Yeah, that’s certainly one odd aspect. Also, there’s a ton of other methods to handle labour shortages. Like activating underused groups, such as women. Or offering retraining so people can switch to different jobs. And higher pay for sectors with shortages doesn’t hurt either, considering the already very low pay in Greece.

Running your existing workforce ragged is NOT the way to deal with this.

But hey, maybe we’re missing some cultural or political piece of the puzzle as to why they went this route.

The Greeks are insane for going along with this. Revolutions have started over less. Clearly their politicians no longer have the best interests of the Greek people in mind.

I miss forums as well, and I’m actually moving back to them. Back in the early 2000’s, I visited like a dozen forums each day. I was a member of like three watch forums, a camera forum, a Star Trek forum, some gaming forums and others. Just ‘doing the rounds’ kept you busy for a while. People also were insanely knowledgeable on those niche forums, and they all had their own specific culture and flavor to them.

Places like a niche subreddit are… OK at best. They are convenient and easy to visit, but don’t tend to have the level of knowledge and discourse that I generally enjoy. You also run the risk of your sub getting ruined by people who are into the wrong aspects of your particular hobby. For example, on a watch FORUM, the discussions are about design, mechanical features, history, photography, how to repair, etc. etc. On the subreddit, a lot of posts tended to be drive-by posters who ‘found a watch and wanted to know what it’s worth’. or ‘is this fake’. The subreddit didn’t curb that, so eventually I and many others just stopped going there. It was basically too easy for people to post there just because, well, they could. Whereas on an actual watch forum, you can do a bit stricter moderation and the registration requirement weeds out low effort posting.

Some consider that ‘gatekeeping’, but I see it as a valid way of protecting one’s chosen community.

I don’t think I’ve met any Brazilians back in those days; (online) gaming is really expensive there from what I heard, right?

One fun thing in the old COD lobbies was always to teach others slurs and general cursing in your language. I learned how to curse folks out in like 50 languages. Each country also has its own unique style of cursing. We Dutch really like to incorporate diseases for example.

I’m certainly not going to say you’re wrong on that first part. I’ve been online since 1996. At that time, the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy… well… going online felt like coming home. Those were my people. I still really miss those days.

But I also know that the experience of someone not like me would’ve been wildly different. I learned a bajillion slurs on COD lobbies after all. It’s a good thing that more people now feel welcome online, as it led to platform growth and functionality that we otherwise wouldn’t have had if it was just ‘my kind of people’.

The current safe, sanitised, gentrified gaming sphere also has benefits: COD lobbies these days are very pleasant by comparison. You even have to sign a code of conduct to get on multiplayer. It feels more welcoming, less hostile. Of course, companies certainly have been financially incentivized to attract as wide an audience as possible. For example, the very first GTA game sold about 6 million copies. GTA V has sold 200 million. And with ever-increasing development budgets, you can’t afford to cater to a niche, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to recoup those costs.

I miss that era. Companies didn’t mind a bit of edginess and weren’t afraid to market to adults. The console culture itself also isn’t what it used to be.

These days, gaming consoles all need to be safe enough for five year olds to play on them. And it’s caused everything to be just too bland and safe, both in marketing and the console itself. Can’t really have things like Xbox 360 Uno with the live camera feed and no moderation. Or the wholly uncensored COD lobbies.

When you can pack the peak amount of players into a decent sized ballroom, that’s never a good sign for your game’s future.

At this point they’re probably better off just refunding buyers and shuttering the game entirely. Doesn’t feel like this is a salvageable situation.

Well that’s certainly one way to kill a game. Heck, I HAVE a PS5, and I still would be annoyed as fuck by that.

Sure, you can offer to link an account for things like progress tracking. But it certainly shouldn’t be forced on anyone.

Well, while those flexible screen flip phones certainly look like neat tech, it’s not the same as the flip phones we used to have.

And it’ll need a few more versions before I’m comfortable buying one. Those screens tend to be just a bit too fragile.

Jesus, that’s a blast from the past for sure!

It really was the thing everyone latched on to with the N-Gage. I actually still own a first gen model that I bought on release. It was actually pretty decent, both as a phone and the games it played. Of course, it never really took off, but I enjoyed using it.

As for the sidetalking… I bought a headset for it to avoid that :D

For me, it’s just the fact that phones… are phones. They all look the same, function the same, there’s just nothing new happening with them.

Sure, chips get better and faster, they’ll add another camera to it and fiddle with the dimensions a bit, but that’s not innovation. All phones look like boring rectangular slabs.

Back in the late 90’s, phones had way more variety and personality. Candybar, flip, even the sidetalkin’ taco that was the Nokia N-Gage. A Motorola Razr looked nothing like say, a Nokia or Sony Ericsson. And those were distinctly different from your Samsung or Mitsubishi phones (Yes, Mitsubishi made phones!).

I’d love it if we went back to more phone variety, but I fear the smartphone has effectively killed every other style. Most people wouldn’t ditch their big screen smartphone to go back to a small flip phone.

Ooff, that doesn’t sound like a good time. Haiti’s always been rather problematic, with the colonial history, dictators, extreme poverty, disasters, several coups, etc. Etc. In 2004, the UN also sent folks there to keep the peace. They were there until 2019 and accomplished…?

So now we’re back to another round of UN intervention probably. It really feels like Haiti will forever be incapable of proper self-governance. The people deserve better, but I doubt they’ll get it.

Good to hear at least sometimes things like that work out well :D

At least ice skating and running are fairly normal sporting activities that average people can partake in. But some of those other facilities they build really have no use for most people.

My own city has a soccer stadium. It was built with taxpayer money. It has 30.000 seats, after it was expanded twice. It had 13.000 when it opened.

The club who uses it has been a financial mess for ages.

The stadium gets used for soccer matches and… nothing. That’s the only use. You can technically rent part of it for say, a wedding reception or business event, but by and large it sits unused most days of the year.

Now imagine if this had been an even larger, even more expensive Olympic stadium. There simply would be no way to make it economically viable to keep it around post-games.

And a stadium is at least potentially multifunctional. But something like an indoor cycling track or high diving pool has fuck-all reuse potential.

Yep. About the last thing people should want is for their country to host the Olympics. Because YOU as a tax payer are footing the bill for all that infrastructure, all the event costs, while seeing no real income from any of it. And once it’s done, it’ll keep hurting your economy. And let’s not forget all that useless infrastructure that you had to build. That needs to be demolished after all…

If someone suggests bringing the games to your country, you should boop them on the nose until they reach sanity again.

Here you go :D

https://programming.dev/comment/7612443

There’s also good fun in derailing a thread :D

The other day I commented on a post that used an ‘internet pirate’ stock image. Mentioned how I’d seen a guy with an eyepatch on the street that day and how rare that was.

Someone ended up sharing a neat little story about getting poked in the eye with a sword and how a kid called him a pirate. That all added fuck-all to the topic at hand, but it sure was collectively entertaining.

Most people are guilty of that to some extent. You want to make a good response, but end up overthinking it and moving on. Which is a shame. God only knows how many awesome comments end up in the digital wastebasket.

Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? Who really gives a fuck about downvotes anyway.

Exactly. This thread is a perfect example. There’s literally no real topic to discuss, and yet people are talking. And that’s a great thing to encourage if we want to grow this platform 👍

Well, comment anyway. You never know what’ll happen.

And even if you have a boring, vanilla opinion on that topic, post it anyway. Because it’ll lower the bar for others to comment as well. (As this entire thread demonstrates)