#Quality Of Life

[megmelodia]

I’ve never hear of the “magical horn of plenty” fallacy. I have heard of the false dilemma fallacy, which seems to be what Elon is working with here.

Elon is seriously dumb. The guy has no idea about productivity improving over the past forty years. Stolen labor value? Stagnant labor compensation?

[reasonsforhope]

Here's the top 2 stories from each of Fix The News's six categories:

1. A game-changing HIV drug was the biggest story of 2024

In what Science called the 'breakthrough of the year', researchers revealed in June that a twice-yearly drug called lenacapavir reduced HIV infections in a trial in Africa to zero—an astonishing 100% efficacy, and the closest thing to a vaccine in four decades of research. Things moved quick; by October, the maker of the drug, Gilead, had agreed to produce an affordable version for 120 resource-limited countries, and by December trials were underway for a version that could prevent infection with just a single shot per year. 'I got cold shivers. After all our years of sadness, particularly over vaccines, this truly is surreal.'

2. Another incredible year for disease elimination

Jordan became the first country to eliminate leprosy, Chad eliminated sleeping sickness, Guinea eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus, Belize, Jamaica, and Saint Vincent & the Grenadines eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis, India achieved the WHO target for eliminating black fever, India, Viet Nam and Pakistan eliminated trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, and Brazil and Timor Leste eliminated elephantiasis.

15. The EU passed a landmark nature restoration law

When countries pass environmental legislation, it’s big news; when an entire continent mandates the protection of nature, it signals a profound shift. Under the new law, which passed on a knife-edge vote in June 2024, all 27 member states are legally required to restore at least 20% of land and sea by 2030, and degraded ecosystems by 2050. This is one of the world’s most ambitious pieces of legislation and it didn’t come easy; but the payoff will be huge - from tackling biodiversity loss and climate change to enhancing food security.

16. Deforestation in the Amazon halved in two years

Brazil’s space agency, INPE, confirmed a second consecutive year of declining deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. That means deforestation rates have roughly halved under Lula, and are now approaching all time lows. In Colombia, deforestation dropped by 36%, hitting a 23-year low. Bolivia created four new protected areas, a huge new new state park was created in Pará to protect some of the oldest and tallest tree species in the tropical Americas and a new study revealed that more of the Amazon is protected than we originally thought, with 62.4% of the rainforest now under some form of conservation management.

39. Millions more children got an education

Staggering statistics incoming: between 2000 and 2023, the number of children and adolescents not attending school fell by nearly 40%, and Eastern and Southern Africa, achieved gender parity in primary education, with 25 million more girls are enrolled in primary school today than in the early 2000s. Since 2015, an additional 110 million children have entered school worldwide, and 40 million more young people are completing secondary school.

40. We fed around a quarter of the world's kids at school

Around 480 million students are now getting fed at school, up from 319 million before the pandemic, and 104 countries have joined a global coalition to promote school meals, School feeding policies are now in place in 48 countries in Africa, and this year Nigeria announced plans to expand school meals to 20 million children by 2025, Kenya committed to expanding its program from two million to ten million children by the end of the decade, and Indonesia pledged to provide lunches to all 78 million of its students, in what will be the world's largest free school meals program.

50. Solar installations shattered all records

Global solar installations look set to reach an unprecedented 660GW in 2024, up 50% from 2023's previous record. The pace of deployment has become almost unfathomable - in 2010, it took a month to install a gigawatt, by 2016, a week, and in 2024, just 12 hours. Solar has become not just the cheapest form of new electricity in history, but the fastest-growing energy technology ever deployed, and the International Energy Agency said that the pace of deployment is now ahead of the trajectory required for net zero by 2050.  

51. Battery storage transformed the economics of renewables

Global battery storage capacity surged 76% in 2024, making investments in solar and wind energy much more attractive, and vice-versa. As with solar, the pace of change stunned even the most cynical observers. Price wars between the big Chinese manufacturers pushed battery costs to record lows, and global battery manufacturing capacity increased by 42%, setting the stage for future growth in both grid storage and electric vehicles - crucial for the clean flexibility required by a renewables-dominated electricity system. The world's first large-scale grid battery installation only went online seven years ago; by next year, global battery storage capacity will exceed that of pumped hydro.

