Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn’t do anything? Do you think it’s because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you’ve circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you’d hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

Then you’re knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner’s dilemma and all that. That’s what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn’t captured by ideology and corporate interests.

Yeah as I expected you’re projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.

I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).

Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.

You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.

(Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)

Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.

IMO the proper thing to do is to answer the question and make damn sure the poster isn’t falling for the XY Problem.

Sometimes the weird solution is justified by a weird context, and we gotta treat people like adults. But also, you’re probably asking the wrong question.

Like, I can tell you how to disconnect your bike’s brake lines, but if you’re asking how to do that with no context I would most definitely like to know what problem you think you’re solving.

It’s so easy to tell this map was made by a Brit. Wales gets its own color (despite largely not speaking Welsh) but Belgium and Switzerland are monochrome (despite having multiple federally recognized and geographically partitioned monolinguistic regions and their own flavors of historical-but-rarely-spoken language)?

Only the Bri’ish would be haughty enough to assume their flavour of federal governance is so unique.

(I don’t actually care, it’s just very interesting how even such an innocent map actually shows a strong political/cultural bias)

I mean, he’s actively supporting the opposition (Trump) right now. Were Trump to win then he’d certainly be in a very good position within Trump’s desired oligarchy. Until then he’s just a very rich asshole whose main major concrete political power comes from his ownership of Twitter and (largely artificial) audience. If anything his support of Trump kneecaps him in his ability to run his businesses as the Biden and hypothetical Harris administrations are not as likely to let him keep getting away with all the blatantly illegal shit he keeps doing.

Michael Bloomberg OTOH fits the term pretty well, as he’s a very major donor to the DNC and that certainly makes him very close to the ear of the president and policy decisions.

That conspiracy theory is so dumb.

The government almost certainly doesn’t need a backdoor as telegram is almost completely unencrypted (only one-to-one channels can be but aren’t by default). The real (but more boring) conspiracy theory is that governments generally don’t mind Telegram because its willfully terrible security model allows them to keep an eye on terrorists and activists’ communications (I have a hard time believing that the NSA or even DGSE don’t have their own backdoors already).

However the EU does have laws mandating the moderation of said unencrypted messages, especially when it comes to CSAM, which Telegram is notoriously poorly moderated. It’s certainly reason enough to arrest and question this guy, at least until formal charges are brought or he walks free. Maybe there are additional political considerations, but there doesn’t have to be.

Also how would arresting this guy help with backdooring. He doesn’t have access to the source code. Whoever he calls to get that done is out of reach of the French police. He has no reason not to disable that backdoor as soon as he gets out of the EU. If he can be bought off he already has been (Crypto AG style except way lamer because no-one clever&important trusts Telegram), you don’t need to arrest someone to pay them. I’m no DSGSE bigwig but pressuring lower level engineers to backdoor their code seems like a 1000% more effective approach.

We need an app that keeps the gender ratios even.

Isn’t that what Tinder is indirectly trying to achieve with its “Get Super Gold+++ insta premium” business model? To get a somewhat even gender ratio you need to get a bunch of men to drop out, and asking for absurd amounts of money is certainly one way to go about it. Though I hear even premium tinder users vastly outnumber the women.

A raffle could work in theory, but upwards of 80 % of men will have to be thrown out and as a woman I wouldn’t see why I would settle for that instead of an app where attractive men will be falling over themselves to talk to me.

AFAIK the only proven methods for not-super-attractive men to get matches is to either go offline, or be bi/gay. Do with that advice what you will.

Try to turn up the contrast and saturation to 200 %, that should increase the comments on picture quality :)

FR tho, mine is also impressively thin but like… I discovered that when I unpacked it? Thinness is not effectively conveyed by marketing material, and maybe it’s because I haven’t set foot in an electronics store in years but aren’t TVs typically laid out in a way that you don’t see them from the side?

Maybe I’m totally off-base and it truly is a big factor for normies shopping for a TV, but I just can’t even really understand how a 3 cm thick panel would significantly impact sales compared to panel tech, size, cost, and ancillary features.

However now that I think about it, maybe “thick” LCDs can’t go bezel-less? That I could easily understand how it impacts the overall esthetics (or even practicality with respect to Ambilight for instance).

What’s the overlap of the general public, people who buy “fancy sculpture TVs”, and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain’t shit.

Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer’s understanding of “the younguns and their flat-screen television sets” as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.

Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.

And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it’s based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.

I can totally see “make it as thin as XYZ” being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).

Frutiger Aero my beloved. The apotheosis of skeuomorphic design, killed by a neverending downward spiral towards the least distinctive, creative, and inspired designs imaginable.

It’s really ironic that this design cycle coincided with the rise of high-DPI displays. All those pixels used to upscale monochrome boxes with square corners. What a tragedy.

Just live in a country which refuses to acknowledge cell broadcast exists, then you’ll die in peaceful silence in the next national emergency while operators take several hours to to send 11 million unicast SMS.

Taps forehead

In 2022 she announced she was diagnosed with a neurological disorder (SPS) and hasn’t performed in public in 4 years. She delivered such an incredible vocal performance against all expectations.

Corporate behemoths are going to keep doing what they do best.

Their ISO-whatever certification says they gotta get that kind of software, so they do. Whether it is found to actually increase business risk does not matter in the slightest, what matters is that a box is checked for the audit.

It’s like Oracle or IBM, who did not contribute anything of value to the world since about 2005 and notoriously have some of the most aggressive licensing lawyers on the planet. But there are lots of companies out there who sort a product segment from Old to New and pick the first result on account of the fact that it’s “established”, “reputable” and “reliable”, every other consideration be damned.

The Catholic Church: Co-opts a pagan holiday and re-brands it

Two millennia of tradition: Mix pagan imagery with Christian imagery

Nonbelievers: Co-opt it back without the explicitly Christian imagery

You: Nooooooo it’s religious!

The Church has had an iron fist over much of my continent for near two millenia, so of course you can find a religious tie for every holiday (except the First of May probably). However my family is almost completely non believing and we’ve always celebrated Christmas and Easter, with Coca-Cola Santa and no Mass. Why this laic co-optation is so controversial I will never understand.

Easter is not inherently a christian holiday goddammit. At least not in its popular celebration. Last I checked Jesus didn’t pop eggs from his butt when he resurrected (that we know of) and the preachings of the Easter Bunny are unfortunately not canon in Catholicism.

To complain about “religious persecution” of profoundly pagan (if not outright heretical depending on who you ask) traditions is… certainly an interesting exercise in religious cognitive dissonance.