I'd be inclined to agree if it wasn't broken down into more detail than what I actually shared. The app includes ads and one of the trackers is Google AdMob, so that's definitely not anonymous tracking. It's also impossible* to be sure whether the other two trackers, Google Crashlytics and Firebase Analytics, are anonymous.

*without reading the source code, at least

Edit to add the report that Aurora Store used

What do you mean by "Canada's Joe Biden moment"? Joe Biden had at least 4 years worth of moments.

You're not wrong, but you've got a bit of an extreme take on it. I think you and your parents may have different thoughts on what it means to "approach" a woman though. I'm going to use "flirt" to refer to talking to a woman with intent of seeing if they would make a good partner for you and just "talk" to indicate just being friendly with someone.

it is only appropriate for a man to talk to a woman who doesn’t know when the social situation is explicitly designed for meeting strangers

No, it's fine to talk to strangers of any gender in public. Approaching them and flirting with them is not. As long as you can roughly understand when you're making someone uncomfortable and stop it, you're not going to come off as a creep/predator. Stuck in a lineup in a store? Chat with someone beside you, maybe commiserate about how long the line is. If you want to flirt with them, then yes the situations you mentioned are definitely the places to do that.

(sort of an aside: whether "meeting friends of friends" is an appropriate situation to flirt with someone you just met is still situation dependent)

They are adamant that I need to learn to approach women or else I will never find a partner.

Approaching women in random public spaces with the intent of finding a partner is also a pretty bad idea. While it could work, it's definitely creep/predator behaviour so I avoid it. It's very likely to make them uncomfortable, since they're just trying to do their thing not get hit on. This can easily be harassment, though I'm on the fence on whether it's always harassment.

Personally I like to flip the genders on situations like this and ask if I'd want to be the other person in this situation. It's worth keeping in mind that woman have way more statistical reasons to be weary/wary of any interaction with men, though. Regardless, e.g. if some woman was beside me in line and started chatting with me, I'd be fine with it. If some woman came up to me and complimented my shirt, I'd be fine with it. If some woman came up to me, complimented my shirt, and then asked for my number I'd be weirded out (I don't know you, lady). If some woman came up to me and asked me to take out my earbuds to commiserate about how long the line is, I'd be annoyed that I'm missing my music.

This sounds like open weights but not actually open source (which requires an open training set), but we can only hope they are true to their promises when they actually release it. Bonus points if they also release how much energy they wasted to train it and how much energy it wastes to run it.

Twitch Plays Pokemon is still better

If they go into influential people's houses or into important businesses, I can think of a few reasons to bribe them to do things for you.

Your first example only works for goods that are completely optional, which is very rarely the case. For example, smartphones. Nobody technically needs one, but almost everyone in western countries has one. If every company that makes a smartphone increases their prices, people will still buy them because they basically need them. I believe this is the principle of inelastic demand (or low elasticity) -- car fuel is a more traditional example.

Your second example doesn't work when the cost of entry into the market is really high. This is very common in high tech. Take semiconductors for example. There's basically one big name in chip manufacturing (TSMC) and a few runner-ups (Samsung, Intel, etc.). The latest node is infamous for being very expensive and low capacity. Why aren't there new competitors constantly breaking in to the market?

UBI is a great idea and will help things, but it's not perfect so we shouldn't expect it to just completely fix capitalism. The best way to fix capitalism is to get governments (which are all in charge of capitalism) to fix it with regulations. UBI will be a major regulation/step in the right direction.

Another classic from NatPo!

While we are ashamed of our cultural traditions, retailers are certainly not ashamed of milking cash from the desiccated corpse of Santa Claus. And so, by being cynical of a traditional Christmas, we have fashioned Christmas into something we should indeed feel cynical about.

NatPo came so close to making a progressive statement, but held back at the last second and blamed regular people instead.

Perhaps we can sneak it back onto the calendar

I wonder who doesn't know when the stat holiday for Christmas is. No need to put it back on the calendar when it's still there...

Throughout the whole article there are only anecdotal reasons why it should be restored. So many of them boil down to "it used to be like this so it should still be like this" too, which is just a silly argument. Maybe come up with some good reasons for it to stay by using a bit of critical thinking, NatPo.

The article could've been a nice little nostalgia trip too, but instead it finished off by saying all of the far-right talking points as though they had some relevance to the rest of the article.

I think it was more a comment along the lines of "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"

I'm sure many people would be much more willing to go into the office if they got paid for their commute. Even better if they got the pollution from their commute offset. Nothing lazy about wanting to be compensated for things you're doing for your employer.

If there are more than enough houses then an investment house would be a bad investment since no one would need to rent it and/or no one would want to buy it with a good profit margin. Instead, they're buying houses that people want, which is driving up home prices and letting them set high rents.

Interesting how they discussed hardware mods but not software mods (for the OS, not for games). I'm probably biased, but I'd think those would be more popular than hardware mods since they're much more accessible to the average user.