Trump
Labels like “Caution hot” on coffee cups
Imagine Dragons
Why?
I ask “why” every time I’m reminded Imagine Dragons exist, too.
I don’t really get why one would have strong feelings about that band one way or the other.
The best qualifier I’d give it is “forgettable”.
Cigarettes
Yes, but have you ever tried being addicted to nicotine? /s
There’s healthier ways
Warning Labels on obvious things. Like “contains dairy” on a package of butter. At some point they need to stop and let Darwin take the wheel.
I like the “This product may contain nuts” on a packet of nuts.
It better contain nuts or I want my money back.
Most nuts are not even nuts.
Dairy is an allergen and has to be marked on packages by law in the states. There are also people who just avoid dairy, and non-dairy butter very much exists.
Sounds like the problem is the vegans renaming margarine “butter” to avoid the negative connotations
Health Insurance Companies
They don’t really exist because people are stupid.
More because of corruption and greed imo.
For profit health insurance companies.
Even with universal healthcare, someone has to do all the admin stuff, and putting it under government control directly just screams of inefficiencies.
Yes, but the alternative is far worse. I present America as Exhibit A.
You’re gonna have to explain further before I can judge your comment.
Homeopathy and alternative medicine.
Chiropractors can be heard chuckling nervously
Cryptocurrency as an investment
I’m gonna get downvoted for this but… gaming consoles.
Gaming consoles made sense back in the day before home computing took off, and for a while they actually had superior hardware than computers when it came specifically to running games. But nowadays gaming consoles are just locked down user-hostile computers with a subscription service attached. The gaming equivalent of inkjet printers. It’s an industry made irrelevant by advancements in technology, propped up by misleading marketing and artificial hype that sadly many people fall for.
I downvoted you just because you’re one of those people who is literally asking for it.
New PC graphics cards alone cost as much as entire games consoles. The top end ones cost the same as multiple PS5s. That’s why consoles exist.
Consoles don’t make money, the expensive games and subscriptions do.
I have a PS5 because it will play the damned games. There’s nothing in the PC realm for $400 I could buy that could come close to guaranteeing the same thing. Consoles don’t exist because people are stupid, they exist because gaming and GPU companies are cartels just like almost every other sector of the economy.
You are underestimating the importance of standards here. On a PC you will always only get a fraction of the hardware’s power, because there’s way more stuff running at the same time, not just the game, and because the developers can’t know exactly what hardware configuration every single gamer has. On a console you can know exactly how much RAM you will have available, so you can design your content to use that amount of data and then stream it into memory that you reserve at the start. If you do that on a PC you may ask for more RAM than the PC has or you may leave RAM unused. Or you can try to optimize the game for different specs, which costs time and money, so you won’t get the same results with the same budget.
Back in the olden days when games were written in assembly and there was barely enough memory for a framebuffer it made sense to tediously optimize games to squeeze every bit of performance out of the limited hardware. Modern consoles are not like that. They have their own operating systems with schedulers, multitasking, and memory allocators, much like a desktop computer. Your claim that “way more stuff is running at the same time” is only true if the PC user deliberately decides to keep other programs running alongside their game (which can be a feature in and of itself – think recording/streaming, discord, etc.) It is true that while developing for PC you have to take account that different people will have different hardware, but that problem is solved by having a graphics settings menu. Some games can even automatically select the best graphics options that will get the most out of your hardware. What you’re describing is a non-problem.
There is value in static hardware so you can perform specific optimizations and target framerate. The subscriptions are 100% bullshit though.
Steam deck makes sense
To be fair, the same deck advertises it as a computer that you can play games on.
You’re not wrong. There definitely used to be a difference back when consoles would get way better support and PC ports were terrible.
Sound On / Off
– The entire options menu of a PC port in like 2006.
But nowadays I struggle to understand the point of getting one of those big chonky tower consoles like whatever the latest Xbox or PlayStation is. (PlayStation even selling entirely new consoles for a simple graphics/RAM upgrade, smh).
At least the Switch’s portability made sense.
The old consoles also were just plug the game in and boot up.
No Hassle.
Now they sounds like Windows boxes.
I LOVED how the original X-Box had an “desktop” in it. Unfortunately that’s gone way too far anymore.
Nowadays I find these interfaces so overly complicated and fiddly that it makes the UX of an N64 far superior.
I pretty much went PC-only after the xbox 360 though, when ports finally started getting good. :)
Proprietary software.
Genuinely: steam. “I couldn’t figure out how to download an exe and double click on it” is pretty dumb
The price of Apple products
Facebook. (When Zuck was asked how he amassed so much personal information about people, he famously answered: “They ‘trust me.’ Dumb f*cks.”) Growing up, we were told it was foolish to post personally identifying information to the Internet, then the generation that told us that flocked to facebook.
Credit scores. (Less the concept, namely the fact that they’re used so extensively to judge people based on arbitrary rules. It’s stupid that the companies behind them are still operating after major breaches involving more information than they should have had in the first place. The average person seems too dumb to care what happens with their personal information, sadly.)
Services like “Grammarly”. Some folks noted below that there are some legitimate use cases as an accessibility tool, but the service itself seems to target the English-native people “Oh whatever you know what I meant” crowd, to help them sound smart in emails.
And all this other Ai stuff that seems to market itself on the premise that the user is a complete moron who needs to escape the consequences of their ineptitude.
Almost every Ai commercial features someone using Ai tools to quickly cover up the fact that they forgot their partner’s birthday, or quickly cobble together some work memo because they were sleeping or something. (Okay that last one can be kinda based amirite lol.)
Edit: Explanations added because I’m fine being disagreed with but maybe I didn’t communicate very well lol.
Grammarly can be quite useful to people who are not dumb but have dyslexia.
This sounds interesting and I actually haven’t heard of it being used for this before.
What about dyslexia-friendly typefaces though? Would that be more practical?🤔
I’ll be honest a lot of my opinion of the service comes from being spammed ads featuring a targetted customer that’s just too lazy to be hassled with the burden of learning decent communication, and has money to spend lol.
But grammarly gets it wrong.
If it was perfect, then sure.
Science. If we weren’t stupid we would already know everything and wouldn’t have to study it.
Hard disagree. We have the scientific method to able to approach the unknown and slowly decipher it in a way that consistently gets us closer to the truth because we’re at least smart-ish as a human race.
You are confusing knowledge and intelligence
The scientific method is specifically a tool designed to combat human intellectual shortcomings.
Shortcomings for some purposes. “They’re different and weak let’s kill then all” is a tried and true method of genetic propagation
Gerrymandering?
Gerrymandering is an actual brilliant way to ensure victory.
Yep, but it exists because of the existence of these districts in the first place. Which weren’t put there because the founders figured the populus was particularly bright.
automatic weapons