months.

Plus the group stage puts the format much closer to the Champions, Europa and conference league formats.

Magazines and books by the loo were a legitimate thing I remember growing up.

Don't see that anymore, I say as I'm typing this comment on the loo.

Allegedly they've been back together for a long time.

Greenwood got done for breach of bail conditions for seeing her and she's now pregnant with what you'd assume is his child.

Exactly. Ain't no rule stating ladies can't pick up a wrench.

I already read a fair amount. 2022 I averaged something like 118 pages per day averaged out of the year. So far in 2023 I've averaged a more sustainable 50 pages per day.

So not being on reddit isn't likely to influence my reading that much.

You're vastly overestimating the knowledge, intelligence and fucks given by the vast majority of people.

The fediverse is frankly too complex and convoluted for the normies. Whichever instance manages to remove the complexity, solve the onboarding process and get the content right will win out and be the thing the normies speak of.

Yeah that's a perspective I understand and I will miss some of that. However for myself at least the removal of Reddit appears to be beneficial to me to such a degree as to out weigh the loss.

But I already have had the benefit of 13 years of reddit opening my eyes andt 13 years of growth and experience from teenager to a responsible adult at the same time so don't feel the mind broadening the same extent any more.

Mildly infuriating my arse.

The only future outcomes are wholly and completely infuriated to the very core of your being if the ex escalates past phone harassment to real life.

Or

The feeling of smug self satisfaction of dodging the fucking firing squad when this person leaves your life without further fuss.

Depends entirely on your values and perspective

If you're coming from the upper echelons of US income then it might not.

Otherwise you'll potentially find the increase in quality of life to be significant.

Americans work too much, commute to much and don't take enough holidays. Europeans work significantly less hours day to day, have significantly shorter commutes on average and have legally required and protected minimum annual leave that vastly outstrips US workers.

E.g. Take myself and a US friend in a very similar job into account. Yes he earns roughly double what I do.

• However I average 10-15 hours less work a week than he does.
• My commute is half what his is and I have actual public transport options that aren't trash if my car broke down.
• I get 38 days of paid leave a year. 8 national holidays and the time between Christmas and Jan 1st by default.. That leaves me with 27 days to use with some degree of freedom. He's lucky if he takes ten days total per year.
• I get private healthcare but also know that if that was removed from my benefits I'd have access to state healthcare without the risk of bankruptcy.

Those listed things are just employment based. Culture is also a factor. I've never once worried about being shot in my entire life. Our food quality standards are higher whilst also costing significantly less. We don't have the institutionalised national self delusion of tipping culture. Our religious and crazy right wing aren't politically powerful enough to be dragging us kicking and screaming inti the 18th century like the US is. We aren't completely and utterly dependent on cars, so being car free is a viable way to live.

My final note is this. I'm not some US hating zealot. I literally booked flights for a two week holiday in the US yesterday. I adore the NBA and find American people to be absolutely lovely on average. But I couldn't live the way most Americans do.

You're just being obtuse if you think that there's no confusion for the majority.

The absolute vast majority aren't techies, they aren't open to learning and they have been used to centralised simplicity.

Just trying to explain home instances, federation and defederation is more than enough to lose the interest and understanding of a vast majority.

Now the barriers do lend themselves to an entirely different feeling and community base. Whether that's good or bad is down to personal taste. But Lemmy isn't going to compete with reddit until the process is streamlined and the thinking required is mostly removed.

I'm undecided at the moment.

I'm now mostly past the muscle memory of instantly opening Reddit any time I'm not actively busy.

Lemmy isn't ready to fill the hole that has left. But honestly as it stands I'm not sure that I want to fill that hole. It would probably be better for my mental health, concentration, social life and many other things if I could successfully leverage this moment to become a whole lot less of an online person.

The beans phase had me doubting the quality part for sure.

I know we'll not regain the special privileges we had and will need to eventually move toward the Euro but good lord we should be rejoining the EU posthaste.

CSGO. My most played game for a reason. Also with community servers and the essentially limitless skill ceiling I'd not be short of things to do.

Or:

GuildWars 2 as I've still got an absolutely gargantuan amount of content to catch up with and the games got massive variety.