azertyfun

"We're too poor to afford to risk anything" is insulting to all the popular revolutions which happened because people were actually poor. Like, sorry not sorry, but the median American proletarian may live paycheck-to-paycheck but still lives in untold luxury compared to a 1917 Bolshevik who had to go to war sharing two boots and one rifle with multiple people, or the median revolutionary in Nepal last year (one of the poorest countries in the world).

Americans really have it too good to risk it all, that analysis is correct. They could have it a lot better, sure, but threat of not having it so good anymore is what keeps them complacent.

Convict you in absentia then use the judgement as an excuse to freeze your bank account and ban you from all forms of banking (something that the US has the power to impose on foreigner because they hold every western bank by the balls due to their reliance on the fed)?

I don't know if they would do it, but it certainly wouldn't be unconstitutional; the US have long made it clear that foreigners on foreign land don't have any legal rights whatsoever. I would be having a long conversation with lawyers to get some hard assurances before going down that path.

De Wever is a far-right populist, this is just bluster.

Don't forget about the political clash as well. Flemish separatist movements have always ran into a brick wall: Brussels is majority French-speaking, entirely within Flemish territory, and wants nothing to do with their nonsense. No matter how much Flanders might want to cut off Wallonia and reunite with their orange daddy, they won't be able to bring Brussels with them, and that would be political and economic suicide.

This American obsession with those awful abbreviations is exhausting. Foreigners should not have to remember if AL is Alabama or Alaska or MI is Mississippi or Michigan, especially when lacking any context clue as to which one it is. "ME" for Maine is straight up evil. Can you name the TLD of Peru of the top of your head?

There are places where abbreviations make sense: where there will be extreme repetition (TLDs, letters) or where space and readability are under tight constraint (license plates, next to the points counter on a football broadcast). An already extremely sparse infographic with no hard layout restriction is decidedly not either of those things and should therefore just use the full goddamn name instead of trying to signal "hey look this is made by an American for an American, fuck everyone else".

... This is not a made-up thought experiment though? We do have empirical data? Out of the five (5) companies mentioned in this thread, one (1) does not fit the pattern outlined in the OP. Seems pretty clear that something is going on. Unless you can point to some kind of sampling bias (by finding additional counterexamples), I don't see how you can just chalk it up to confirmation bias.

Sure, it could all be coincidence, in the same way that maybe the dog really did eat my homework. Not a very convincing explanation.

Interestingly I never see this kilometric leeway given to tech companies when discussing, say, their technically unproven surveillance practices, which pretty much everyone readily accept as fact.
That so many people are fighting this particular point is inherently curious. For "some reason" accusations of misogyny require a much higher burden of proof than many other kinds of accusations, which is really more a reflection on the people debating this than on the tech companies themselves (which we already know are run by complete and utter human shitstains anyway).

Except the Armageddon is real but no-one will rise up to save us when every major city is nothing but glowing embers under an ever gray nuclear sky while the remnants of humanity fight each other with sticks over the last grain silos.

So-called American "revolutionaries" make me sick with their reckless disregard for the unavoidable responsibility their country has with regards to their military. An "accelerated downfall" won't just affect you bozos. Especially not if the means are "stoking the fire of imperialism".

If I could press a button to accelerate the US downfall and magically contain the fighting to the lower 48 in a way that leaves whoever is left standing nuke-less, I would, but that's not an option on the table, so barring that, please vote against the guy who really can't be trusted with the nuclear briefcase, yeah???

The complete fracturing of children's education post-war cannot be understated as a society-wide catastrophe.

Ironically stay-at-home mothers were already not the norm pre-war for the poors/minorities. Which participated in generational poverty as those children had a worse access to parenting and education. But the post-war middle class suddenly fell into that pattern as well, with similar results.

On top of that you've got the meteoric rise of car-centric urbanism, fracturing communities. It used to take a village to raise a child, now they can't even walk across their neighborhood unsupervised because the roads aren't safe for children. Indirectly, parents trust fewer and fewer community members to watch their children, making the task of raising small children unusually difficult and tiring.

Countries with more socialized childcare and better working conditions were better off overall, but the entire western world is facing a natality crisis because it truly is harder to raise a child now than it used to be. Which is absolutely bonkers because the world is also richer and more productive than at any other time in history.

Yeah sorry but that's completely sensible. Grid-scale solar is awesome, but private solar is a symptom of complete government failure.

Compared to grid-scale you have:

• No economies of scale
• Massive investments required to force utilities to upgrade transformers (here in Belgium it's quite common in the summer that whole neighborhoods have their inverters shut off because the voltage is too high because the low-voltage grid simply wasn't meant to flow in the other direction)
• Horrendous fiscal incentives that reward the rich and punish the poor (who are forced to shoulder the distribution costs for the rich who are still using the grid but "offsetting" it with net metering).

Getting ~30% back on the energy you put back into the grid is fair when you that into account (distribution is more than half of your actual energy cost, therefore putting 1 kWh back into the grid does not discharge you from paying for 1 kWh of distribution costs!).

If the government was doing its fucking job no house would have solar on the roof (except in remote places for outage preparedness) because when you account for externalities it doesn't make any goddamn financial sense. Put those panels in former colza fields by the GW if you want cheap electricity.

Or it's the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children's show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it's easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

Good for you if that's your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it's an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.

I tried but like most children's shows I just can't deal with (at least the early seasons') pacing. It's excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn't seem to be trying to get anywhere.

Typically those children shows' pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn't change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.

General anesthesia is very hard to get right, and requires a dedicated specialist with years of experience monitoring you at all times and even then people occasionally die from it.

When I get surgery from an alien veterinarian, IDC what it is I'll stick to local anesthesia.

Wait wait wait wait, where does this idea come from that the German people weren't to blame for Nazism? They were to blame. They were blamed. Their country was partitioned, their army was dismantled, their families were torn apart, and they endeavored to teach future generations what they did wrong. It did not even remotely make up for their nation's crimes against humanity, but they were "lambasted".

Do not weaponize history to justify your own apathy. These lessons were paid in blood. Yet new blood is being shed, and every American who does not fight against the regime is responsible. Yes, it's an unfair ask; no-one wants to live through troubled times. But you are living in them so stop cowering behind historical wrongs to feel better about your inaction.