Anyone who is passionate about what they see as a moral cause will be insufferable to at least a few people. Passionate Linux and FOSS advocates are insufferable in the eyes of WIndows fans, for example.

It's not just vegans, it's just how human minds work.

I've always joked that marriage is a lot like sharing your house with someone... so you should choose that person wisely.

But in a lot of ways it can be that simple. It's making an effort to understand the commitments and courtesies that your partner needs to share a life with you that separates a marriage from a love affair. It's an intentional commingling of your lives with the intent of mutual benefit, sharing affection, and having the grace to allow one another small mistakes in the process.

If the people in question have an understanding, then I don't think that legal status, civil or religious ceremonies, permanent cohabitation, or even monogamy are essential, as you'll find relationships that remain stable despite lacking one or more of these things from time to time. But, entering into and honoring that commitment to each other is.

Boiler room is slang for a room filled with shady stock brokers using high-pressure tactics to sell crappy stocks for fraudulent reasons.

When fund raiser time came around, his band teacher told everyone to take out their phones, call relatives, and try to get them to commit to buying x number of candy bars. It was like a little boiler room full of kids begging grandma to shell out $50 for mediocre chocolate.

• Susanne Vega's cover of the Story of Issac is somehow more Cohen than Leonard Cohen's version.
• Motorhead does Sympathy for the Devil the way it always should have been done.
• Briana Buckminster and Billy Moran made a pretty much perfect acoustic cover of Carry on Wayward Son.
• I have always loved the original, but the Jerry Douglas / Mumford and Sons version of The Boxer has replaced it.
• Clutch now owns Fortunate Son IMO, no one else should play it.

Our policy was supervised / filtered only until early teens. Kids sites, educational stuff, games we purchased and approved of, etc. We were also late to give them phones, our son got his first because in his freshman year of high-school his band teacher set up a boiler-room to sell worlds finest chocolate and he was the only kid who didn't have a cell phone.

When we had "the talk" we discussed masturbation and porn, why porn is popular, and all the negatives that go with it without condemning it outright. We talked about online predators and not sharing things with people you didn't know, especially pics, addresses, etc.

My wife and I are firm believers that kids need space to discover who they are, so as they became teens, things went to semi-supervised. We paid attention to them more than their devices, but we had rules such as adding one of our emails as a recovery address to any socials they set up, so we could check up on them if we thought something bad was going down. Never had to use that, and I think just having it there made them think about what they did online.

Around sixteen/seventeen, no filter and no more backdoors into their accounts. Just a couple of long heart to hearts about how shitty things can be on the internet and how we're there to talk with no judgement if they need us.

Exactly, and i didn't mean to hijack your comment. It's just that it's something that bugs the hell out of me, but that I completely understand at the same time.

I've started heading it off with stuff like, "I don't watch the news, that's how they send out the subliminal messages." You have to be careful with those though, you could start a micro-relationship that goes on far longer than you want it to.

Maybe no one needs anything anymore,

I'm guilty of dreading small talk myself, but no, this isn't the case. Damn near everyone would be better off with more micro-relationships, more empathy, and more community support these days.

Problem is you never know if you're going to have a nice chat about the weather, or get to listen to gramp's reinterpretation of a talk radio political screed aimed at yourself or someone you love. And since so many things try to divert a large fraction of our attention to rage baiting political blurbs with no actual content, celebrity gossip, and outright propaganda, it's not unreasonable to be wary of the possibility of getting more of the same from a source you can't easily filter, turn off, or click away from.

People, especially those who are more introverted, seem exhausted by it all even while still responding to it. The psychological hooks are set pretty deep.

I'm enough of a conspiratorial thinker to believe this is by design. An attempt to move us away from empathy and community and teach us to rely on corporations and products for the kind of support you're describing. Don't wait for a kind stranger to help you change that wagon wheel, get a trail-side assistance package at the trading post before you set out...

Not covered in this image: having to learn how to be more discreet in your tweens and teens. You told your dad's boss that dad "couldn't come to the phone right now" and took a message, not that he was dropping a hot deuce and had run out of toilet paper.

Zugzwang strategy. You have to make move, there's not even an option not to play.

It's not just about capturing the mobile phone market and punishing alternate ROM developers, it's also pushing people into the market that might otherwise choose to have a dumb phone, no phone, do things in person, via mail, etc. No android/iPhone? Good luck with online shopping, communicating with medical providers, checking your kid's grades online, paying utility bills, taxes, etc. etc.

As the boomers die off, and fewer people do things the pre-internet way, there's no incentive for governments, businesses, and so forth to maintain those processes and systems. Why would we have a receptionist take appointments by phone if she's just typing them into the same web interface? Why print report cards when we can post them online? Why maintain a storefront and not just warehouses like Amazon?

Opt-in to surveillance or opt out of necessary parts of life, all under the guise of "convenience".

Exactly, how does this not come across as completely off the charts levels of insecurity?

People don't often realize how subtle changes in language can change our thought process. It's just how human brains work sometimes.

The old bit about smoking and praying is a great example. If you ask a priest if it's alright to smoke when you pray, they're likely to say no, as your focus should be on your prayers and not your cigarette. But if you ask a priest if it's alright to pray while you're smoking, they'd probably say yes, as you should feel free to pray to God whenever you need...

Now, make a machine that's designed to be agreeable, relatable, and makes persuasive arguments but that can't separate fact from fiction, can't reason, has no way of intuiting it's user's mental state beyond checking for certain language parameters, and can't know if the user is actually following it's suggestions with physical actions or is just asking for the next step in a hypothetical process. Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible...

You get one answer that leads you a set direction, then another, then another... It snowballs a bit as you get deeper in. Maybe something shocks you out of it, maybe the machine sucks you back in. The descent probably isn't a steady downhill slope, it rolls up and down from reality to delusion a few times before going down sharply.

Are we surprised some people's thought processes and decision making might turn extreme when exposed to this? The only question is how many people will be effected and to what degree.

This may honestly be it for me.

I quit playing games because of all the greed and hype, I went back to piracy when streaming started to fracture and greed set in, I left non-federated social media because of the enshittifaction and invasiveness, and I go to fairly extensive lengths to block ads and protect my privacy as much as possible...

And instead of moving to any number of fair, non-exploitive business models, they're just going to force ads down my throat like that episode of black mirror.

If this goes through I'll be sorely tempted to wipe everything I can and start over as best I can. Only interact with the Internet when I need to.

You'll find me paying cash at the local used bookstore, at least until all the major publishers make that illegal.

EDIT: It's honestly depressing, I genuinely enjoy technology and the internet, but when companies like Google are able to force garbage like this it just sucks all the joy out of it for me.

It's like everying is becoming a shitty mobile game. Do the toolsheds that develop Candy Crush clones not think we can understand why in app currencies are sold in bundles of 100 but every thing we purchase with them requires amounts that end with a five? Does Google not think we know the real motivation behind a system that strives to prove ads were delivered to your browser either?

I know a lot of people may not see the real driver here, but I'm tired of being underestimated and infantalized by a bunch of dorks trapped in a corporate echo chamber. I think I'd prefer it if they just straight up said they're going to sacrifice our privacy and user experience for a quick bump in stock value.