The hubris of thinking that a random driver-exploiting app is some kind of godsend utility and we'll be scared of losing it.

At this point the old school taxi companies have their apps too, you're not the cool kid anymore, uber

Scooter. Not an electric one. I had a thought once "hey I did ride one in childhood, maybe it can be a bit of nostalgic fun from time to time". Got myself the cheapest Chinese thing I could find, "no point investing too much into a fad".

Turned out a scooter is absolute peak urban mobility. Short distances become much shorter. Mid-long distances become short. Granted, for a longer trip somehow the time gains diminish, probably because it's not as efficient as a bike. But a scooter isn't a long-hauler. It's there to zip through an empty mall. It's there to be folded up in a second and brought into a bus or a shop without being a hassle. It's like 3-4 kg, not too fast for sidewalks but fast enough for bike roads, extremely easy to stop, doubles as a cart when carrying bags of groceries home.

The chinese one broke after 1 season because I was riding it everywhere. Then I got myself one from a better company, I chose it for small weight and portability. It's technically children's thing but I'm well below weight tolerance and also smol so it's easy to handle. It's already like a 5th year and whenever it's not raining or too cold I ride it for shopping, errands, leisure walks, to work... Almost daily.

I'm not American, can someone explain why Biden does this when his "one job" for 2024 is to not look like a fash?

Whether pro-Israeli bots like it or not, numerous acts by IDF do fit perfectly into descriptions of the acts forbidden by the convention. Even if the case is eventually dismissed it will be on technical grounds such as "it's actually a war crime not a genocide" not because "IDF did nothing wrong".

Was there a massive behind-the-scenes NWO plan between billionnaires, old aristocracy and top politicians to fuck up the world, reduce population etc? No, the world ran its natural, chaotic course for most of history.

Is there this kind of conspiracy now?

ABSOLUTELY YES.

In 2023 it is not possible to have any influence and not be aware of the climate disaster. Anyone who does have big influence and does not act to mitigate warming and its consequences is doing it willingly and with full conscience. Doubly so if they act to worsen the situation. It's almost like the elites read some of the crackhead theories and thought "hey, this is actually a decent plan!"

And another question: did someone already lay out a roadmap to google's collapse?

Right now we're going through a financial crisis, big tech needs to start making proper money so they try to squeeze the users. Google hopes to "drm the internet" to maximise ad revenue. Let's assume they succeed. 3 years from now the dystopia of dead adblockers is live, google and other leeches make bank off ads.

But there's no more adblockers and no more ad revenue left to squeeze out (because every internet user is already chained to a screen and force fed ads within ads). And shareholders demand increase in profits. What do they do then? Is there any hint of a long-term strategy? How long before the maximum theoretical ad revenue is reached and plateaus? Then COVID29 or something comes, fed raises rastes again and...?

Knuth's arrow shows up in... Magic the Gathering. There's a challenge of "how much damage can you deal with just 3 cards and without infinitely repeating loops?". Turns out that stacking doubler effects can get us really high. https://www.polygon.com/23589224/magic-phyrexia-all-will-be-one-best-combo-attacks-tokens-vindicator-mondrak

With one notable exception: report, inform and spread news about Swedish metalworker union strike against Tesla.

I like Stand-up Maths, usually starts with a real-life situation and escalates into proper math, sometimes also programming shows up.

Wait... It's not "firm" as in "company that made the stuff"? FIRMware = the official software a firm pushes to patch things they make

I recommend everyone who hasn't to look up the idea of "Potiomkin villages" (and subsequently Potiomkin anything eg. Potiomkin AI). In short: back in the tzarist days lower ranks put up mock villages which looked clean, modern and prosperous for higher ranks (and tzars) to see during visits. These mockups were essentially theatre decorations which hid the real state of the matters - dilapidated, dirty, poor and corrupt. For at least the last decade everything we saw of Russia was Potiomkin in nature - either to show off before the West or to hide corruption before own superiors.

let me introduce you to the progressive tax rates.

