It seems you believe the myths that media wants to tell you about modern courtship. Yes, such shallow people exist. And yes, there are thresholds of hygiene and stability someone should be expected to meet. But a lot of women want to get laid just as bad as men, not for the money or the status but for the sex.
My first question about studies like this is always “how do they know this?”. And I while I know I could find the study and dig into the setsils, I don’t have to do that to know that this is the result of surveys taken over this time period. Unless technology develops to grant us a way to monitor and track the sex lives of people objectively and unobtrusively, that’s just the best way can do. So any conclusions drawn really should be “the decline in people’s surveyed frequency of sexual intercourse has gone down over time”. Just to throw out some baseless speculation: could people in the past inflated their answers to appear “cool” or similar? Could there be cultural shifts pressuring respondents to deflate their numbers now? Personally, I’m inclined to believe the results of the study ARE true, but I’m not confident in that.
The decline of 3rd spaces, which is a big concept with multiple causes. Car-centric infrastructure, industrialization, women moving to the workforce, capitalism, technology, etc. It has become harder for people to have intimate personal interactions with others who live nearby. I believe the rise of things like social media, dating apps, and now AI companions is less about “hey we developed this new technology to replace and maybe be better than real human interaction” and more about “we need to develop something to replace what we have lost”.
Consent. Reductions in arranged marriages and child marriages. Protections and rights for women and children.
Economics. Everyone is overworked and tired. I’ve seen this in a lot of the other comments here but I actually don’t buy into this quite as much. There seems to be an inverse relationship between GDP per capita and birth rate, at least recently. Most of Europe, Japan, Australia, the US, Canada, Korea, and perhaps most notably… China. All have experienced declines in birthrates, and in a lot these cases there is good modern data showing the birth rates changing as these economies develop. The countries having the most children are poorer countries.
Now, it could be that these wealthier countries have access to birth control, so this does not necessarily dissolve economics as a factor. But, my own theory is that sex is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available to humanity (if you don’t factor in the costs of children). So the citizens of these wealthier countries are spending their time and money doing other things. Not just skii vacations or going yachting, but reading books and watching TV.
They could be in a similar phase of life. I was still 17 when I started college and had a full-time job. A 20 year old could still be in high school if they were held back. This is kind of the range where you can start counting months or talking about how different school systems have different cutoff dates that can mess with things.
I would not recommend 20 year olds and 17 year olds date in general. But it’s very possible for two people of those ages to date without being creepy or having problems.
The image quality is not helping, but I think that’s Turkey, not China.
I’m pretty sure the US is holding hands with Saudi Arabia. Israel could be holding hands with either Bahrain or Qatar, but given the context it’s almost certainly Bahrain. The dogs from left-rjght are France (probably), Turkey (probably), UK, Germany, ???, Italy. With Ukraine in the corner.
My vexillology is failing me on the one dog. The lighter blue plus the small dots that appear to be constellations kind of give me island vibes. It’s almost like if Tuvalu had just a shield with the English colors instead of a full Union Jack (not that Tuvalu’s inclusion makes any sense anyways) in its corner. Doesn’t match NATO or the UN or the EU. Maybe it’s an old flag, or one for some organization I’m not thinking of?
I was interpreting this as a commentary on how these countries are being treated by the US and Israel, not a commentary on how they should be treated. The Trump admin has been treating Ukraine like shit and treating European allies like dogs.
It’s entirely possible that you’re correct and this is supposed to somehow be an anti-Ukraine message, but other than “Ukraine = Shit” I’m not sure how it would tie in with everything else. I’m also not sure why Ukraine is here at all.
If I imagine a Russian trying to cram a Ukraine commentary in here… This seems like a natural spot to repeat the story Russia has been trying to sell that the Ukrainian government is secretly run by Nazis, but the artist chose not to do that.
And there’s no Russian flag. That makes it harder to figure out if this is Russian propaganda or not. Which may be why they aren’t included, or it could just be that the artists didn’t think they were relevant because they’re really trying to show how the US is controlling these other nations to prop up Israel.
Trying to look up J. Michael Springman, the only thing I can find is this guy. I’m not sure if this is the artist or not, and if it is I’m still not sure whether he would be pro-Ukraine or anti-Ukraine.
The whole inclusion of Ukraine is definitely weird. The cartoon would probably be better off without it. I’m just not sure I have enough info from the comic itself to fully conclude the artist’s intention here.
Can dwarves survive such prolonged periods so far removed from rock, stone, and dirt?
On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT’s, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD’s. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it’s still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I’m not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It’s “oh this is a neat little feature I can use” not “this technology is going to change my life” the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM’s being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because “AI” will be ruined.
Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.
The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.
I see two possible explanations:
Class warfare. The same people banning porn are the ones banning abortion, banning homosexuality, banning gender transitions (although they never seem to ban the same therapies for cis people), banning sex education, banning contraception. All of these attacks on individual sexuality are to try to push people into unprotected heterosexual sex. At the same time, these same political groups have been attacking both parental support systems and child labor laws. They want parents too desperate to rebel. They want children working. They want a larger supply of labor: more supply means more competition amongst workers for wages, which means the labor is cheaper.
