I have absolutely loved every impossible burger in patty form I've been served, it's certainly not fooling me as real meat but its good enough it doesn't have to, but every time I've had it crumbled its been dry and fairly unpleasant. You can definitely ruin it in preparation.
OH! I hit that one too, quit the game over it. Very obnoxious finding endless forum posts of people having the same bug as you, and not a solution to be had, and your not even being paid for it.
The legal = moral line of thought is one of my most hated things to come across. It correlating with the highly religious makes sense, but it's by no means limited to them. It's incredibly wide spread in American culture to have at least a small degree of that, people always feel naughty when they break the law. I too find it ridiculous.
Keep in mind that there’s actually a path to breaking people out of this point of view, but it’s a really deep, dark rabbit hole, with lasting ramifications.
When you take this principle into account, however, a huge segment of the world makes much more sense, although the realities that become evident are kind of horrible.
The fastest path to lead people out of this mindset, is to prove to them their own error by bringing them in on some misbehavior (such that they perceive it as a serious violation of their own personal code), for which they both benefit from, experience no consequences, and find deep tempatation to repeat.
To broach the subject of crossing some personal line with a person like this raises an eyebrow. Crossing that line in front of them reveals a mixture of feelings. Inviting them to participate is met with uncertainty. Pulling the trigger with them gives way to a period of paranoia, until the coast is clear. Then, twice then, three times. Now, they’re convinced that morality isn’t set in stone, and laws are the commands of mere mortals, to be broken at will.
But, now what you have on your hands is a convert. Once conservative, and yet still as much, but eager to experiment and challenge their own views. This is where stereotypical morally abivalent, yet superficially conservative people come from. Seduced out of their naive, obedient world view, but entertaining dubious integrity. So now it’s no longer divine authority in an imperfect world conceived by some paranormal perfection, but instead, simply might makes right. And so, you get tasteless materialism, and a ruthlessness to obtain status.
After a certain age, this sort of thing really can’t happen with some people. When you’re a teenager, transgressing certain boundaries can be harmless and naive, but after a certain age, cheap thrills don’t work. That’s why we find a broad split of sheltered, uptight squares, mixed in with smaller segments of snobby, cavalier libertines or cheesey, greedy sociopaths.
It’s a distribution of age brackets for teenage misbehavior. The cornier the yuppie, the later in college they started breaking the rules, or maybe they never broke any rules, and that’s why they’re stuck with this holier-than-thou attitude.
There is a strong preference for new houses, add in their superstition where if someone dies in a house it might as well be considered unmarketable and you get a market where you have to always keep building.
It's something you can't understand without experiencing yourself. Always sounds pathetic from the perspective of people who have lived their lives having okay mental health.
It's disgusting how bad its gotten. It's assuredly partially nostalgia, but I think also partially truth, but the internet of my younger years I remember as being filled with labors of love, pasionately created content most places you look. Now it's difficult to find much that isn't lowest common denominator pandering or essentially white noise.
There are still plenty of labors of love all over the place, but my own personal experience is that if you create something as a sincere act of self expression or love for [x], people don't bother with it. I think a lot of what the internet has turned into has also primed us as users to seek that sort of stuff out. I've been trying to distance myself from a lot of services and the meme-o-sphere in favor of occupying the types of sites that used to matter to me (personal web pages, no social media, a couple blogs, rss from a few news sites, SLSK). I have partly HN to thank for this, after reading everyone's disgusting unsympathetic responses to Seattle's "homeless problem," I've distanced myself from the site and don't regret it one bit.
Edit: it really did feel like we were on the verge of the future, but the rise of communications technologies has hobbled all of us, and Idiocracy may be the only future that's possible if we don't slow the ocean currents to a halt first.
I don't think it's just nostalgia and survivorship bias. The median quality of content on the Internet has become objectively much worse, mostly due to a race to the bottom and a race to make the most "viral" thing to cash in quick. Media has always been a bit of a deflationary race to the bottom but this is quite extreme.
Some survival bias maybe, but I agree, content was better, and I believe mostly because there was more work put into the content. Today a lot of work goes into presentation, into using words in common enough dictionary ( see https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/09/22/a-thing-explainer-word-chec... )
But don't forget that there was less content, and soon the era of blogs rose, for which I read a fascinating description lately:
