It’s inevitable for ads supported social media.

They need to keep you “engaged” to show you more ads, and the most effective way to do it is to foster conflict.

How’s the leopard treating you, Bill?

You underestimate how much interface and algorithms impact how people interact with eachother.

The problem is that this is screwing the restaurants too, either through reputation damage or through empty tables if the scalpers don’t manage to sell the reservation on time.

So, what’s he going to do about it?

0% tariffs

Sounds reasonable, we just need to set some ground rules.

Free trade area with the United States of Chlorinated Chicken

Ha ha ha, fuck no.

To be fair, brands sabotage their own phones to try to force people to buy a new one every year. 1000 euros would be fine if the phone lasted the better part of a decade, but between lagging or non existent software updates, broken updates, and no affordable reparability, 1000 doesn’t buy you a phone it pays for an expensive rental.

Inflation doesn’t mean everything increases prices uniformly. Desktop PCs, for example, were more expensive in absolute value in the 1980s, and the average desktop would cost more than $4000 if they had kept with inflation.

“US President has an uneventful Thursday and doesn’t crash the world economy”.

I pity The Onion’s writers.

We didn’t have the Intel 8080 chip that the Altair computer ran on, So Paul got to work writing a program that would simulate one on Harvard’s PDP-10 mainframe. This allowed us to test our software without needing an actual Altair.

So, basically:

We are going to write a compiler, but first we are going to write a Virtual Machine from scratch because the hardware is too expensive.

Good times.

The Trump administration got a human trafficker in Romanian custody free for some vacations in the US. That’s the only thing I have to say about the US and people in foreign custody.

The US interferes with foreign custody regularly, both through legal and illegal channels. The judge will only accept the excuse if he’s dumb.

As a native Portuguese speaker I found it very useful when I started to learn English. And even nowadays having some form of “visual map” between English and Portuguese at least for more erudite words - which tend to be the ones that are shared between more languages - helps me write English better.

The similarities between English and German also ended up helping me learn German.

Going by how ortography changes have gone in other languages, I doubt it.

Besides English, if English fix its ortography it’s going to become much harder to learn for speakers of other European languages - as confusing the pronunciation rules and exceptions are, they are caused by writing things similarly to other European languages while mangling the original pronunciation.

Revolutions need organization. Organization needs third spaces were people can meet, discuss, and organize. Most of the US has basically no third spaces outside of churches, and this is very much by design.

The thing is that when he says Soros he doesn’t mean Soros, he means something that would make him sound even more like a Nazi.

You misunderstand how most dictatorships work. You either crown someone absolute king - and there’s less than a handful of them - or you pretend to work within a constitutional framework which is the most popular form of dictatorship by far and the only realistic option in the US, at least for now. The latter introduces limits to what a dictator can do without breaking the illusion that everything is working as it should.

I can’t overstate how much effort the garden variety dictatorship puts into making everything seem “business as usual”.

If Trump goes there he might as well try to formally replace the entire constitution.

I know this one! What’s the last sentence of 12th amendment?

Of course there will be elections. Very few dictatorship skip elections outright nowadays.