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Modern social media
Microtransactions in video games. Hell, I’d say that modern video games in general are pretty bad, ESPECIALLY modern mobile games.
Look, I agree they suck, but video games being slightly worse isn’t the worst thing about the 21st century.
Eh, I couldn’t really think of anything that isn’t already pointed out by somebody else in the comments, so this is the thing that came to mind.
Have you played many modern games?
Breath of the Wild?
Deep Rock Galactic?
Battlebit Remastered?
Baba is you?
That first one is actually pretty good. For some reason I have never heard of the other three.
Go ahead. Downvote my comment with pleasure.
… Ok?
Ban them.
Get rid of the entire business model. It’s an abuse. Games make you value arbitrary worthless nonsense - that is what makes them games. Attaching a dollar price to that imaginary form of value is a scam.
Full scale mass surveillance capitalism. Governments used to have to hire agents, dress them up, and have them bug peoples phones. Now they can just buy it in bulk. No warrent, no black site op, just cashing checks.
Social Media. Cancerous all of it. Psyops and psychological manipulation. If you studied psychology and sociology you would know there is a huge stage 4 cancer in society and it is social media.
Does Lemmy count as social media?
Yes - by most definitions. It’s powered by user-generated content and is based on interaction between users through engagement with that content, which is voted and scored.
There is a difference which I personally feel makes reddit less harmful than other social media, however, which is the algorithm - or lack of it.
In most social media, the algorithm exists to continually serve people the exact content they engage with in a constant feed, which is IMO the most socially damaging part of social media because it creates endless doomscrolling, toxic echo chambers, promotion of sponsored content, and a whole raft of psychological problems in users.
The Lemmy homefeed is more organic, and scrolling through ‘all’ you see content genuinely from everywhere, in a less curated way based on upvotes, not individual algorithmic tailoring. And that’s maybe not as “engaging” but it’s far less damaging.
Post-WWII put propaganda/advertising to the next level. Social media turned that to 11.
Separate apps for various retail stores. I don’t want a home depot app. I don’t want a kroger app. We have a generic app for this category called a web browser. If you want me to download a specialized app for your store, I assume that means that my browser does not sufficiently breach my privacy for your “business purposes.”
Dude the phone “app” is 100% on the list for me too.
As a stop gap between good web design including PWAs it made sense at a time, but 99% of apps are just bloated websites that data and power for no noticeable gains…
I really hope this goes out of style eventually, and one day gets remembered alongside proprietary hardware connectors.
The only one I use is Safeway, to scan the in-store coupons. I’m not sure how much info they can get, because the app fails to load until I pause my VPN.
I skip the app and use one of Safeway’s “Please Don’t Rape Me” cards that I found in the parking lot.
I also second social media, but I need to make another suggestion it’d be Keurigs k-cups. So much plastic waste for the barest level of convenience.
Thank you for beating me to mention this.
K-cups are really amazinlgy bad. And it’s not like there aren’t much better solutions available. Philips has those fully bio-degradable pads, a local store now sells a type of coffee maker that uses just the coffee powder in balls where the outer shell is compressed grounds that is cracked open to get to the powder inside.
But no, Keurig and their fucking oceans of plastic waste.
Nespresso has ones that are fully metal, and so can be shredded and separated by mass to get scrap aluminum and prime compost fodder. They accept them back by mail.
Even the creator of the K-cup said he regretted creating it because of the environmental impact.
Was that before or after going to the bank, laughing?
Actually, the inventor of the Keurig coffee pod system, John Sylvan, sold his ownership of the product for $50,000 in 1997. 7 years after founding the company and before single-serve coffee really took off.
Interesting!
What the hell is a K-cup, it sounds like something you shove up your vaj
Nah that’s a diva cup
It’s a small plastic cup full of ground coffee, Kuerig machines use them. They generated a ton of plastic waste, since each k-cup was a single use.
There was great progress in compostable K-Cups from other vendors. And then Keurig did the DRM thing with the UV ink. So they literally made everything worse trying to keep their market reach.
I threw mine out and went back to a french press. Straight into compost, and the coffee tastes better.