65. Democracy proved remarkably resilient in a record year of elections

More than two billion people went to the polls this year, and democracy fared far better than most people expected, with solid voter turnout, limited election manipulation, and evidence of incumbent governments being tamed. It wasn't all good news, but Indonesia saw the world's biggest one day election, Indian voters rejected authoritarianism, South Korea's democratic institutions did the same, Bangladesh promised free and fair elections following a 'people's victory', Senegal, Sri Lanka and Botswana saw peaceful transfers of power to new leaders after decades of single party rule, and Syria saw the end of one of the world's most horrific authoritarian regimes.

66. Global leaders committed to ending violence against children

In early November, while the eyes of the world were on the US election, an event took place that may prove to be a far more consequential for humanity. Five countries pledged to end corporal punishment in all settings, two more pledged to end it in schools, and another 12, including Bangladesh and Nigeria, accepted recommendations earlier in the year to end corporal punishment of children in all settings. In total, in 2024 more than 100 countries made some kind of commitment to ending violence against children. Together, these countries are home to hundreds of millions of children, with the WHO calling the move a 'fundamental shift.'

73. Space exploration hit new milestones

NASA’s Europa Clipper began a 2.9 billion kilometre voyage to Jupiter to investigate a moon that may have conditions for life; astronomers identified an ice world with a possible atmosphere in the habitable zone; and the James Webb Telescope found the farthest known galaxy. Closer to Earth, China landed on the far side of the moon, the Polaris Dawn crew made a historic trip to orbit, and Starship moved closer to operational use – and maybe one day, to travel to Mars. 

74. Next-generation materials advanced

A mind-boggling year for material science. Artificial intelligence helped identify a solid-state electrolyte that could slash lithium use in batteries by 70%, and an Apple supplier announced a battery material that can deliver around 100 times better energy density. Researchers created an insulating synthetic sapphire material 1.25 nanometers thick, plus the world’s thinnest lens, just three atoms across. The world’s first functioning graphene-based semiconductor was unveiled (the long-awaited ‘wonder material’ may finally be coming of age!) and a team at Berkeley invented a fluffy yellow powder that could be a game changer for removing carbon from the atmosphere.

-via Fix The News, December 19, 2024

[gent-illmatic]

NATURALLY 👌🏾

[furiousgoldfish]

I hear a lot of 'Don't give up, keep trying, you'll get there!' when people mention some of their worst struggles, but you know, it's okay to give up. If something is making you feel awful about yourself, it's stressing you out to the point where you lose your life quality over it, if you're identifying your entire value over how it goes, if you're experiencing crushing anxiety over it, if you're starting to feel suicidal over it, it's okay to give up. You are worth more than that thing that is stressing you out.

I can't think of anything that is worth bearing so much pain for. What in life is worth losing your will to live? We humans don't need to spend our life struggling so badly. We need comfort, feeling good about ourselves, feeling worthy, feeling safe, and cozy, and peaceful, and happy. If trying desperately hard at something is taking this away from you, it might not be worth it. Finding new ways to experience calm and comfort, that could be a better focus.

We're not alive only to accomplish. We can exist just to find ways to feel good. Even if it's something that people wouldn't usually do, even if you feel calmer and better when alone, when not accomplishing anything, when you're removed from any stress or competition, when you're just you and there's nothing to compare yourself to. You can do that. There's nobody worthy of judging you for that.

[kouhaiofcolor]

Dude you know what makes less and less sense to me the older i get? The basis of being charged for rent and utilities in this day and age when we spend less and less time actually at home doing anything fr. Like when you take into consideration how fucking burnt out we are on a regular basis (esp and particularly among adolescents and young adults), how do I even have a bill for utilities I’m never home to really use for any significant amount of time?

