Not surprising when flagship devices have more than doubled in price in over the last decade.

That and the fact that many modern devices feel like compromised devices with purposeful downgrades despite the huge cost increase.

Honestly I hope WhatsApp (yeah I know Meta are date harvester extraordinares) pull out the second this passes.

WhatsApp is by far the largest messaging service used in the UK. Every company I’ve worked for in the last five years makes extensive use of group WhatsApps. Same with all my friends and family too.

The public outcry at that loss would potentially be enough to sway politicians away from such BS. Anything short of WhatsApp going and the British public won’t be technologically literate enough to give a fuck.

It does and that’s the real issue.

MS has the power, reach and financial means to completely steamroll the market by underpricing games pass to kill any competition. Then once they’ve done that they can set prices, control labour and production to reduce costs too and monopolise the market to their shareholders cold dead money grubbing hearts content.

To put the scale of the issue in perspective.

Microsoft has a market cap of 2.5 Trillion dollars. Or 2500 billion.

Sony, Nintendo, Tencent, Valve, EA, Take Two and Ubisoft combined don’t even reach 700 billion. We take Tencent out of the equation and it’s only 300 billion.

So we’re talking 4x that of all their combined global competition. If we only look at “western” companies its basically 8.5x.

But getting rid of Bobby Kotick will make gaming better /s

As already said you just need to buy something explicitly listed as a monitor.

One thing you’ll find is that at 55" with decent specs you’ll be paying a significantly higher price than you could find a 4k TV. That’s because good monitors of that size are often super high end displays. E.g. Nvidia branded big format gaming displays.

The Galaxy S5 active is evidence that you’re just wrong. Classic removable battery but still IP67.

Will be interesting to see how this goes.

I’m literally in the states on vacation and visiting friends the first two weeks in November so any games I can attend would be cup matches.

Provisional plan is to visit DC, New York and Boston just not sure on order yet but does hopefully give me a decent shot at going to a game with 4 teams to work with.

Our cup competitions span large parts of the season instead of a single month. Even the truncated format of the FA for Premier league sides who enter at the 3rd Round is 5 months. The league cup again even in shortened format for teams in European competition is 4 months.

Plus the group stage puts the format much closer to the Champions, Europa and conference league formats.

Magazines and books by the loo were a legitimate thing I remember growing up.

Don’t see that anymore, I say as I’m typing this comment on the loo.

Exactly. Ain’t no rule stating ladies can’t pick up a wrench.

I already read a fair amount. 2022 I averaged something like 118 pages per day averaged out of the year. So far in 2023 I’ve averaged a more sustainable 50 pages per day.

So not being on reddit isn’t likely to influence my reading that much.

Yeah that’s a perspective I understand and I will miss some of that. However for myself at least the removal of Reddit appears to be beneficial to me to such a degree as to out weigh the loss.

But I already have had the benefit of 13 years of reddit opening my eyes andt 13 years of growth and experience from teenager to a responsible adult at the same time so don’t feel the mind broadening the same extent any more.

You’re just being obtuse if you think that there’s no confusion for the majority.

The absolute vast majority aren’t techies, they aren’t open to learning and they have been used to centralised simplicity.

Just trying to explain home instances, federation and defederation is more than enough to lose the interest and understanding of a vast majority.

Now the barriers do lend themselves to an entirely different feeling and community base. Whether that’s good or bad is down to personal taste. But Lemmy isn’t going to compete with reddit until the process is streamlined and the thinking required is mostly removed.

I’m undecided at the moment.

I’m now mostly past the muscle memory of instantly opening Reddit any time I’m not actively busy.

Lemmy isn’t ready to fill the hole that has left. But honestly as it stands I’m not sure that I want to fill that hole. It would probably be better for my mental health, concentration, social life and many other things if I could successfully leverage this moment to become a whole lot less of an online person.

The beans phase had me doubting the quality part for sure.

I know we’ll not regain the special privileges we had and will need to eventually move toward the Euro but good lord we should be rejoining the EU posthaste.