Power. Maybe these payments processors don’t actually care about pornographic games. But attacking pornography in the name of “defending women and children” is easy to sell to the public and sets a precedent for these payment processors violating neutrality. So eventually they will move to banning games that are too violent (well, they’ve already been trying for decades). Then it’ll be games that are too “extreme” or promote “terrorism”. If these payment processors don’t see any consequences soon, I expect in the next 5 years they will try to take down any games that are anti-Zionist. Maybe games that are pro-Ukraine. In 10 years it could be any sort of left-leaning game. Disco Elysium for promoting communism. Horizon for depicting climate change. Stardew Valley for allowing same-sex relationships and being anti-corporate.
Notice that these discussions never seem to apply to copaganda. It’s perfectly fine to be violent and bloody as long as that violence is authorized by the state. The US Military offices have a well-documented relationship with Activision for Call of Duty, so you aren’t going to see any of these groups call for CoD to be banned.
At the very least, most of the Democrats are guilty of taking money from those ghouls.
To bring it back to Palantir, Biden himself was singing their praises back when he was vice president and the US government was using their surveillance tools.
As much as it is good to see MAGA turn on Trunk over the Epstein files, it’s not lost on me that Garland, under Biden, sat on the files doing nothing for 4 years. And maybe that would make sense if they were actively investigating and trying to prosecute people, but as far as I can tell Maxwell is the only one who faced any consequences.
I don’t want to distract the narrative away from Trump’s guilt. And also, when you stack up presidential accomplishments I’d still rank Biden near the top, probably top-5 in US history. But that says more about the other presidents than Biden.
I think Rupert Murdoch is involved too. And I think it’s good to mention Peter Thiel, the owner and founder of Palantir, any time they are brought up.
There have been a ton of governments swinging rightwards suddenly too. Not just the US- the UK has a long stretch of Conservative governance that was only barely broken by Labour in 2024, and the Labour party has drifted so far right that the Reform party was created. Germany is dealing with their own alt-right menace. Conservative middle-eastern governments like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been spreading their global influence. The Philippines had their stint with Duterte. India has had a right-wing Prime Minister, Modi, since 2014. And of course, we have Netanyahu of Israel and Putin of Russia.
Personally, I look to the downfalls of communist states. The USSR collapsing in 1991, leading to the absolute mess of oligarchs looting the publicly owned assets and turning them into private fortunes. The opening of China to the west started by Deng Xiaoping led to similar issues there. The rise of the oil age, which helped both those Russian oligarchs and middle eastern petrostates (and the US. And the Scandinavian petrol states, though they at least moved to social democracy instead of authoritarianism).
All of a sudden all of this power was concentrated in the hands of just a few hundred businesspeople and politicians. Reagan and Thatcher happened. Socialist governments everywhere were undermined by the US government. Then economic crash after economic crash after economic crash. The dot-com bubble, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, wars everywhere, Brexit, the invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic. Every earthquake that hit Japan, every hurricane that was horribly mismanaged by FEMA, the fires in Hawaii and California and Australia and Canada.
Every disaster a new opportunity for those few hundred people in power to tighten the screws, acquire more power, and distance themselves from the rest.
I don’t mean this as a conspiracy. The billionaires fight each other too sometimes. Trump mostly seems like Putin’s puppet, but there are some exceptions. Putin backs Iran while Trump backs Israel. Putin was on good terms with Musk, and afaik that has not changed while Trump has distanced himself from Musk publicly. Just that the overall trend has been towards power moving from the people into the autocrats globally for the past few decades.
And if anyone’s panicked about the immoral stuff going on in the porn industry (and there are plenty of things to be addressed and critiqued about a hystorically predatory domain)
You’re 100% correct, but I would also like to point out how weird it is that porn seems to be the ONLY industry where these religious nutjobs pretend to care about workers.
In the US, the same people who say they care about the porn industry preying upon women are the same ones rolling back child labor legislations to send 14 year olds to meat packing plants. The same ones who have kept the minimum wage where it is for decades. The same ones who want to ban abortion even in cases where the woman’s life is threatened. I know this is a BBC article about the UK, but I can’t help but see some parallels with the right-wing religious conservatives everywhere in the world.
They don’t care about women. They don’t care about children. They don’t care about workers. They care about having lots of cheap labor. They care about parents being too tired, too overworked, too risk-averse for the sake of their children to dare to fight back. They want a world where peasant girls get married at 14 and start cranking out more babies immediately. Any substitute which threatens that (birth control, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, sex education) is under attack.
Men, particularly the vast majority of working class men, are victims of the patriarchy even at the same time they receive privileges. There’s an unfortunate sentiment among the woke that people who happen to be part of a privileged group are bad. White people are colonizers, straight people are toxic, men are all violent sexual predators, etc. For a lot of people, it’s much easier to be woke and fight for an equal and just world when the victims of that oppression are obvious.
If this exact same comic was made by JK Rowling and replaced “men” with “trans women” or “trans men” the comments section would be (rightfully) shooting it down as being bigoted.
