Amen. You have to stay away from that toxic commercialisation. It messes with your brain and stalls your progress in any hobby.

I think one of the best things about arts, crafts, sports, music and the like is that it has a built in resistance to that kind of commercial takeover. Having good pens will not make you better at art, good shoes won’t make you better at soccer, a fancier gym won’t give you bigger muscles. These things come from hard work, perseverance, dedication. You can’t buy skill no matter goes much money you have, I love that.

Any art or craft or sport is pretty much free when you weigh up the hours vs the outlay required.

Except skiing and motorsports. That eats money.

Every time I see the names of the Xbox lineup my brain just feels tired and kinda shuts down.

I am never going to remember it.

I never said it was.

Did I say that?

Journalism provides information and understanding. That’s it’s whole thing. The Information bit tends to be clear - it’s verifiable, you can see if it’s raining as in your example. Understanding is harder - it’s intangible, you infer it or deduce it. Therefore it’s non-objective, unprovable, so an opinion.

And lots of things fall into the second category - An article on what Putin’s actual objectives are in Ukraine. Why his world view became that way. What it feels like to be a Uyghur in China. What it’s like in the inside of the Trump administration. This kind of thing is valuable and it’s only communicated through opinion pieces.

I think people react strongly to it because it is something that can be weaponised and has been. Mixed in or presented as informational news. Or might just be advocating some dogshit idea or rotten agenda. There’s too many examples to mention…

That’s a very good point. And the flag kinda sums up Israel’s strategic conflation of anti Israel with anti Semitism.

I’m guessing from the phrasing of the article that this was the Star of David outside of the flag. Which I think is asking for an accusation of anti Semitism and could have been easily avoided.

Never heard of an opinion piece? Reporting people’s takes on a situation is very much part of journalism along with factual news.

When it’s done well, it can be really powerful and informative.

I’m sure it was anti genocide/ anti Zionism they were going for but they fucked up by using the Star of David. That pretty clearly targets the religion not the country.

I think that was potassium-permanganate and sugar. It was one of the saner recipes ( who really wants to blow their face off or smoke banana skins ) with somewhat easily available ingredients.

It was legit. But the temperature window between melting the ingredients together and igniting it was very narrow. We did what your friend did, we made the smoke bomb and also set it off in one go.

Your friend must’ve been in a while ton of shit.

Yes. Seriously. And if x wants to operate in the EU then it has to follow EU law.

Consumer protection still exists and what x is doing with it’s ‘verified’ badges is just straight up deception. The only thing it verifies is that that account has paid x money.

Second, relating to transparency in advertising. Hybrid warfare is a major threat to the stability of Europe’s society, institutions and democracy. A major vector for that is propaganda carried out through Facebook and X. Both through fake users and adverts.

The EU should very much take this seriously and I’m glad that they are.

The charges are clear. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2934

Duplicating the data many times over isn’t progress.

It cost governments around the world trillions of dollars to get through COVID… The uk’s debt went from 80% of GDP to 100% in the space of just 18 months. It’s hardly a viable economic plan to carry out on an ongoing basis.

Many non essential industries and travel just completely froze And guess what? Co2 production barely even stuttered according to your graph.

The solution is to transition into a renewable, prosperous, circular economy. Not go backwards into poverty.

The deputy prime minister was forced to resign just last week. The only higher position than that is PM.