I left lemmy a few weeks ago for this reason and I come back today to see what's up and it's exactly as you described. We aren't the only ones either

One of the important skills you learn as a science fiction fan is the ability to understand what fiction means.

How many slave children were spent to make each stand?

Is this the same as Plex's 'watch together' feature?

In reality they should have just said nothing, by recalling it and notifying the general public far more people are going to be aware of this. Had they just said nothing it probably would have flown way under the radar

The way I see it, things have been filtered down to a design concept of "simplify until a toddler can figure it out" and that's been followed by so many designs that everyone has overlooked all the drawbacks of designing in that fashion. People have become wildly content with simple apps that lack personal configuration or extended functionality because users now lack so much basic knowledge or expect crazy things to the point that if they come across any small issue they will call technical support, leave a crazed email, or complain loudly on social media long before they every actually considered solving the issue themselves or even checking online to see how others arrived at the issue. I kinda feel like I'm just rambling right now but for a long time society, at least here in the US, normalized and and removed negative connotations from the term "computer illiterate" to the point that it's become not only the norm but the design goal.

I'm in the US and the only time I see mention of edge is when installing windows and then again when changing my default browser, which is kinda silly but not something I bother wasting mental energy to care about when it's something that shows up once and then never again. I would love to see legislation in the US match what some of the European countries have but considering how things could be, it's of least concern to me. I paid for Windows once in my life via an OEM license I ordered from a German retailer and I've had about 16 or so computers since then and all of those have either been custom built machines, used computers, or parted together boxes so if they want to bug me about installing their browser which effectively will recoup revenue based on data from me which varies from useless to misleading and probably becomes a net negative and moves them further from their goal. Then sure, I don't mind clicking that "no thank you" button

Why alarm systems???

I have 3 windows machines in my house that are over 50 days running right now

They monetize using nitro. Discord servers use multiple different servers based on location to host the actual chat services. I'm not an expert on the inner workings but it's actually rather complex and fascinating. If you don't like using discords clients then maybe try an open source alternative discord client, if nothing else it will give you insight into the back end and help you better understand what's going on behind the scenes. Technically using alternative discord clients goes against their TOS but considering your feelings on discord I doubt that will matter to you.

When I think back to how immature and reckless I was as a teenager I can't believe I was legally allowed to drive and considered a full grown adult at the age of 18.

Yeah but that's not even true. It's cheap to live here and employers pay well, with lots of available work. Maybe in whatever area you live it's rough but it's pretty easy to thrive with very little education in the cities, I'm not sure why you think that someone's money would now be worthless, it's the polar opposite as your cost of living is going to be lower. I'm not sure what has you saying drug use is higher than anywhere else though, quick look at various studies show it's about on par with the rest of the US. As far as people wanting to leave, I don't know many but the ones that do are generally people that don't apply themselves to anything and have a mindset that the reason their life is shit is everyone's fault but their own. Sadly yes, we are a red state due to gerrymandering but that's not a problem that can be solved by turning away intelligent people who are capable of shifting the imbalance. Do keep vocalizing the issue with this though because we need more attention brought to conservative corruption here, and good things are coming of it as we recently had some of them get locked up with sentences that weren't a bullshit slap on the wrist which is cool