I’ve been using Deezer for the last few years, and its (mostly) great

Have used Spotify in the past, then went to google Play Music, then tried YouTube Music for three frustrating months before coming to Deezer.

Deezer pluses;

Absolutely awesome range, more music from more artists than any other service I’ve tried, and very little missing. They have every Johnny Cash album bar one, pretty impressive. Their Country and Western catalogue is unparalleled

Although you can only download onto three devices, you have unlimited downloads on each one, as opposed to Spotify which limits you to just 50,000 tracks. I blew past that on my phone in three weeks. I cant see myself needing to download into more than three devices

Good stable Android app, better even than Spotify, as good as GPM, and far far better than YTM. It isnt perfect, can be a little slow to load playlists sometimes, but I have only had to shut it down and restart it 2-3 times in almost a year of use. YTM had to be restarted 2-3 times a day, the Android app fell over more often than a drunk after happy hour.

Great sound quality on mobile and web, I really cant fault it

Good simple web interface too, and I can edit playlists and tracks fairly easily

Good value for money - cheaper and better than the rest

Apparently pays artists better

Deezer minuses;

Android app playlists only have a shuffle play button, and there is no way to change this to regular linear play in settings, even for Premium users, or disable shuffle across the app. This is the biggest flaw by far, and it is shared with Spotify. It is the only aspect of YTM that is superior

The MP3 upload feature is a bit clunky and not terribly intuitive, and limited to only 2000 tracks. However this really doesnt matter as I havent needed to upload much music at all as practically everything I want is available on Deezer anyway

Editing big playlists on the web interface can be a sluggish and buggy, especially moving around large blocks of tracks. Was a bit frustrating when I needed to edit playlists I’d moved across from YTM, I found that often it was easier to just delete almost all the tracks and rebuild from scratch. Now all my playlists are cleaned up it isnt a major - building new playlists works fine

You need to favourite a lot of artists and/or tracks to get the automated recommendations after a playlist finishes to work properly (as opposed to Flow which just works off one artist). Artist exclusions dont seem to work, but now I have favourited 190 artists that doesnt seem to be an issue now. Minor glitch though

I can barely manage just the one. I dont know how people can juggle multiple accounts. I would get so confused

NO. Not a fan of the current or former CCP or the former Soviet Union

First time I landed in Australia on the Gold Coast I followeed a bin chicken for 20 minutes with a camera trying to get the perfect picture like it was some rare exotic bird. I’m sure the locals were sremoveding or openly laughing behind my back, I dont blame them

We dont have much in the way of animals but we have birds. The Tui is common in suburban gardens here, but they are beautiful and even as a local I still like seeing them. Pukekos are everywhere but for those from the UK/ Europe/ USA they’re prett exotic. Down South, Wekas are absolutely everywhere outside the cities and will walk right into people’s homes - I once experienced coitus interruptus when a Weka jumped up on the bed I was in with a guy.

When I was in South Africa I was super excited to see baboons, locally considered something of a nuisance. And in Queensland, Australia, the first time I saw an Australian white ibis, locally known as a bin chicken, the locals must have been very amused to see me chasing it with a camera getting photos

Glycine

Thanks for this tip, I dont have trouble sleeping generally but my partner does, will look into this for him

I put the heaviest and least breakable things first in line so they end up at the bottom of the bag(s). Canned food, stuff in plastic bottles, then all the cold/ frozen stuff altogether, light and delicate things like bread, chips etc last

I joined on here a bit over 9 months ago after I was permabanned from reddit for ??? reason after I posted a Google Streetview link of a layby. This happened to coincide with the third party API fuckup and several other irrational and counterproductive changes so I arrived here right in the middle of a period of huge growth. I havent left since then per se but have had periods of reduced activity. Have started another profile on reddit (which was stupidly easy) as there are still a number of niche communities there that have no activity on their equivalent communities here. Am settled, and will likely gradually spend more time here as reddit management continue to find more feet to shoot themselves in

This Stihl Vacuum shredder/blower. Like a leafblower, but instead of just blowing the leaves pointlessly around it sucks them up, shreds them a bit and dumps them in a big bag - and its electric. Terrific piece of kit, quiet and effective and oh so satisfying to use, I go over the driveway and garden with it every day or two (we have a lot of trees surrounding our place which constantly drop masses of leaves)

This! I remember putting one on a site I built way back then

We have an app here in New Zealand (and Australia as well I believe) called Gaspy which shows gas prices for all stations within a set customisable radius, in price order, or on a map. And believe me we need it here with gas averaging between $2.60 to $2.90 a litre. Thats $9.80 to $10.96 a US gallon

I paid NZ $469 for my current Samsung A31 almost four years ago, I wasnt fussed about the camera but wanted a 3.5 mm jack and lots of storage. Its now looking fairly shabby but still works well. I’ll use it until its dead and get another phone around the $400 mark. Midrange, not top end, but not a budget phone either. It needs to do a number of jobs (play music, navigation, web surfing, record rides and hikes, camera, find cheap gas, tell me how much UV dosage I’ll get at any particular time, weather, messaging on 3-4 apps plus calls of course) and be reasonably robust. Style and status dont come into it, I dont care about any of that

Yes, we’ve got an Epson Ecotank too, its been great, and super economical on ink. Bought in the first covid lockdown when our HP shat the bed, still going strong. And its not made in China so another plus

How did this ballroom get hired at such short notice?

Well I upvoted because this is an excellent question that has applications and relevance far beyond just the current Hamas atrocities.

Facing up to and dealing with the fact that a small percentage of any population is psychopathic (which is a rough clinical descriptor/ analogue for what the man in the street would call evil -lacking in conscience, empathy or morality) is something we do not do well, at least in the Western world, and it is something which we do need to grapple with. And when evil men gain power and set the social and cultural norms - as in 1930’s Germany - the larger population can be persuaded or at least coerced into doing evil. We’ve seen this before, from the Armenian genocide, the Nazi regime, Rwanda and now this

That is a fantastic idea. America has such a terrible health system

Its a fair question. I think the best approach actually is not to make it illegal for deeply unsuitable individuals to reproduce, but to incentivise them not to. Make contraception freely and easily available, and actually pay them not to have kids. Using a carrot rather than a stick approach like this will be far easier to get across the line and will present less enforcement challenges

Damn… you lucky. I need heavy sedation just to get my anxiety under control, or at least tamped down

I would have thought that in the instance of rape the burden of punishment would fall entirely upon the perpetrator, i.e. the rapist. Fair point about divorce though

Currently in most of the Western world we have very stringent standards that have to be met in order to adopt a child (and quite rightly too in my view). But in order to conceive a child naturally? Nothing, nada, zilch. Full blown neo-nazi? Meth addict? Huge track record of violence? Rapist? Paedophile? All of the above? Find a partner of the opposite sex and you’re good to go! This is a massive inconsistency that I can see we will have to face up to sooner or later, maybe not to the extent you propose, but some sort of minimum standard needs to be put in place for being able to reproduce, for the sake of those children that will otherwise be brought up in horrific, abusive nightmare environments if nothing else.