Omg. 😆

Ah, so same as in the west!

Esp if you can pick the person. Remote plumbing with a cash reward sounds good to me.

Online spaces are limitless, basically. If you don’t like living under someone else’s rules it’s dead easy to spin up your own space with your own rules. The dictatorship-ness of these virtual spaces keeps then semi-civil and on-topic. Ideally, at least. We are talking spherical cows here, obvs.

Real life spaces, not so easy to spin up your own country. So we have to use a political system that (on paper, at least) caters to the majority without stepping on the minorities too much.

Online? Dictatorship. Let the guidelines be clear and the conversations civil and on topic. If my speech isn’t wanted in a particular community I can find another, or make another where I’m the dictator.

IRL? Democracy. It sucks, but it’s better than everything else. I do, however, wish there were better laws forcing media to be locally owned, and bound to be truthful. And some way to keep late stage capitalism’s hand off the scales.

It’s so damn great!

And that just underlines my decision to quit Duolingo when it got contaminated with AI stop.

I can tell you from experience that AI was worse at teaching me a language than humans were.

Because Oracle sucks donkey balls.

Lol, think I was gushing about Hyprland there.

Might be a little out of control…

There’s a lot of “chocolate” in the US that doesn’t qualify as chocolate in sane countries because it has too much wax or other additives in it. US “chocolate” bar in Canada has to be called a “candy” bar.
Same way their “milk” has too much other garbage in it to qualify as “milk” in Canada.

Lindt, otoh, is /actual/ chocolate. So it’s seen as luxurious.

Yet another reason to look at non US CPUs going forward. Either RISC-V or ARM from Europe/Korea.

This. Only the server owner needs a plexpass.

The AI slop is why I quit Duolingo after my 1500+ day streak.

Yup, between that and the lack of gun control is no wonder the US is the way it is. On paper, that level of freedom is lovely. In practice it just lets the worst people be violent assholes with zero consequences.

I’ll take the German/Canadian/NZ approach every day!

Yup. Same goes for being employed - if they’re publicly traded they’ll almost certainly treat their staff like absolute garbage.

The policy damage is easily repairable. The reputation damage is going to take a lot longer. Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose, and the US has been shedding a LOT of trust recently.

Hell, you couldn’t pay me to cross the border right now. (Literally - my employer offered me a 20% raise to go work in the NY office and I laughed at them.) I don’t want to risk getting a one way trip to El Salvodore because some psycho with a badge doesn’t like the shirt I’m wearing, or whatever fucking excuse they use.

Decades. Lifetimes, even.
The US has shown that it’s not a reliable partner. Sure, the next pres might be sane, but what about the one after that? They’ve shown they’re more than happy to elect a con man and do sfa to keep him in check - they’ve done it twice now, so it’s near 100% that they’ll do it again.

The entire USA is in FO stage of FAFO, and now China and Europe will be the players to watch. I mean, other than watching the US flush itself down the toilet to own the Libs, obvs.

So much this. Closest we get seems to be a Prius. :(