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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • 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





  • 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.








  • Depends entirely on your values and perspective

    If you’re coming from the upper echelons of US income then it might not.

    Otherwise you’ll potentially find the increase in quality of life to be significant.

    Americans work too much, commute to much and don’t take enough holidays. Europeans work significantly less hours day to day, have significantly shorter commutes on average and have legally required and protected minimum annual leave that vastly outstrips US workers.

    E.g. Take myself and a US friend in a very similar job into account. Yes he earns roughly double what I do.

    • However I average 10-15 hours less work a week than he does.
    • My commute is half what his is and I have actual public transport options that aren’t trash if my car broke down.
    • I get 38 days of paid leave a year. 8 national holidays and the time between Christmas and Jan 1st by default… That leaves me with 27 days to use with some degree of freedom. He’s lucky if he takes ten days total per year.
    • I get private healthcare but also know that if that was removed from my benefits I’d have access to state healthcare without the risk of bankruptcy.

    Those listed things are just employment based. Culture is also a factor. I’ve never once worried about being shot in my entire life. Our food quality standards are higher whilst also costing significantly less. We don’t have the institutionalised national self delusion of tipping culture. Our religious and crazy right wing aren’t politically powerful enough to be dragging us kicking and screaming inti the 18th century like the US is. We aren’t completely and utterly dependent on cars, so being car free is a viable way to live.

    My final note is this. I’m not some US hating zealot. I literally booked flights for a two week holiday in the US yesterday. I adore the NBA and find American people to be absolutely lovely on average. But I couldn’t live the way most Americans do.