This is what I’ve seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we’re learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren’t consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.
It was definitely considered piracy by the public at the time. Everyone I knew called it a “legal grey area”, but as far as I know it was legally permissable.
The media companies tried their hardest to make it sound like you were destroying the entire industry and you’d go to jail for life as soon as they caught you.
What makes me mad is the boomers I watched copy rentals and NFL games are the same ones telling me I’m stealing by using an ad blocker.
I agree on board games.
See if there are Board Game shops in your city. If they have tables for Magic the Gathering you can check their calendar and usually find open board gaming nights. In my experience people usually bring a bunch of their own games and are open to new players. Some of the people in our group don’t own any games; the rest of us are always bringing more than we can possibly play anyway.
I have no advice, but I have a similar issue. Firefox on Windows 10 with just uBlock Origin.
YouTube works fine at first, but if I watch a lot of videos in a row then after an hour or so it starts to load slowly. Then it stutters, then finally I get audio and a single frame for the whole video. Shorts seem to accelerate the descent. I haven’t tried live streams yet, but I bet I’d get the same result.
Completely closing all Firefox instances and reopening fixes it for an hour. It acts like a memory leak, but I’m not even close to maxing out my RAM when it crashes. My fans get loud which makes me wonder if it’s botching the hardware acceleration.
Sadly I can’t help beyond telling you you’re not crazy.
Most importantly, since there are infinite other options in-between that are just as likely as God existing, some can have negative reward values if you choose “worship God anyway”. It is just as likely that there is a vengeful Anti-God that will torture you for eternity if you worship the Abrahamic God, which would completely negate the rewards from the original wager.