Readit NewsI know a lot of people in the US, and especially Canada, who've stopped going to restaurants for example. They now cost too much, the food is often mediocre or even outright bad, the service is often terrible, parking can be an issue in some cities, and it's generally a miserable experience. Cooking at home, even if takes more effort, ends up being comparatively more enjoyable.
That's also the case for movies, concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, and tourist venues. The tickets cost a lot relative to the enjoyment that's provided, and the pricing of food and drinks at such events can be astronomical. It has just become prohibitively expensive, especially for families, in addition to the other inconveniences (such as travel and parking) that can be associated with such events.
Even something as simple as going to a beach or a lake has become an awful experience in Canada. A problem at Canadian beaches has been foreigners defecating in the sand, rather than using the proper washroom facilities. Even when that isn't happening, such places can be quite crowded and nowhere near as fun as they were in the past when they were quieter.
I certainly can't blame people for not wanting to subject themselves to unpleasant experiences like those.
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...
Most of the time I can just turn in the general direction of the device I want to "listen".
> it’s become a key part of “the narrative” that social media websites have an “anti-conservative bias” in how they moderate. As we’ve pointed out over and over again there remains little evidence to support this.
From the study they're linking to:
> We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended
It literally shows Republicans getting suspended at drastically higher rates than Democrats but, according to TechDirt, there is no evidence of any anti-conservative bias anywhere. It's just a fantasy. Because, see, social media platforms aren't biased against conservatives, just people who are 'wrong' about politics, which is totally different! The study is exactly the kind of ideologically biased pseudo-science that makes the social sciences such a laughing stock. It's just a giant exercise in circular reasoning. Because social networks don't literally say they're banning people for ideological reasons, nobody is banned for ideological reasons. That's the study, in a nutshell.