That website is not abusing query strings, though, its usage of query strings is perfectly cromulent. And tfa is not saying not to use query strings, but not to append random garbage to other people's URLs.
My city is deadlocked on doing anything about the literal crimes I’ve described because acting against violent offenders is seen as oppressing the downtrodden. Building new shelter capacity is insanely difficult because no one wants concentrations of this near them, and concentrated homeless services turn the area into a waste land (like pioneer square) due to the amount of criminal and antisocial behavior. Raising enough money in taxes seems out of the question because everyone thinks someone else should pay.
So you get common crime and antisocial behavior in much of the city and no one can do anything about it.
This only solves one problem (you don't get thrown in jail for using drugs), but there are other problems. Drug dealers and gangs still exist. The drug user doesn't know what he is actually buying. Overdoses are easy to do since you don't actually know what you bought.
The way to solve these issues is legalization and regulation.
The overdramatic tone is pretty funny. "You are in [wrong city]. We could send a team on ninjas to kill you right now, but we chose not to. You are welcome."
It's an odd criticism to begin with. The Switch is a toy, it's not a PC. Apart from a few shitty PC ports, it runs its games just fine, so in what sense is it really "underpowered"? Would Super Mario Bros. Wonder be a better game if the Switch 2 could push twice as many polygons?
"The Switch is a toy, it's not a PC. Apart from a few shitty PC ports, it runs its games just fine, so in what sense is it really "underpowered"?"
Well this comment down below brings it about really quickly:
"Switch 2 has better FPS for Switch 1 games. Like BotW stops having terrible FPS drops in certain scenarios."
If you need a newer-gen piece of hardware to run an older-gen FIRST PARTY title at acceptable speeds without issues then I'm going to say you are ABSOLUTELY and PURPOSEFULLY selling underpowered hardware (and Nintendo has been doing it since the days of the NES. So many first-party titles with slowdowns because the hardware was not up to the task.)
Switch also tried to live in the portable console niche, above handhelds, and this was several years before Steam Deck. SOC development favors the later devices, obviously.
Compared to Xbox and PlayStation it’s vastly underpowered.
They’re not “shitty PC ports”, they’re ports that people tried, likely managed to one platform and then when they tried on switch 2 realised just how far behind it is.
>Compared to Xbox and PlayStation it’s vastly underpowered.
Sure, the same way an IPhone 17 is vastly underpowerred compared to a PS5. I'd hope we don't need to go into details on why that's not a very useful comparison.
>They’re not “shitty PC ports”,
Garbage in, garbage out. They are called "shitty PC ports" because the port to the PC from the PS5/XBX was bad, without the specs excuse.
By "a nail in the coffin", do you mean that people will stop buying Switches? Because I would be very surprised by that.
It's not like most people even know what a Steam Deck is. At the moment at least, the two devices mostly don't compete for the same audience. And if you want to play Nintendo's games - which a lot of people do, they're usually quite good - you don't have much choice anyway.
Nintendo's core audience has always been children, their parents, and casual players, but with some console cycles they expand into other niches, as has (resoundingly) been the case with the Switch; the Switch appealed to virtually anyone interested in playing games on the go, including people who otherwise don't usually buy the newest Nintendo console/games for their polish and/or family-friendliness. For a long time it was by far the most convenient way to play Skyrim or Witcher 3 or what-have-you on buses, planes, at school etc.
The Steam Deck doesn't cut into Nintendo's core audience, but it does draw away people who would have bought the Switch 1/2 for those reasons -- the audience that made the Switch 1 such an overwhelming success. Anecdotally, I've had multiple non-techies bring up the Steam Deck unprompted, usually with an impression of 'the Switch but better' and/or 'more adult-oriented'.
Historically, when the market they created starts to become saturated, Nintendo starts looking to pivot. So the Steam Deck might not kill the Switch 2, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't kill the Switch 3.
> It's not like most people even know what a Steam Deck is.
Steam basically is PC gaming at this point, which is still a massive market that is almost as big as the entirety of console gaming.
I know there are those out there, but I would be slightly surprised if a PC gamer didn't know what a Steam Deck was in 2026.
As someone who has pretty much every console system and most handhelds, I didn't spring for a Switch 2, and it is for the exact reason the thread parent mentions. I do like Nintendo games, as they are consistently high quality, but they are not usually graphics reliant for fun, and the Switch is good enough still, and I don't love paying $90 USD for a single game when I can buy $5-20 games on Steam and play them across multiple devices.
The Switch also followed a poor WiiU cycle that caused some pent up demand and launched with Zelda BotW which was an epic title. People bought Switches just to play that game and then stuck around to buy other titles on the platform. The Switch 2 doesn't have either going for it.
I'm in the same boat as you, I also don't feel the need to buy a Switch 2 yet. Also, game sharing on Steam with my kids is just so much more pleasant. Having multiple kids and multiple Switches was such a shit show of what felt like manual license and provisioning management that I'm not really keen on giving Nintendo more money at this time.
Yes, Nintendo is essentially the futuristic version of Disney. And families will continue to pay a premium in exchange for a curated experience that you know will be OK for your child.
There will never be proper studies with control groups to test exactly how harmful beating children is, so this is an unrealistic standard to expect. Given this context, the person you're responding to is correct: we have overwhelming evidence that corporal punishment is harmful in general and very harmful for children.
