It is real. And I think it continues with this snake pretending to be a female so many males try to mate with him, thereby warming him up and allowing him to ~~sneak in and mate with an actual female snake~~ join the mating frenzy

How do you define "things"?

On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

As for non-human animals... For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

1. Just because I have heard of NordVPN doesn't mean I'll necessarily use it (in fact I use ~~arch~~ mullvad, btw.)
2. Let's see some numbers that ads work. You can't just calculate how life would be without ads, but I wonder what would happen if ad expenses for all companies would be capped somehow. When cigarette companies were severely limited in terms of advertising they saved a ton of money. Of course people already knew their brands, but still.

I think ad space sellers wildly overestimate the effectiveness of ads and google has made it far worse with targeted ads. People have gotten used to saying things like "ads work" and "brand recognition" but does anyone know the numbers? Or is this just repeating some phrases you've heard?

I don't know the numbers myself, but I'm quite skeptical.

Ha! He's a comedian making a joke. Perhaps not the best joke, but obviously a joke. He's even on stage in his role as comedian.

After all the vile things Wilders has said that were dead serious I feel like this is nothing.

Probably good publicity for the comedian though, and of course it's some political points for Wilders and the rest of the far-right ("look how violent these left-wing people of color are!").

Things have been going shit here actually, and blaming minorities for a country's problems is still a surefire way to win votes. As a dutch person I'm sad, embarrassed, and scared.

Ik ben ambtenaar voor de rijksoverheid. Het ministerie waar ik voor werk kan zomaar een extreem rechtse koers gaan varen. Zie het niet zitten om zulk beleid te gaan uitvoeren. Heb nu al moeite maar van deze uitslag word ik gewoon bang.

Weet niet of ik naar iets anders moet gaan zoeken of dat ik juist moet blijven om vanuit de ambtenarij een tegengeluid te laten horen.

The claim that this is bad for the Dutch economy is nonsense. A huge number (probably most) Schiphol passengers are using the airport for a layover. They aren't staying in the Netherlands, they're not spending money there (at most some coffee or something but it's duty free), and it doesn't create many well paying jobs for people living in the Netherlands.

Most of the money Schiphol brings in stays in the pockets of people who are already rich and the jobs it creates are mostly poorly paid (like luggage handlers, staff at shops, etc). There's plenty of open vacancies for jobs like that already, we don't need an extremely loud and polluting industry for that.

Schiphol is too big as it is. The Netherlands is a small country and it doesn't need such a huge airport. Why does Amsterdam need to be some hub for Europeans to fly across the world or to connect the Americas and Asia? Why must the Netherlands be even more polluted to make traveling slightly more convenient mostly for foreigners?

I think to a large extent it's a case of cognitive dissonance.

Loads of these people have defended Trump for years, supported him despite his obvious lies and grifts and so you kinda have to believe that whatever else he comes up with is also true. If you believe all his previous falsehoods, why not the next?

To admit he's full of shit means your whole belief system has to change. Trump supporters have lost friends, alienated family, spent their money on him... It's much easier to keep believing in him than it is to admit you've been wrong all this time, cause that would mean having to admit you've been taken for a fool this whole time AND it means all your efforts and sacrifices have been for nothing.

That's great! Glad it's working out.

One thing made me chuckle though:

with only 4 gigabytes of RAM

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads or RAM?

Damn, I wouldn't have recognized him from that photo alone. Fuck cancer, I hope he can enjoy the rest of his life which will hopefully still be many years.

Bizarre. But the article outlines a lot more vulnerabilities. Seems like every part of this device is poorly secured.

IOActive's hacking technique exploited glaring security vulnerabilities they found in the shufflers, the researchers say: They bought their own Deckmates for testing from second-hand sellers, one of whom told them a password used for maintenance or repair. They found that this password and others they extracted from the Deckmates' code were configured in the shuffler with no easy way to change them, suggesting they likely work on almost any Deckmate in the wild. They also found that the most powerful “root" password to control the shuffler—which, like all the Deckmate's passwords, they declined to publicly reveal—was relatively weak.

This is just ridiculous / hilarious.

I use Organic Maps as much as possible. For public transport I use another app (not google maps but a local app for my country). Sometimes I check google maps if I can't find a place or if the opening times are missing on openstreetmap (the source for organic maps).

The main issue with organic maps (and I think any map app based on OSM data) is search. Especially in places where multiple languages are used I've found it quite frustrating.

Valencia, for example, has Valencian/Catalan as its main language on OSM, but Spanish is very common. If I search in Spanish I don't get good results. A small typo will also mess things up. That's pretty frustrating and means I often have to go to the website of wherever I'm going to get the proper name in Valenciano without typos, or I have to look it up on google maps.