I’m on the other side of the world from Microsoft HQ, and I can still hear the shouting.

Because this was basically a one way decision that will now block them from a lot of future contracts with governments, organizations and companies.

As the old saying goes: Don’t feed the trolls.

Replying as if half the comment doesn’t exist and putting the word intelligent in quotes is a classic antagonizing move by trolls to make people try to engage them.

It’s banned in several European countries like Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Iceland and Greece. And it’s pending legislation in several others. As to why it wasn’t EU law already: Some of the legislations are pretty new so it wasn’t considered as something the majority would approve until they started implementing their own laws. On top of that several EU countries have pretty strong homophobic communities.

Countries like Poland. In 2020 the EU was witholding funding for parts of Poland, because they established “LGBT-free zones”. And the last one was only made invalid by the Administrative court last month.

If I pay for a service and get ads, that service is dead to me forever.

Indeed, the vast majority on any social media platform does not engage. And when they do it’s mostly just liking content and not even replying. You see it on lemmy as well, with news articles often having few comments. And when they do it’s one or two top comments and a bunch of replies.

Over the years the only thing I can imagine is to add another anonymizing layer, where people can send in questions and the “best ones” are posted by a general/bot account. But that is something people much smarter than me have tried to figure out for years, so I have no idea how it would be implemented.

Is there a way to encourage people to post more? Because the main problem seems to be getting actual posts, not replies to them.

For example “nostupidquestions” only has a few questions a day, but there are 40k subscribers and 1500 people or so checking in every day. It has 4.2k posts and 170k comments.

“asklemmy” has more posts, fewers subscribers, and over 2k a day check in. 6k posts and 317k comments.

It’s mostly just morons hacking and slashing with zero understanding. They literally just search for “climate”, “trans”, etc. to cut funding and remove access without checking anything, they just assume they’re correct.

And then when theyr’e called out they just lie and double down. Case in point, they refuse to admit they confused “transgenic” with “transgender” to the point where they made a post on the white house website: https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-millions-on-transgender-animal-experiments/ (For reference, it was alzheimers research)

The real scary part is that there are people who have an inkling of what they’re doing, and you’re not hearing much about the things they’re changing.

I think the biggest one by value is Meta with €1.2b. Although their revenue is in the $150b+ range, so not maxed out.

Lufthansa and Air France might have some massive fines incoming.

Yeah, the amount of industrial machinery being controlled by ancient hardware would baffle a lot of people.

For a comparison people might relate to: There are ATMs running twenty year old versions of Windows XP.

Not sure vampiric “law” cares about renters rights. And if it does, is it based on current laws in the country they are in, or the country of origin? And is it the origin of vampires themselves or just the vampire turned. And is it based on the time they were turned or modern laws?

Either way, in one instance I they bought it from the bank after missed mortage payments. So they weren’t legally living there anyway but counted as last/current resident for the vampire since the bank isn’t a person.

That’s actually a plot point in at least one of the vampire shows. A vampire buys someones home from the bank, and they’re free to enter despite the resident/occupants refusal.

A private company is selling cheap tablets to inmates to let them communicate with their family. They have to use “digital stamps” to send messages, 35 cents a piece and come in packs of 5, 10 or 20. Each stamp covers up to 20,000 characters or one single image.

They also sell songs, at $1.99 a piece, and some people have spent thousands over the years. That’s also now just going away.

Then you get to the part about the new company. Who already has a system in Tennessee where inmates have to pay 3-5 cents per minute of tablet usage. Be that watching a movie they’ve bought or just typing a message.