Imagine I earn 100k$/year. Let's say the tax rate is 30% at this point (I'm pulling these numbers from a hat), so I pay 30k, I'm left with 70k.

Next year I'm promoted to vice-CEO (I'm pulling these positions from a hat) and earn 500k$/year. Luckily my state says that at 250k$ the tax rate jumps to 50%. This means I pay 30% on all earnings up to 250k (30%250k=75k) and 50% on all above that (50%(500k-250k) = 125k), effectively I'm left with 300k in my pocket, more than 4x what I earned before despite the tax hike.

The next further year I became the final boss of capitalism - the CEO. Earnins jump again to 2mil$/year. Again luckily, my state says that all earnings above 1mil are taxed 75%. So again I pay the 30% on all earnings up to 250k (30%250k=75k), 50% on earnings between 250k and 1mil (50%(1m-250k) = 375k) and 75% on the earnings between 1m and 2m (75%*1m=750k). I'm left with 800k in my pocket, almost triple of what I earned last year despite the tax hike.

anyone richer than lower middle class will fight tooth and nail against progressive tax rates, but the fact is that at these levels of salary even if you're left with like 25% it's still a hideous pile of money.

Okay now I'm stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.

How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was... peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.

When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish... it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.

Don't get me wrong, it's not dunking on "dumb spanish speakers". There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it's famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that "Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian" etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.

Azerbaijan gets a nod to host COP29

Ah yes, host the climate summit in an authoritarian fossil fuel exporting country, it has never caused problems.

SALAD DRESSING?! Are you Americans going to a restaurant and ask the waiter to bring you a salad with clorox?

How does this work as a business? Are ad companies so desperate they will buy ad space on machines destined for people with zero disponible income and zero loan capability? Are the data from stalking people who can't afford anything that valuable?

At the end of the food chain surveillance capitalism works thanks to profit from conversion from ads to purchases. How do they expect conversion by targeting people who can hardly afford rent and necessities?

...all of which was announced via social media, which implies that despite shortages of food and water the people there have constant access to the Internet. Cyberpunk is now. Unless a thunder from the thunderstorm fries a cell tower nearby of course.

Blah blah blah

Rats know they're losing so they want to give farewell gifts to their cronies before leaving and punish the poors for not voting Tory.

Also helps to harm economy and national redources as much as possible so that the next administration fails to do anything and Tories can return in a further election cycle.

My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:

• insane amounts of empty space. It's one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn't count as "far away", another to experience it.
• guns. Not like in "them americans only shoot themselves", but like in "any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it's normal" wtf mates, you can't keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
• malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don't get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain "hey let's put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here"?
• And a very specific nitpick: calling places "european" like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being "the most europe-like cities in north america" and... they're not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that's it.

That's a 200IQ move from RSA. This court is embedded in the United Nations so if Israel wanted to ignore it they would have to withdraw from the UN and this is probably too much even for them. So we're up for a grim, but potentially entertaining festival of mental acrobatics, as the pawns sent by Netanyahu pretend that the anti-genocide convention is not actually an IDF checklist. Because it sure does read like one.

What could cause this??? What a mystery!! Why would people succum to viruses?!?!?! Inexplicable!!! If only here was a reason why so many people have weakened immune system??? No one could foresee this, also covid case number is low, don't look in this direction.

Back when Threads got released someone told me on Lemmy that Meta will not pull an EEE on ActivotyPub because something something antitrust Microsoft long ago millions of dollars.

How is Manifestv3 different?

Last time I checked BBC wasn't a Fox News cosplay

Maybe not yet, but...