I’m being charged increasingly for streaming services i don’t have the energy outside of work to watch with any actual consistency or attention. Most of the time I turn the mf tv on for white noise — to scroll through social media on my damn phone 😂 bc the sound of the tv in the background gives me this illusion of control over how I’m spending my time “leisuring”, only bc it’s something i can use to convince myself that the shackles have been at least temporarily removed. They’re never removed though. Literally ever.

You spend $200 on 10 damn items at the grocery store now; groceries that don’t even last, at that. The essential-est essentials have prices straight out of apocalyptic hell. At the same time, this is the same damn country that decided no one has a technical right to food or sustenance — with the phenomena of food insecurity all over the damn nation. People can’t even truly afford to take care of their health being tethered to working “tirelessly”, and with health insurance having no seriousness here whatsoever.

I’m paying 1,000+ damn dollars a month for rent alone, working for shit wages that never really budge in any way that matters and that I can’t actually save shit with, bc I never really have any disposable income. It’s just a fucking nightmare. How are y’all doing this with children??? How are y’all doing this with dependents and pets and car payments and student loans and credit card debt on top of a never ending series of American obligations?? How are y’all not losing your very minds living like this every day??? The math doesn’t even add up. Logic doesn’t even apply.

There’s nothing logical or fair about any of this. It doesn’t even make systemic sense the way we’re charged damn near everything year-round to exist here. How are they incentivizing y’all to breed playing w our rights like this in our faces?? It’s worth it to y’all? I could grind my teeth to nothing trying to make the vaguest sense of it. I feel so utterly squeezed by and ensnared in bills 24/7/365. And like………… in a way…… it kinda doesn’t make declining birth rates seem so bad? This really might be for the best.

Tf we supposed to do, just work for other human beings all our lives? 8 billion of us?? What right do human beings have to demand such consistent energy from other human beings? 😂 Just to be a vessel by which others procure and sustain wealth via our underpaid and exhausted labor while we struggle to survive on meager resources? Doesn’t seem sustainable. Or realistic. Or humane. I’ve never wanted to be here less. I’ve never wanted to not be needed so badly in my entire life. I’m so fucking tired of being here.

[cilil]

So I think we have all seen those posts going around that were talking about some users sorting AO3 by hits and kudos and using ratio to determine if the fic is "worth" (yucky wording ngl) reading. Once again I'm glad that I saw pretty much all of the people around me agreeing that this modus operandi is... suboptimal to say the least, for reasons I don't need to rehash in this post.

I've now gone one step further and disabled stats on AO3 altogether so I don't have to worry about anyone's "performance" or "popularity" and can let the fics speak for themselves.

If you'd like to do the same or are bothered by the numbers for other reasons, be it sensory overload due to too much stuff on your screen, feeling down because your fics don't get as much attention or whatever else (these are all very valid and understandable reasons btw!), here's a link to the script. OP also provided a guide with screenshots showing exactly how to set it up and which part of the code to delete if you want your inbox to remain visible.

Happy reading!💜

[mx-lamour]

Just found a picture of myself naked with breasts and I cannot even comprehend the way I gaslit myself into thinking those weren't big and that was fine for so long. They were not an insignificant obstacle. Who even was that.

Two weeks post op. Only two weeks. Everything is different now. I feel so normal.

I have scarred other women already by pointing out that my chest no longer rests on top of my stomach when I slouch and that my nipples are actually attached to my body now instead of floating around in space. These are things I noticed and had to contend with every day.

It was not just about looks. It was about high key sensory sensitivities. Don't let anyone guilt you, scare you, or convince you to stave off quality of life improvements.

[lobautumny]

So like, there's some really shitty video that this toy saw a while back about QoL mods in Terraria and how if you install all of them and then crank all of their settings up to the maximum, then the game basically plays itself. The whole video was weirdly hostile and vindictive and effectively just made fun of the concept of QoL features/mods as a whole. But it stuck in this toy's mind, not because the video itself holds any value, but because the core topic of how quality of life & accessibility features have a tangible impact on a game's design is really interesting and nobody talks about it with any kind of nuance.

