They do many many useful things and the utility is valuable enough to begrudgingly have to accept the frustrating experience of using them. We generally really do have to accept it as well because as with all useful technologies, they become ubiquitous and then useful technologies are built off the fact of their reliable ubiquity and then those technologies replace existing ones and you find yourself needing smartphones to get by in society. They’re close to a necessity if not in reality, a necessity where I live, but places like China for example it is simply impossible to go about life without one. I honestly don’t what people do there when their phone is broken, just getting out the door to pick up a new one would be a challenge.

This is a tough one, I’m going to guess Marx?

I don’t see why that moment was unsalvagable, the whole back story not withstanding, people get startled when woken, and it’s usually only momentary. Were there no words spoken or anything?

The trend was to make the phone as small as possible and it would have been hard to do that with extra keys. You could make them smaller keys, but then it’s almost as hard to use just by virtue of being too tiny tiny to type on.

I always thought t9 was pretty great but I do remember it being frustrating when you needed to type something it was never going to get and it wasn’t always convenient to switch to regular keying temporarily.

What? Why?

I think this takes home the prize for weirdest.

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I’ve been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I’ve definitely noticed the decline of Google, that decline has been subtle for me, it hasn’t become a disaster, it’s just generally frustrating and just not as good as it used to be. But that said, I haven’t exactly loved DDG in comparison. It’s okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind of, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It’s more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I’d be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn’t which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone’s asked basically that exact or very similar question.

I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I’ll persevere but I can’t say it’s been better.

Ah ok, definitely skip bin then. Do you have local government refuse collection where you live?

Good luck. I guess even second hand they’re probably pretty good if you like golf, at least I mean maybe. I suppose they could be sucky clubs too. Hope you find someone that’s into golf

I would say it might make a good re-gifting option to have on standby but, they’re second hand, they’re heavy and space consuming and, at least I personally, don’t know anyone who plays golf either. Gift sucks.

Could you just actually drink coffee? I mean I guess the caffeine isn’t necessarily the best for situations of anxiety, but I find a cup of coffee really relaxing and if it helps when it looks like you’re drinking it I wonder if really drinking it wouldn’t help similarly.

Yeh but then, if a person is genuinely obviously extremely attractive, or clearly has traits like a capacity to lead or influence people, or is objectively wealthy, or is clearly very smart, those are all things that come off as really conceited to the rest of us unless their acknowledgement is very careful. If such a person is too quick or too ready to acknowledge these things about themselves, despite their accuracy, we’re pretty likely to think they’re a dick. It seems like for people who are in some ways exceptional, the appropriate level of humility, wherever it is on the scale, does need to involve at least a little bit of pantomime and false modesty. The right size in such cases will need to be at least a little smaller than they really are, not too much smaller, or it’s interpreted as disingenuous, but not exactly true to scale either.

Sounds like you unintentionally fit the brief anyway.

Ayyye!

So is this intended as kind of a metaphor or is this mainly aimed at people who have literally stepped in real shit?

At least it’s broadly kind of informative in description of some of the categories before the ‘continued’ section. That may seem a low bar but I guess efforts to educate on this topic have set such a drastically low bar in decades past that it’s encouraging to see it lifted slightly off the floor. The categorisation scheme takes a bit of a nosedive when they get to marijuana which for some reason has its own category, also for all the drugs and categories they describe they make the mistake of failing to describe the effects that make people want to use the drugs in the first place. I can see why they might be hesitant to do that, you don’t want to actively encourage people to use the drugs, but I remember when getting similar lessons on the topic thinking that it was an obvious omission because it’s hardly like people took the drugs, repeatedly, because of how much they enjoyed the “impairment” especially as I has my own first hand experience running directly counter to it. The failure to address the positive sensations taking such drugs produces that have caused people throughout all of human history to seek drugs out, damages the credibility of the information since it clearly sought to discourage at the cost of objectivity.

I think my surprise here is that given the program’s reputation, and your experience with it, it seems there was quite some gulf between theoretical intent and practice. Educating children about drugs, probably seems relatively uncontroversial to most, I think you could get a lot of people with otherwise pretty different views on drugs to get behind the idea. The way the D.A.R.E. program went about it and the content of the program and the accuracy of the education they attempted to deliver seem from a distance to have been very questionable. This is why it’s so perplexing to me why you hold such a surprising level of respect for D.A.R.E., I mean sure the intent could have been education, but it doesn’t sound very much like the intent and the reality had a lot of overlap. I’m careful with my wording here because where I grew up we didn’t have ‘D.A.R.E.’ specifically so I can only form judgment based on what one hears and reads about the program.

Given your experience and the way they made you feel from the practitioners’ sheer ignorant and biased approach I would have thought you’d definitely be the first to call the program “dumb” as the very least of the criticisms to be levelled at it.

???