To be fair, as a native English speaker from Canada, I don’t know what the heck is going on with the South African accent.

Half the time I can’t even recognize it (likely just due to lack of exposure), so when I hear someone speaking with an accent that’s kinda like Australia and New Zealand, but isn’t quite right for either of those, I think “must be South African”… 😅

XMPP/Jabber via a web client like movim.eu sounds like it ought to work!

You can also look into Snikket as a host for small groups like friends or family, but can continue to use the Movim web client even if you’re hosting with Snikket rather than Movim itself.

If I could momentarily be a douchebag for a good cause: I’ve been to Japan and visited gardens there, and when I saw this photo I thought it was a photo from a place I’ve been in Japan, so this garden seems pretty legit to me! Beautiful!

Forth

You’re not alone! This concept is called Liquid Democracy

I agree with OP. If there’s a puzzle in a game that’s clearly some kind of water puzzle, but I can make a boat to solve it in 15 seconds and bypass the obvious intent of the puzzle, maybe I feel a bit clever. But if I can solve every puzzle with effectively the same boat… what’s the point of doing the puzzles? I guess because I wanted puzzles? But on the other hand, if I know I can solve every puzzle with a 15 second boat, it feels kinda weird to pretend I don’t have an answer and struggle through anyway. Like, the victory is hollow when I know I could have solved it faster the dumb way.

The number of times in that game I thought “oh, maybe I have to jump up through the floor here to get through this door” and then I peeked through the floor and was like “oh, nope. It’s the damn final boss room again. Not supposed to be here yet, better go back through the floor and try another way to open this door” felt like I was babysitting the game so as to not entirely ruin the experience… and it kinda ruined the experience…

Okay, I trust that you’ll all respect that I’m entering a Judgment Free Zone.

There was a period in my life where I would buy grocery store potato salad and use it as a dip for Cool Ranch Doritos, and it was actually pretty good!

I don’t do that anymore, but all I can say is that it’s possible. Thank you for respecting my experiences.

Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.

BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.

So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.