So like, Terraria is obviously a very different game from what it used to be. But all of the raw content (hardmode, bosses, biomes, weapons, NPCs, etc.) that always gets the spotlight in updates only makes up a relatively-small portion of that outside of, like, the tinkerer’s workshop from 1.1, and damage classes being added in 1.0.6, both being relatively-early additions. The plethora of things that were changed/added to make the game look nicer also aren't the core thing responsible, obviously. So what is the biggest reason modern Terraria feels so alien when compared to 1.0.X versions, or even 1.1?

It's the quality of life features. Inventory management got exponentially easier/more efficient, you have a minimap at all times, smart cursor lets you expend far less effort mining and dealing with backwalls, there are special equipment slots for grappling hooks and light pets, grappling hooks are bound to a hotkey instead of being an item that you need to manually select and use, you can use items directly from your inventory instead of needing to place them in your hotbar and then select that hotbar slot, you automatically walk up 1-block inclines and open/close doors as you walk through them, there’s a plethora of features to make getting around the world trivial, the start of the game moves way faster due to the player getting access to better equipment faster, block-swapping exists… This toy posits that this is all why Terraria feels like a fundamentally different game. In old versions, it felt like you had to fight tooth and nail to get anything accomplished, but nowadays, everything feels all buttery-smooth. The main friction you encounter in progressing through the game is with boss fights, as Re-Logic obviously intends.

Now, obviously, it would be insane and stupid to claim that Terraria is a worse game, right now, than it was all the way back in the 1.0.X era, and it would be even stupider to claim that it’s worse because it has QoL features. However, this toy does not believe that every single QoL feature added to the game was inherently objectively positive or correct from the game's inception. Rather, they were natural, smart conclusions for Re-Logic to come to with the direction they decided to take the game in as it continued development. But this was not the only direction Terraria’s development could have taken.

There’s a very unique feeling to old-ass Terraria versions, and it sucks that tracking down and playing these versions is so goddamn hard. You only ever have a vague idea of where you are because there’s no map to use as reference so you’re heavily encouraged to keep most of your stuff on the surface, and to build infrastructure to connect important things underground/in the sky so you don’t get lost. Everything is so unwieldy that building a simple house and making it look remotely nice feels like a herculean effort, enemies kick your ass way harder earlygame due to decent gear being much harder to access, and there’s a lot more gravity to the choices you make in what gear you use, because it’s a lot harder to hot-swap your armor and accessories when you're not actually at your base, which is harder to get to/from due to the world being far more difficult to navigate, as a whole.

This all leads to an exponentially slower game than modern-day Terraria is, where every single thing you do needs to be deliberate and well-thought-out, and everything takes a much longer time to do. This toy remembers spending weeks as a kid building housing for the meager number of NPCs that were in the game back then, alongside farms for all of the potion-making herbs and a big obsidian generator, and all of that could be accomplished in a single play session in 1.4.X.

There is a universe in which Terraria saw minimal QoL updates and instead leaned really hard into this direction, making a slow, exploratory game where the player’s power level very slowly increments upwards and you’re encouraged to build largescale infrastructure rather than the (relatively) fast-paced boss rush where your power balloons out of control immediately and your infrastructure is a fast-travel teleportation network that takes minimal effort to set up that the game currently is, and that version of the game would not have been wrong, inherently. It would’ve been more niche, for sure, but it wouldn’t have necessarily been bad, or even worse than the current game is.

This is what makes this toy sad that old Terraria versions are so difficult to get ahold of, as well as what fascinates it so much about the retro Minecraft community. Speaking of, let’s switch gears and talk about Minecraft for a bit.

Minecraft, as it’s sure most of the people reading this are well-aware, has recently been having something of a renaissance in its retro community, the people who prefer alpha and/or beta versions of the game to the modern game. A handful of complete overhaul mods have come out for these versions (notably, Better Than Adventure and ReIndev) that put interesting spins on the game’s design, basically asking the question, “What if Mojang decided on a different direction for Minecraft to take from this point in time?”