And so is every Coke bottle with 5 times the plastic. And so is every store-bought coffee. Yet… silence. 🦗🦗🦗
What about bottles? Far more energy requires to melt and pour glass. No one says a word about single use.
Never found a K-cup on the beach or trail, but I pack plastic bags to haul trash and sometimes load 2 or 3.
Yet… silence.
Imagine never reading any news or discussions about environmental impact, but coming in here trying to defend Keurig by doing full whataboutism.
Plastic bottles weren’t invented in the 21st century
Don’t give anyone ideas.
Too late!
Keurigs are actually pretty convenient when you’re only making one cup. The trick is to get one of the reusable filters and just use whatever coffee you like.
I love my Keurig, but I always use the reusable mesh cups.
Yes, it’s a waste, but the whole thing was blown way the hell out of proportion.
I hike, kayak, canoe, whatever, all over the place. Every plastic bottle I pick up contains, what, 5 times the plastic? I pick up a LOT. And nobody thinks twice or raises a fuss.
We use a Keurig, but either with plastic refill cups or paper bags my wife brings home from the hotel.
Strong dissagree. I am barely functional pre-caffeine in the early morning. A Keurig is about as much mental energy as I can muster to operate. It is a godsend to me on day I work early.
I think the problem is not in pod-based single-serving coffee machines. Those are common, and well-loved for a reason.
But there are easily available alternatives that do the exact same thing without requiring so much plastic, namely Senseo coffee pads (they’re grounds in coffee filter paper) or CoffeeB and its compressed coffee grounds balls (so it’s all just coffee ground, both the coffee and the pod). Probably a fair few more I don’t know about personally.
Possibly even Nestle with their Nescafe pods. They’re aluminium but some countries achieve effectively 100% recycling on that, then the only issue is the filter membrane they place inside and I don’t know whether that is easily separated during recycling or not.
K-cups are recyclable. Why are you people not putting them in the recycling.
A lot of stuff marked as recyclable is technically recyclable but cost prohibitive to do so. I don’t know what type of plastic these cups are, but when they claim recyclable, it should specify percent actually being recycled.
I’m liking aldi at the moment. They list all the separate parts of packaging for me and how it can be disposed. I hope its just a step to moving more to biodegradable rather than recyclable.
They’re 100% recyclable. It’s also very cheap.
Again, possible to recycle does not mean they are actually recycled or economic to recycle. Many things are possible to recycle. Most are not. If their form factor or material makes them costly to recycle, they wont be. You say they are cheap. What cost to make new? What cost to collect, sort and recycle?
100% biodegradable would be better. With no plastic.
To be used in most recycling programs you would need to fully remove the foil lid, and rinse out every k-cup before depositing them in recycling.
…okay. And? That’s like 2 seconds of work.
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“We’re glad to see you successfully advanced the state of the art in human tissue culturing. However, instead of renewing your grant, we’ve decided to immediately execute the entire research team. May god have mercy on your souls”
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How can you call that a robot? It doesn’t even run on electricity.
Hmm. What is the definition of robot, anyway? A lot of robots run on hydraulics, which in principle could be pumped and valved with no electricity. On the other hand, nobody calls a conveyor belt a robot regardless of how much stuff it moves or how many parts it has.
I stand corrected.
Do you? I actually don’t know, haha!
It was an honest question.
Yeah, honestly I do. I knew incorrect information, spread it, and was replied to with a correction.
There’s a lot of people who don’t know when the 21st century began.
corporate personhood.
That’s pre-21st century though.
According to someone else in here, it was 19th, and that sounds right to me. I’m guessing early 19th.
It’s just a neat, tidy legal fiction for some purposes.
It’s a bad enough idea we don’t need anymore for the next few centuries.
it was 2010
Negative. Corporate personhood predates Citizens United v. FCC (which is what I assume you’re referring to). IMO: The ruling itself still counts as an answer to the original question though!
Is that really a 21st century idea? I would have thought that was a reaganomics reform tbh
well citizens united was 21st and encoded it in law.