• Spez will turn Reddit into a bot farm and sell this as training data
• Musk turns Twitter into a bigoted cesspool and will sell this as training data, which will subsequently be flagged for low quality (also: a botfarm)
• Threads is a corporate ad dashboard (and we already know how easy it is to GPT copy) and Zuck will sell this as training data
• Facebook is either dead or only good for boomers and Poles
• blogs are dead
• Fediverse is out there waiting to be scraped but possibly too small to sustain a big model

We'te getting there, hopefully.

Euthanasia will be legalised and normalised sooner than we expwct

Oh and I forgot an important one:

There is no way this could be prevented!!!!

There's probably much more. Half of them only recognised in their village somewhere in the middle of South Asia, the other half too burnt out with work and continuous crises to notice they could be good at something.

Hahaahahah sounds like a language model saw a few too many proisraeli websites and "Palestinian terrorists" became a default moniker for Palestinian people.

Goes to show the biases in any automated translation/text generation

Wait so americans wanted to solve trade imbalance with China, that is overreliance on import from China and indirectly reliance on the Chinese influence... By selling out control over American companies? Capitalists are dumb.

The commissioner responsible for the chat control was thoroughly corrupt by a company which created the scanning system. She was also either unbelievably dense or very, VERY dedicated to her role of a pearl-clutching, think-of-the-children granny. To the point of arguing with IT specialists on TV.

I'd prefer them to converge from Baldur's Gate 3 direction. Cast more or less established voice actors and give them the hype and marketing space usually found among movie/tv stars. "films and games converge" yea, when we treat a 200hour computer game the way we treat a long tv series and acknowledge the actors' contribution on the same level.

Yeah, the oligarchs. It's quite likely that top people at Wagner are/were rubbing shoulders with some of the Russia's rich so there may be more for the mercs in it than just the money.

Website not available in the EU due to GDPR

I recommend not clicking, such clauses usually mean there's some scummy bs running in the background.

Correct with the caveat that the Polish truckers have to comply with the EU regulations (laws designed to make sure drivers aren't forced to drive 12 hours straight and their trucks are not falling apart) while the Ukrainian ones don't. Polish and Ukrainian govts are slowly getting to work on the issue but that's just the beginning. When Poland and others accessed the EU the German truckers, farmers... were also quite dissatisfied. It's a complicated matter and while I wholeheartedly support Ukraine and agree that all measures should be taken to make grain exports smoother I should also acknowledge, that this time the conflict is not just mere pettiness from the Polish side.

It's a large rpg game with everything an rpg game has to have to be attractive and immersive but without forced bullshit. Note how Larian's previous games were also praised even without the context of "modern games". The studio is good at what they do so the game is good... and it doesn't break the previously successful formula, down to keeping local multiplayer - yes, it's an AAA game which lets two people play with a single copy. Would someone think of the shareholders?! Hopefully not and an essential aspect of rpg - actually playing with other people in a shared fiction - is there.

Besides contrasting it with greedy monetisation BG3 needs to be compared with its precedessors (Divinity games and Baldur's Gate 1 and 2) and it passes the tests with flying colors from what I read. Then we can compare to other big single-player rpgs like Pathfinder and again BG3 doesn't disappoint.

That Larian did not over-monetise the game is really just cherry on top and I didn't even play the thing yet.

Also Europe gave away so many shells that now the European ammo factories work to replenish the most basic strategic stockpiles of the EU militaries.

You better start enjoying them anyway. Unless we get really good at sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere it will be only getting worse. The atmosphere-ocean system isn't at equilibrium yet and we keep pumpin' every year.

...until morale improves.

No no no no. It's, you know, just warfare. Terrible things happen at wars. But you can always send more missiles and bombs so Israel can end the war faster! No genocide to speak of! Just mundane defensive war.

(/s obviously)

The link does not say in what way people were not supposed to share.

The link is the same kind of self-delusion people show around all of these generative tools: "look the faces are weird, the bird has wrong feathers, the cat has only 2 legs, nothing to worry about" while forgetting that most everything else in a clip works well and that it is the first-of-the-first releases which will get gradually better.