Also pets. Gifting someone a pet does neither the recipient nor the animals any favours unless you know for certain that they both want a pet (and that it’s an actual informed want with all the required forethought and self assessment for both the advantages and disadvantages of having a pet, and not just “a puppy running around my house would be so cute!”) and have the means to support a pet.
Especially if the recipient is a kid and/or you’re giving them a fish or rodent or some other small cheap animal that is considered low maintainance or disposable. News flash, no pet is low maintainance or disposable and you might as well just step on the animal instead to spare them the suffering because a dumb little kid will kill them slowly and horribly. I see this happen all the time and it pisses me off so much. Pets aren’t toys, they shouldn’t be given to children who can’t even take care of themselves.
Actually, please just stop giving people animals without their prior input in general. If you truly want to gift someone a pet, you should be involving them in the acquisition process, taking them to the shelter to choose a pet for example, because the personality of the individual animal and whether it’s suited to the personality of the people that will be caring for them is absolutely critical. If you can’t do that but still want to support their having a pet, then see if a shelter will sell a prepaid adoption certificate, that way they can still choose to not go through with it, or just buy them pet supplies if you know for sure that they plan on getting a pet. There are even species agnostic gifts if you don’t know what kind of pet they plan on getting.
I’m squarely gen-z and I did that all the time in the 2000s and 2010s. I was also lucky enough to grow up in a less car dependent city with good cycling infrastructure which helped a lot. Seeing how the incidence of pedestrian and cyclist deaths due to car collisions has steadily risen over these past decades (accounting for more deaths than from both drugs and thugs combined mind you), I’d also argue that kids don’t do that anymore because it’s now a lot less safe to exist outside if you’re not in a car. Not every problem can be blamed on that damn phone.
“Y’all kids today spend too much time on devices.”
Yeah, because that device literally gives us access to all the information the entire human race has amassed. Not only that, but we also have our work and/or school tied into it, so for those things we literally need to be on it at least part of the time. Instead of hoarding expensive books that you’ve never read to justify having an oversized McMansion with a “library”, we access our information as needed.
It’s always ironic and super self aware wolf when a customer says they “feel bad” for you because you’re working on Sunday, Christmas, etc, or working in the dead of night for 24/7 establishments.
Also, Catholics and many other Christian denominations literally believe that people who work on a Sunday go to hell for violating the Sabbath, yet after Sunday mass tons of them flood into restaurants, causing the cooks and wait staff to go to hell.
If we’re to insist on it being a specific country’s food, it really should be Indian no? It was invented by Indian diaspora in the UK as (IIRC) a take on traditional Indian food using ingredients that are easier to obtain in the UK.
IMO saying tikka masala is British food is like saying General Tso’s Chicken, which was invented by Chinese diaspora in the US for similar reasons, is somehow American food. I don’t think the country it was invented in can really claim credit in either case.
Here’s the thing. Even with inflation (which is exaggerated by companies when they jack up prices for consumers), they have less overhead now than they did when they started. They had to do all the DVD stuff by hand and now it’s all computers. So basically they just had a massive bump in their profit margins and just pocketed the difference.
Surprise surprise, better technology and automation replacing people doesn’t mean things become cheaper under capitalism, even when it fucking should.
I once had a program fail to compile, but when I compiled it a second time it worked. No idea why, best guess is some kind of caching or dependency issue that got resolved by restating the compiler.
Now every time a program fails to compile and it’s not immediately obvious what the problem is, I instinctively compile it again just in case. Well more like three or four times.
Also also us: oh a lottery ticket that I know for a mathematical fact has such a tiny chance of winning that I’m literally more likely to be struck by a shark and eaten by lightning, well I’ll try my odds, who knows?
The other day I saw a video from Emkay, one of the largest “Reddit commentary/reaction” content farm channels where they just steal the top voted posts from Reddit and read them out, going as far as to censor even the lightest swear words with stupid pop culture sound effects until the post is utterly soulless to avoid demonetization, zero credit to the original creator and no linkback in the description or anything. And surprise surprise one of the narrators flat out said “YouTube blocking adblockers is great because we get more revenue!”
If that isn’t a self aware wolf moment I don’t know what is.