A lot of these mods cast aside the instant-gratification convenience and linear progression of modern Minecraft in favor of slower-paced, more survival-ey gameplay, placing more emphasis on the act of exploring your world and gathering resources as the core gameplay loop as opposed to… Well, modern Minecraft really doesn’t have much of a core gameplay loop to speak of, and that’s sort of the problem, now isn’t it? This toy doesn’t want to get too far into all of this, though, as its thoughts on Minecraft’s game design are not the focus of this essay. Rather, it wants to put the spotlight onto Minecraft’s community.

An ever-increasing number of people have been growing more and more critical of Minecraft over the last 5 or so years. It’s obviously always had its detractors, but in recent time, there have been more of them that have gotten more vocal, and it’s become pretty normal to have the take that Minecraft has been getting worse lately. And a big culprit that people keep pointing to is QoL. One of the most common criticisms of Minecraft online is that quality of life features have made it way too easy to trivialize the process of blasting through the game’s content, getting obnoxiously overpowered enchanted diamond (or netherite) gear, reaching the End, and getting access to elytra and shulker boxes.

Despite both being excessively popular games that have been made far easier through their QoL changes and overall polish, that have both been in constant development for over a decade at this point, the critical responses to those features in Terraria and Minecraft could not be more different. This is amusing, and gets at something deeper with regards to game design that this toy doesn’t know it’s ever heard anyone actually say: Quality of life features are fantastic tools for reducing the noise that gets in the way of a game’s vision, but when you add them haphazardly and/or with no real vision for what you want your game to be in the end, you can very easily wind up accidentally removing a large portion of what could’ve otherwise become compelling parts of your gameplay loop. They need to be used intelligently, or they can, in fact, harm your game and make a significant contingent of your playerbase enjoy it less.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A new economic report from TD says Canada is falling behind the standard-of-living curve compared to its peers.

According to the report published last week, Canada has been lagging behind the U.S. and other advanced economies in terms of standard of living performance (or real GDP per capita), despite recent years of “headline growth.”

“Economic growth does not necessarily equate to economic prosperity,” TD economist Marc Ercolao wrote

Aside from considering GDP, Ercolao explains, standard-of-living quality is an important factor in understanding Canada’s economic performance.

In the 10 years before the pandemic, Canada was pretty close to the U.S. in terms of average growth, just over two per cent per year, which hovered above the 1.4 per cent average for all G7 countries, Ercolao says. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[santaeofficial]

Quality Of Life Improvements Continue

Today's a big day for hidden avatar hunters across Santae. We have several updates to share that make it easier to track information about the avatars you've discovered -- and show off your favorite ones to others!

> Your Forum Avatar is now displayed above the HA on user profiles! Now you can show off your favorite avatar outside the forums, or select your forum avatar to perfectly match your HA. The number of avatars a user has unlocked is now also displayed on user profiles.

> For the coders among you, some inline styles on user profiles moved into CSS classes/identifiers to allow further profile CSS customization.

> Your user profile now links to a new Hidden Avatars page! This collection-style page has space to display all the hidden avatars on Santae. The art for avatars you haven't yet found is hidden, but you can see the titles -- along with the ability to reveal the solution for how to unlock it (if you wish!).

> Profiles have been improved on mobile. They should look ALOT better when viewing them on mobile - from the HA no longer spilling out of it's container, to the pet content being wrapped underneath to make it look better.

> Button added to profiles to view the avatars of the user you're looking at.

> Guess the Cup is now awarding the trophy upon winning all 10 levels. For the next week we have increased the odds of winning.

