Aus here, for complex dental I can claim up to $800 annually on my extras cover, need braces for around $8000.

Edit: forgot to mention it’d only have been ~$2000 around 2003 when I was first told I needed them, but my parents, whom paid off our house with a year’s combined salary, couldn’t afford it. My dad argued it should come out of his existing child support payment, and I didn’t get them.

Yeah we’re deprioritising the platform you use, because it’s niche. We have analytics, and they say your use case doesn’t matter. Just accept it and keep paying us, like all those other times

Of course, a delay is preferable to a rushed launch. Cyberpunk showed we can have both, though. I’m just pushing back on this new idea that in-engine footage is a substitute for gameplay. While we’re deducing stuff based on the lack of gameplay, the game not being feature complete would mean that whatever is possible in-engine is irrelevant anyway. The whole later step of scaling and optimising to the platforms they’re releasing on hasn’t happened yet

The launch window being so critical is the same reason why they should just say “coming soon”, or announce an announcement or something for a trailer like this, in my opinion. That way the first public release about the game doesn’t immediately set the tone that starts heaping pressure on the dev team. Keep in mind that tone was already set by leaks.

I don’t mind the way the actual trailer was done, but I’d definitely have preferred to see actual gameplay given they gave a release window. It telegraphs a rushed release, because if it was feature-complete they’d show gameplay

It is ridiculously overpriced and stepped on a hundred times. According to statistics bureau numbers though, use has more tripled over the last year alone

There isn’t really much peer reviewed evidence suggesting vaping is significantly harmful in a tobacco harm reduction context, though. It’s all supportive of vaping, that’s why it’s been embraced by many medical organisations across much of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The amount of tobacco harm prevention vaping is doing in places like Kuwait right now, where up to 50% of males smoke, is fucking incredible. Australia’s blindness on this issue is a farce. They, like most western governments, are addicted to tobacco tax. It’s 4% of our overall tax income. That’s a proportion of all taxation in our economy, including all the land, property, goods, services taxes. An entire 4% of it comes just from perpetuating tobacco sales. Financially conservative governments aren’t giving that away for free. Internally they’re like “we’ll worry about addressing the leading cause of preventable death when we get voted in for another term, otherwise it won’t work out for us politically”. That’s why we have a nation of Labor state premiers that almost unilaterally support sensible ecig regulation, yet the federal health minister from the same political party has this curious unexplained blindspot on the issue and just parrots big pharma talking points about nicotine, while nicorette isn’t even kept behind the counter.

I think its use in the field was pretty limited. It was something a scientist at the company I work for was telling me about. They were curious given all the shit chat about a lack of longterm evidence. They wondered what is the actual earliest record of this sort of concept? They ended up finding out about experiments done with this device in some kind of wartime medical journal they showed me. We were pretty tickled by the journal article mentioning propylene glycol was the substance these old researchers were atomising. I tried finding it again to link something, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.

Same concept also developed and used in WW2 as an anti-chemical weapon device. Basically a grenade that bursts into a cloud of PG, trapping airborne chemical particulates and pulling them down to the ground.

I mean, look at their handle. It’s not like this is the handle for Famezen, they’ve clearly already had their account removed before. Report function needs someone to use it for it to be able to work, right? On balance, Youtube’s business model goes to assigning value to the action of viewing a video. Subsequently devaluing that metric by collaborating to sell it for a few pennies doesn’t sound like a great plan.

Amyl & the sniffers is my fav

Disposable nicotine vapes, or any other kind of nicotine vape, have been banned federally for import other than via a special access scheme for the last few decades since nicotine was included on the poisons standard.

Just want to clarify that the actual change here is limited to banning 0mg disposables. Since Mark Butler’s health department has decided to continue the trend of totally failing to act on sensible ecig regulation, an entirely expected and totally avoidable de facto standard shipping method of stealth packing nicotine products amongst 0mg has resulted. The China suppliers know that we have zero capacity to detect nicotine at the border and that every word that comes out of Butler’s mouth on the topic is bullshit. They can just flout the law and get away with it. There’s literally no system set up to hold them to account. Border Force aren’t doing GC-MS analysis on your Amazon packages. The only reason the headline says ‘to be banned from January 2024’ is because the government don’t want you to realise they are currently banned, and in fact always have been.