The point isn't just that we can do RCTs. The point is that the methods used are not even adequate on their own terms. Just as one example, the standard method with longitudinal data would be to throw in individual fixed effects. But they don't do that. Another example: I know of no serious cross-country panel analysis with (say) time and country fixed effects to examine the effect of national spanking bans. There is a cross-country cross-sectional analysis, which is just not adequate to draw any conclusions.
Even if the methods were the best possible given the difficulties, you wouldn't then say this was "overwhelming" evidence. You'd say "the best evidence we've got" and you'd then assume that parents don't know nothing and exercise a bit of humility. (Though to be fair, that argument does not generalise to the Singapore decision-making authorities! Maybe they don't have any deep local knowledge that should lead us to trust their judgment.)
Looking back at my own time in school, my primary bully already got beaten up by his own parents, which probably caused him to act out in school in the first place. I would not wish him to also get beaten by the school, and I do not believe that this would have helped me in any way.
People respond differently to different things. One bully who gets punched back will stop, while another will escalate. Trying to fix bullying requires a solution tailored to each individual bully.
I doubt his parents beat him because he bullied other kids though. In other words, if the kid thought that reducing his bullying would mean no beatings, perhaps he would have acted differently.
Well said. I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying, nice and simple as that would be.
> I think we all shouldnt be too quick to assume that the problem starts with the person doing the bullying
I don't think anyone is making that assumption, but being ok with corporal punishment likely comes down to three things:
1. We should care more about victims of violence than perpetrators, and all measures should be taken to protect victims and prevent victimization, even if it hurts perpetrators. Meaningful consequences for violent behaviour is critical.
2. The belief the physical deterrents work, if applied consistently and not abused to the point where it doesn't provide clear guidance as to acceptable behaviour.
3. That the primary job of schools and educators is to provide a safe and effective learning environment. Being therapists that get to the root of problematic behaviour is neither in their training nor in their job description.
How about when the perpetrators are also victims? If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home (as is often the case), don't both kids deserve help and support? Just beating up child A is no more productive a solution than throwing people in jail.
I grew up in a place where teachers could and did beat children. School kids there are far better behaved than kids in US public schools. I’m not making an argument for it, just an observation of effectiveness. It works.
> If child A is bullying child B because they themselves are suffering abuse at home
Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others, just like it wouldn't excuse breaking the law. You can say "here is the punishment for your bad behaviour, now let's ALSO have child services remove you from that environment AND have the justice system punish your parents' bad behaviour". Everybody has their job and if they do their job, then what's the problem?
> Just beating up child A is no more productive a solution than throwing people in jail.
Firstly, there's no "just do X" for multifaceted problems. Secondly, people these days dramatically underestimate the value of prison. Over 60% of violent crime is committed by under 5% of the population. Don't underestimate the value of simply removing repeat violent offenders from society.
> Experiencing hardship doesn't excuse violence against others
I totally agree, but I don't agree that forgoing violence as a punishment is the same as excusing the bad behaviour. The best outcome for everyone is surely rehabilitation, no? There are other punishment options if you still insist on inflicting some hardship.
> Over 60% of violent crime is committed by under 5% of the population. Don't underestimate the value of simply removing repeat violent offenders from society.
That neatly avoids the question of why they reoffend, which is precisely my point. If prison is effective as a deterrent then why do they keep coming back? "Simply removing them" for a period of time simply perpetuates the problem, thus helping to ensure more violent crime in the future, not less.
> I don't agree that forgoing violence as a punishment is the same as excusing the bad behaviour. The best outcome for everyone is surely rehabilitation, no?
The dirty secret is that we have absolutely no idea how to rehabilitate anyone. Even our best therapies for people who desperately want to change their behaviour are only 40% effective at only slightly modifying behaviour, and most violent criminals unfortunately have no such desire.
This is partly psychology's fault for doing such poor science for decades (35% replication rate!), but partly also the false premise that there are no innate biological factors at play.
> That neatly avoids the question of why they reoffend, which is precisely my point. If prison is effective as a deterrent then why do they keep coming back?
This is already known but ignored in "polite" society: poor impulse control. Most repeat offenders only stop offending once they age out of impulsive behaviour, not because they had some kind of revelation or personal growth; stories like this conflate correlation and causation.
Age is the best behaviour modifier we know, because hormonal profiles change, which ends up changing strength and frequency of the impulses we have to overcome. Imprisoning repeat violent offenders until they age out of it poor impulse control is totally a policy that should be on the table.
At the point a parent is beating up their own kid I wonder what options are available. If they're removed from the family then placing them in foster care almost always leads to worse outcomes than leaving them with the abusive family. The state doesn't know how to raise children.
Then surely the focus should be on solving that problem? Just clamping down on the proximate cause doesn't really help - as others have pointed out, it seems likely to incite revenge attacks rather than stopping the bullying.
That's the thing, it's unclear if it's a problem that can be solved. It has to do with fundamental benefits of staying with biological family, and avoiding the extremely negative consequences of lack of attachment.
My bully had two much older brothers and I guess that's how he learned to communicate, so I communicated back. We became friends afterwards.
Looking back it's not the physical bullying that was the most damaging, but social. I went to a different middle school and without a support network it was difficult to say the least.
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