It’s a Christian tradition - four candles, one for each Sunday before Christmas. There’s often an extra one in the centre for Christmas day too.

Every week an extra candle is lit. Today, using the conventional method, three candles would be lit.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say “kinda”.

But porn isn’t the driver, it was a facet of the actual reason - accessibility and cost.

Betamax was, by any metric, the superior system.

VHS, however, was cheaper to produce, and cheaper to buy the recording equipment.

JVC had an open licencing strategy to encourage manufacturers to produce VHS-compatible equipment. Sony had a closed licencing strategy to maximise revenue.

So in this new world, where small movie studios could now record directly to magnetic tape and small companies could duplicate and distribute copies for very little cost, which format would you pick? The cheapest one.

The ready availability of porn was a factor for VHS’s success, but so was the ready availability of cheaply made horror films, martial arts films and other niche genres (niche by 1970s/1980s standards).

The snek!

Ha, you caught me, I was indeed a Reddit refugee. A little less enthusiastic about the MOASS these days, but I liked my old name, so kept it 🙂

I feel lucky that I was born at a time when computers were knowable. I grew up in the 80s, and cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum. Very little was hidden - even loading software into memory was something you experienced, listening to the beeps and warbles and watching the flashing colours for ten minutes or more. Guide books showed labelled photos and diagrams of the actual hardware inside, giving real tangible meaning to the commands you typed in.

I think there’s a massive amount of disconnect now between the users and the actual hardware, and getting up to speed with how things work is so much more difficult.

Also, I’m lucky that I was born into a family that was just able to afford a microcomputer. My dad had a stable enough job that he was able to get a loan from the bank to buy one.

Not sure my life would have turned out the way it did without this starting point.

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Ok, I think I’ve worked out what the issue is here.

First of all, let’s go back to where Owen Jones starts off.

The term chav refers to a specific subset of young people who spend a disproportionate amount of their money on fashionable clothes and hang around being a nuisance to other people.

He also argues that the term is used by right-wing media outlets as a broader generalisation of working-class people as a whole, to further push their arguments.

These two things can be true at the same time.

But I’d definitely agree it’s not a slur. It’s just lazy journalism presenting a caricature of the working-class because it’s easier for their deranged arguments.

The majority of people are born into working class families, but only a few become chavs.

It’s a sad reflection on the country that the right-wing media is able to get away with presenting absolute rubbish with abandon, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of people consume this media without realising that they’re being told lies and half-truths.

But that’s what the problem is. It’s not that the term itself is bad, it’s that bad people use the image it conjures to caricature the working class in general.

“Chav” doesn’t mean “working class” in the same way that “penguin” doesn’t mean “bird”.

Heck, some of the chavs I know wouldn’t know work if it hit them.

Chavs are a tiny subset of working class people, in the same way that penguins are a tiny subset of birds.

I live in a northern mill town. Most of my very large extended family are working class (it’d probably be a bit disingenuous for me to claim that I still am, though). They would look at you like you were an idiot if you tried to convince them that chav means them.

Chavs are the kids who hang around with expensive trainers and caps, who have absolutely no qualms about being a nuisance to other people.

They represent a tiny proportion of the working class, and any criticism of them is specifically targeted at them.

I tried to find out what you were referring to - was it the rude person in the vegan thread? If you look, they were pretty heavily rebutted and downvoted by the other users.

The mods uphold the community guidelines, ideally without overreach. If someone’s out of line, but not technically breaking any rules, the other users are usually good at putting people straight.

This. Dirt cheap material cost, no additional machining costs.

You’ve basically said much of what I was going to!

We know where memories are stored in the brain, physically. The biggest problem with targeting specific memories is simply a matter of working out which neurons are tied to that memory.

We can already, fairly crudely, see roughly where a memory is stored by looking at brain activity when the patient recalls it. We can also directly trigger memory recollection by applying electrodes to the brain during brain surgery.

There’s still massive engineering challenges to overcome to get this to a practical stage, but engineering challenges are usually surmountable. With that in mind, do I think the technology will be doable, ever?

• Technology to erase specific memories - absolutely.

• Technology to replace specific memories with new ones - I suspect yes, but that’ll need some big leaps in our understanding of how memories actually work.

• Technology to do this with just a flash of light - no, probably not.

TIL George Orwell was a pen name.

Just for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know, this is not the actual etymology.

It just started as a misspelling of “owned” (with p and o being next to each other on the keyboard).

Here’s an example of a sentence where a missing comma completely changes the meaning.

Those cases are different, and are dealt with through your country’s asylum process.

I suspect the N words in question are very much white.

I remember you from several months ago. I see from this post, you’ve not taken onboard any of the help and advice from last time.

Either that, or this is just a trolling account you turn to every now and again when you’re bored.

You’ve decided to leave Lemmy after being downvoted for posting links to conspiracy videos disguised as a question?

FWIW, I didn’t downvote you, but surely you must see why other people have?

I’ll provide some similar examples, hopefully you can see the problem.

“Is it true that deep down women really want to be treated as slaves? These Andrew Tate videos raise some compelling points. Link. Link”

“Is it true that black people are trying to wipe out the white race by diluting the purity of our bloodline? Here are some convincing videos. Link. Link.”

Obviously these examples are worse than yours, but they’re exactly the same form. Nobody wants that kind of thing in their feed. Nobody wants to be asked to watch tinfoil-hat crackpot garbage before they can properly answer a question.

No, I can see why some Americans might confuse them, with a “baddle of wadder” accent.

Bum science, specifically…

I’m sorry it came to this, but this is clearly the behaviour of a deviant. Expect a visit from officers who will escort you to an undisclosed location for reprogramming.