Sounds like he reckons that just keeping an eye out for anything that looks like a disposable shipment will do the trick now? Aw yeah, tell me more about how you don’t understand the scale of freight logisticsin Australia. Is it going to invalidate the existing prescriptions for those products via special access scheme? I’ve had a nicco script for 2 years and haven’t had a single parcel checked.

To wit: if you read this article and didn’t come out of it thinking “shit I’ve gotta hop on AliExpress and get on this for a quick buck”, it’s because you got bullshitted. It’s gonna be creeping up to dethrone cocaine as the hottest Aus consumer commodity 2024. Cheers Mark

The meme specified “perceived temperature”, which I would assume to mean some combination of the temperature metric with a heat index, humidex, wind data, solar radiation estimates, or something like that

Sure, but this is largely because currently each client doesn’t need to aggregate the whole fediverse. In a decentralised network, you can’t split the sum total of processing required to run the fediverse equally amongst peers. Each peer would need to do more or less the same aggregation job, so the total processing required would be exponentially more than with the current setup. You could still argue it’s a negligible processing cost per client, but it’s certainly way less efficient overall even if we assume perfect i/o etc in the p2p system and even if the client only needs to federate the user selected content

Also just practically deploying a client app that can federate/aggregate constantly in the background (kinda required for full participation) and scale with the growth of fedi without becoming a resource hog I imagine would be pretty tough, like maybe possible yeah but I feel like it makes sense why it isn’t like that also

The instance is the aggregator, if it’s P2P then the aggregation is done by the client. In a torrent swarm you contribute bandwidth, not processing power

In general I would agree, but as it pertains to Youtube adblock blocking - there is no gradual slide into degradation (apart from perhaps to do with the implementation of ads itself, though I’d argue they’re less obtrusive now than in their original implementation many years ago).

There is fundamentally no way to adblock-block today which does not involve collecting info in a way that causes obvious privacy concerns. It’s not somewhere Google can get to by taking little steps. The adblock-blocking that’s been happening to date is easily circumvented. Logically an arms race between adblockers and adblock-blockers will ensue, except in practice it’d be like raising the stakes from a civil war re-enactment to actual nuclear war

Google’s desperation to show tracked ads is but one vector in the equation which determines longterm viability for watching Youtube ad-free for free. There are also other vectors to consider like the level of obtrusion required to actually effectively adblock-block, and its related effect on the userbase. And also just the level of inconvenience presented by ads, determined by their length, skippability etc.

The proportion of the userbase blocking ads is still relatively negligible, and this is an outcome manufactured by Google toeing the line between too obtrusive and too ineffective. Any measure I can imagine which would actually capture a significant portion of users blocking ads would also significantly skew the balance in favour of obtrusivity, which they would pay for in lost users.

As long as many users are happy to continue being vigilant in blocking ads, IMO this balance will ensure blocking ads will remain feasible.

Oscar

Literally swap the word Fediverse in that pinned post for Lemmy and you’ll get more engagement with it. Because you’re right, even if the current reddit user has heard of lemmy and mastodon, they still most likely don’t know what the fediverse is, don’t understand the site linked to is a lemmy instance / reddit alternative. Subbed to !futurology@futurology.today btw, if the current activity there can be sustained I think it’ll shape up to be a nice community

I’m curious if you feel the same way watching movies? It’s not as if Idris Elba’s live-action movie roles depict “reality”. What is it about the presence of a real actor which breaks your immersion in games but not movies, or do you just feel similarly about both?

I’ll upvote any constructive interaction, but I think a big reason why aggregators got popular was the ability for a user manifest their general disagreement with something in a way that can impact the visibility of that info. So I don’t think the overall nature of upvotes/downvotes could manage to be substantially different to Reddit or any other aggregator. The user behaviour is ultimately determined by the availability of the function, rather than the nature of the community that uses the platform/function