Speak for yourself American
I bet it effects you more negatively than decisions your country has mad unless your british or not a democracy.
It’s a 19th century idea that appeared in the published decision of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.
Only—get this—it wasn’t even what the Court decided. Instead, it was the guy in charge of recording the decision for publication who declared “corporate personhood” in the headnote (summary) of the case. And would it surprise you to learn that the guy was the former president of a railroad company? We just sort of went along with this not-precedent until the Citizens United case.
yeah but citizens united codified it into us law.
Not quite. The Santa Clara decision gave corporations equal protection under the 14th Amendment, is law in the same sense that Citizens United is, and has been applied many, many times. The 2010 decision held that 1st Amendment protections apply to corporations.
proof-of-work blockchains. instead of a utopian decentralized currency we have a utopia for scammers and day traders, and uses a ton of energy at a time when we need to conserve to combat global warming.
All while aiming to be cash you can e-mail, and failing at that because its high volatility and low speed make it a completely artificial commodities market with nearly zero real-world applications. It’s a technology that took off because Paypal is the devil and it is arguably worse.
Anything cooking related. It all the same shit you already had but this time it’s plastic, harder to clean and only does 1 specific thing.
Not to mention the shit that’s completely fucking useless, like Juicero - a “juice squeezing machine” that only works with plastic bags you get from their subscription service.
You can also just… empty the bags manually. Without buying the super expensive machine.
Yes, but you wouldn’t be a cool forward-thinking silicon valley tech fan anymore. Only kind of /s.
Or just buy a glass or box of juice, which is also cheaper than their proprietary bags
Of course
Can you give a few examples of older stuff worth getting? I’m looking to update my kitchen soon :)
A cast iron skillet. If you use it regularly the seasoning will be so good that it’s as functional as any PTFE nonstick pan, you can use metal cooking utensils on it instead of having to get plastic/silicone stuff (for PTFE), and it serves many purposes from stove top to oven. If you can find a “vintage” one at a yard sale from when they used to hand polish them smooth instead of pre-seasoning them with a rough texture, even better. When I bought a small Lodge one years ago, I used a grinder and sanding discs to polish off the factory textured seasoning and re-seasoned it myself, which worked a charm! If you go that route, I recommend doing it outside, because the amount of metal dust that it stirs up is impressive (and magnetic, so an absolute mess to clean up).
Old mandolin slicers. The plastic on one’s produced recently cracks in a year for the cheap ones, or five years for the expensive ones. My grandmother had one that was solid metal. I’m sure it’s serving my cousin as well today as it served my grandmother 50+ years ago.
Nah because my kitchen is full of plastic junk 😅
I’d suggest a stand mixer, but even those have gone down hill, even brands like kitchenaid have gotten worse.
Maybe some old pyrex, if you can find some. The new stuff is bad, can’t recommend that.
Quantum computers a real candidate once they get off the ground. They might help solve a few problems in chemistry and condensed matter physics, but on the other hand they definitely will make a lot of encryption we heavily rely on obsolete, and the replacements are noticeably inferior. And that’s about it, because quantum algorithms are hard to design. So, that seems like a net negative to me.
Deep neural nets are powerful, but the fact we fundamentally don’t understand how they work is a bit nerve-wracking.
Facial recognition technology. Not only is it not as perfect as people claim in identifying people, but some countries are using it to attack the LGBT since it was discovered the LGBT have different variances in facial features. And yet that’s not even 100% perfect, so now you have a bad technology for a negative purpose repurposed into another negative purpose that it’s causing collateral damage with because it’s as awful at that as the first thing.
By the same token gait recognition.
Just pointing out I read that whole article and there was nothing in it to suggest that any countries are using it to attack LGBT people
Dunno why you linked it instead of something more relevant
The generative AI’s that “creates” content. Just dumb black boxes remixing what you give them, overconfident and inaccurate, yet seen as the ultimate tools by people.
They do create content, though, regardless of it you personally think they’re smart in the process of doing so. Like, there’s actual papers that are devoted to making sure.
Influencers
Back in the day, they were just people of varying fame, whether warranted or not.