All that aside, from a practical standpoint it’s also worth pointing out that any sexual assault expert will tell you the vast majority happen between people who already know each other. A victim is more likely to be abused by their own family members, family friends, teachers, religious figures, youth leaders, coworkers, or significant other than they are a random stranger. Of course, it’s always dangerous to meet strangers (robbery, fraud, and more).
Which is important to point out because it’s a very quick jump from “women don’t feel safe because of all of these men around” to “well let’s get rid of the most violent men”. Which, oddly enough, tend to also be a part of whatever group they are trying to eliminate. Jews in pre-WW2 Germany, black men in America, communists in McCarthyism, Hispanics under Trump, Syrian refugees in Europe. It always starts with “this group wants to hurt our women and children” and ends with everyone losing rights to authoritarian regimes.
I mean, I can’t speak for everyone of course but a couple of the local farms near me are open to the public as kind of a tourist-y attraction. They have petting zoos and hay rides in the fall and sell a lot of their own products (honey and honeycomb, produce of course, baked goods, apple cider, etc). And everyone is welcome to see the animals grazing on real green plants, in open fields.
With other farms I can talk to their employees at the local market, I can find news articles about them, or I can even drive by and look then up myself.
Are they perfect? Of course not. But… What are you asking people to do? Should we all just give up and go to the local Wal-Mart for all our produce? Or are you naive enough to think everyone should be growing their own Victory gardens?
All the good phones are dying. I still quite enjoy my 1 IV, and honestly the Xperia line would probably be my choice in a couple years when I am ready to upgrade if they are selling them in the US at that point.
I’m hoping Fairphone gets US support at some point because they seem like the best option.
It really feels like design peaked a decade ago. Headphone jacks, micro SD card slot, removable batteries, front-facing speakers. Everything good has been removed and the phones are 5x more expensive. The few phones left with some of those features are the cheap weak models for people who only use their phones to call and text.
https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/2531490/-/comment/11832636
You might be living in an echo chamber. Most Americans use AI at least sometimes and plenty use it regularly according to studies.
You literally are right here accusing me of being in an echo chamber for thinking Americans view AI negatively, then when I back that up with a source you are now… Claiming that the article says that.
Except that the whole “most demographics are positive on AI” piece that you toss in counters your own countering of my disagreement. You’re talking in circles here.
It’s also worth noting this article is using a sample size of 700 and doesn’t go all that heavily into the methodology. The author describes themself as a “social computing scholar” and states that they purposefully oversampled these minority groups.
The conclusion is nothing but wasted time and clicks. You’re in this thread telling people to “read the article” and I’m in here to warn people that it’s not worth their time to do so.
And this is part of a trend I’ve noticed on Lemmy lately: people posting obviously bad articles, users commenting that the articles are bad, and usually about 3-4 other users in the comments arguing and trying to drive more engagement to the article. More clicks, more ad revenue.
We could argue all day over who is experiencing reality or who is in an echo chamber.
Pew Research found that US adults who are not “AI Experts” are more likely to view AI as negative and harmful.
The thing is, EVERYONE hates AI except for a very small number of executives and the few tech people who are falling for the bullshit the same way so many fell for crypto.
It’s like saying a survey indicates that trans people are more likely to hate American ISP’s. Everyone hates them and trans people are underrepresented in the population of ISP shareholders and executives. It doesn’t say anything about the trans community. It doesn’t provide any actionable or useful information.
It’s stating something uninteresting but applying a coat of rainbow paint to try to get clicks and engagement.
For the most part they trusted me. It helped that my step-dad played videogames before he met my mom. It probably also helped that I never gave them any concerns. I was a fat nerd who never got into fights or showed any signs of violence. My parents were concerned about me spending too much time indoors and not getting enough physical and social activity, but never concerned with the content.
I also was a smart enough kid that I knew the limits of what I could ask for. I wasn’t going to ask them for Leisure Suit Larry or BMX XXX, for example.
There were a couple of exceptions where my mom heard things about specific games through the media. I remember the marketing campaigns for God of War and GTA3 really leaned into the controversy. Although I did end up getting GTA3 eventually.
Ironically, there was only one case where I felt like I was allowed to play a game before I was ready, but it wasn’t one I asked for. My step-dad bought Twisted Metal Black. I had played a bit of the Twisted Metal series earlier, but preferred the much more whimsical Vigilante 8. I still remember getting nightmares about getting my head locked into a mask like the one character (I think her name may have been Dollface?). As I am remembering it now I realize it was probably a metaphor about identity, but as a middle schooler I was just freaked out about it.
For a long time I was confused by two seemingly separate pieces of information.
The majority of people I seem to interact with seem to act like communications are effortless. “Just pick up the phone”. “It’s just an email”.
Most communications I get are terrible. Like, the number of times I need to restrain myself from typing “as I mentioned in the email below” is insane, or how often I send an email with a bulleted list of issues that need to be addressed and the response only addresses a fraction of them while the rest are ignores.
Then I realized that most people are stupid, casual, and oblivious. They put very little effort into communications, so while they seem so easy and effortless they are harming the quality of that communication.