Thank you everyone for your valued feedback, without you, we would not be where we are today! <3

With Love & Gratitude,

~The Santae Team

[sataniccapitalist]

Socialist Countries are Outpacing the US in GDP and IQ

Socialist nations are surpassing the United States in various metrics, from economic growth to intelligence quotient. This video explores how countries with socialist policies are outperforming the U.S. in key areas like GDP, education, and overall quality of life. We'll examine data comparing socialist and capitalist economies, debunk common misconceptions, and analyze the factors contributing to these surprising trends. Join us as we delve into the complex relationship between economic systems and national success, challenging long-held beliefs about socialism and capitalism. Whether you're interested in global economics, political systems, or social development, this video offers thought-provoking insights into the changing dynamics of world powers.

How Socialist Countries are Outpacing the U.S. in Everything from GDP to IQ

/ how-socialist-countrie...

[gent-illmatic]

[friendbreakfast]

a very small, unimportant yet useful quality of life feature i think the next Ace Attorney game could benefit from is marking with a ✓ any piece of evidence youve already presented to a specific character during investigations if presenting that piece of evidence will not result in new dialogue.

that way, people who like me enjoy presenting every single thing to get extra dialogue arent ever in a situation where they forget what theyve already presented so they get the same lines of dialogue over and over again.

i know its trivial to just press the B button to skip through already-seen dialogue which is why i said this is a small unimportant thing, but it still takes time to do so for longer strings of dialogue so it would be nice if players could just avoid it altogether.

plus, sometimes the same piece of evidence being presented to the same person actually results in different dialogue because of the story having given more detail to it or whatever else, so the ✓ no longer being there could be a good tell for the player that theres new dialogue they could get from it so they can choose to present it again to get that sweet, sweet extra dialogue.

[blackcoffeedreams]

[st-va]

I despise short form content.

I hate YouTube shorts and I hate Instagram reels. I hate not having control over the time I spend on these 2 particular apps and just how easy it is to get lost — after all, that's what they are designed to do.

If you're on the same boat as me and don't want to download some sketchy shit to stop those urges, let me show how to completely remove ads, shorts, reels and skip annoying sponsors with just the Firefox mobile browser.

Below the cut is an (I hope) comprehensive guide on how to achieve the dream homepage

Before I begin, I need to say that:

I am not sponsored by anything mentioned

This is only tested on an android device

There is a trade off in performance in both apps

Notifications will direct you to the hellscape that is the original app

The font in the screenshots is not something native to Firefox, I just love pixels

Here is a pros and cons list to using my method

YouTube pros:

No ads

No sponsorships (mostly)

No shorts

No community posts

Background play (finicky)

More privacy

Extentions for this are all widely used

Cons:

Outdated UI

Unable to have a video minimised at the bottom of the screen by scrolling down

Slower to load vids on homescreen (not by much)

Full screen is a bit finicky sometimes

Important to note:

I don't know if this impacts data usage

Video quality is the same

I've been using this for at least a month, imho the pros outweigh the cons by a BIG margin.

Instagram pros:

No ads

No reels

Quicker access to direct messages

Cons:

Definitely a lot more laggy

Refreshes are sometimes needed

Extention is not used by many

Important to note:

Same as YouTube, but I have not used this for a while. I figured out that what I can do with YouTube is applicable with Instagram today.

Having said that

Let us begin

The thing that this whole "hack" revolves around is the ability to use extensions in the mobile version of the Firefox browser.

Once you have downloaded the browser (it'd probably ask you to make an account, I don't know if it's a necessity), you'd want to go to the settings(top right) then the Extensions menu (fourth one top down). Scroll down to the "Find more Extentions" button and then search.

Here are the extensions I have

Not all of these are necessary, this is just my setup. Firefox is my default browser so i use other stuff too.

That's it! Here are some before and afters:

YouTube

Before:

After:

(thank you matpat for the perfect video for this lol)

Instagram

After:

(I'm out of pics per post so only the after)

Hopefully I've managed to be of help. I'll answer any questions that you may have!

Oh, and if you guys want I can give a shorter tutorial on how to add a shortcut to these sites to your home screen.

[fira54funko]

Fira54 Ver 2.0

Guess Who's Back??