Talking about cars in the UK, one Aussie chimed in with “it’s like driving your car on the beach at low tide while it’s high tide”

I usually steer clear of religion but the Rorschach test idea is amazing, never looked at it that way until now. Cheers!

I think most rational people would like an opposition party who brings good ideas with solid justification to the table. A group of professional politicians who argue in good faith, working for the betterment of their electorate. People who can at least be respected by the international community, willing to tackle the real problems facing the world as a whole.

If we’re talking about dictatorship perhaps it’s worth scrutinising the people arguing for total immunity for the president. It’s especially worth an in-depth look at the relationships they form with leaders of other nations and the principles they share.

As a non-US person, I want to point out that US politics has shifted so far to the right that centrists in any other country would look like far left to you.

deleted by creator

A heads-up to anyone running old laptops; buy genuine replacement batteries while they’re available!

I have an aging XPS 13 and of course, Dell have discontinued the battery line. Opened it up one day and every cell had puffed out. It took buying a couple of fakes before finally finding a decent reseller on eBay who stocked what I needed. The fake batteries were not recognised by Dell’s hardware detection system thing, I imagine lots of other manufacturers might implement the same feature.

And you sound like someone who puts their political stooges on a pedestal.

deleted by creator

It’s like the Fonz jumping the shark all over again.

As they say in Thailand, same same but different.

woooosh

deleted by creator

And with the decline in birth rates armies are going to have smaller pools of people to recruit from. Even the US army is experiencing a shortfall, and it’s not getting better any time soon. Perun did a great video of this just recently.

It makes sense that if militaries won’t be able to recruit the quantity and quality of troops that they would like to, they’d need to supplement those numbers with some kind of force multiplier.

https://piped.video/watch?v=Ga2PA-vEiFk

Dude. The UK broke its trade deals and left. Now it pays increased taxes on all goods and services from the EU.

deleted by creator

A strong neodymium magnet so you can stick your wallet to your fridge.

Replace ‘Trump’ with ‘Russia’.

They are both entangled in a fight for survival. Both of them need the support of the US people if they have any hope of making it. It’s imperative for either party that they win this and nothing is off the table when it comes to politics or influence.

There is an existential war at hand and none of the embattled parties give two shits about the aftermath.

This comment feels like it’s been on the Fediverse too long. To continue the analogy, your small town suddenly starts hosting a lot of voices on soap boxes. The more visited the town becomes, the more town criers it gets. Those criers bring their audiences, so not only do you have long queues for the two public bathrooms but you get fights in the town square; struggles over ideologies and all the underhanded trolling that entails. Corpos move in, governments move in, all eager to bend the ear of anyone unfortunate enough to get in grabbing range.

I liked Digg. I loved Reddit. At some point you just need to make a stand. Money and profitability aren’t part of the equation, fuck’em. I’ll keep my small town tyvm.

Asking why is meaningless, it’s an artifact of how our brains are wired.

Our brains are evolved to try to understand the world around us in terms of reason; if this happens then that happens. It makes sense when looking at the chain of results that cascade out of the fireworks of creation; chemistry, biology and physics. The arrow of time points one way and we have evolved around that premise.

It doesn’t mean that our intuitions are correct or even vaguely headed down the right path. We’re a victim of that arrow of time, the path of the world we live in.

I can’t speak to the other countries on this list but South Africa had ample access to vaccines. The take-up was low. Reasons offered were doubts around the efficacy and conservative attitudes to modern medicine.