I wish. Min wage in some parts of China provides a similar purchasing power as I have making more than 4x the min wage in the US. I would actually be able to afford a house in my lifetime if that were true.

In fact, when losing a war miserably, one should expect to make concessions to the winning side. This delusional belief that losers can dictate term terms will result in the death of every Ukrainian man of fighting age.

You don’t ask the loser what they want to stop the war. You go to the side that’s winning and say, “what would it take to get you to stop?”. Either Zelensky is a fool or he’s so posturing for more western money, because he has really no leverage and so his insistence on continuing the war is costing hundreds of thousands of lives. Support domestically for the war has collapsed, tens of thousands have fled the country, tens of thousands more dodge the draft. Everyone willing to fight in this war has already done so, they’re literally arresting people for draft dodging and telling them go to prison or join the military and we’ll absolve you of the “crime” of not wanting to fight a losing war. Is this just a collapse in western understanding of war after so long without a major one? Or is it just selfishness on the part of the west who cares more about “hurting Russia” than it does about irradiating Ukraine and destroying an entire generation of people? Or is it just idiocy on the part of Ukrainian leadership, who keep getting removed for not wanting to continue sending their men to die?

The people he’s appointed have exacerbated conflict around the world and brought us to the brink of a world war. He’s incompetent and stuck in an imagined past of American world policing that no one wants anymore.

I swam naked in the fountain at our towns courthouse as a child, and it was fine. You’re weird and creepy.

I still use those, how else can you hear your POST codes?

Sure it is buddy. Keep rejecting the truth in favor of what the party tells you, works out so well. It is after all their most important demand.

Yeah Malcom X was clearly trying to divide the left.

All Chinese companies, public or private, are required to have worker democracy. They have better required benefits than I do in the US, including maternity care, sick time, overtime pay, and a lower retirement age. If you support not trading with the US and India at all, I will acknowledge your consistency, but it seems to me that it’s likely you’re operating off of outdated information.

Yep. There’s millions of felons in the states who were criminalized for bullshit reasons. I’d say most criminals would make better politicians than the current bunch. Unfortunately he means Trump only.

I’ve been using Mozilla products for going on 20 years on my windows PCs, and other than websites arbitrarily deciding they don’t work on non chrome browsers, I’ve rarely had issues.

Today at work someone posted in the it slack channel complaining that chrome has auto restarted three times got mandatory updates in the last day wondering if he could get it stopped because it was messing with his work. I’m just over here using the same Firefox instance for months at a time, and even when I have to restart my whole computer it perfectly pulls up my previous session, even distributing the windows across their previous monitors. I never really liked chrome, idk how it caught on so much with people. I’d legit rather use pre-chromium edge, at least it was fast.

Noodles come from Asia, not Italy.

Tomatoes come from America.

So not much in spaghetti is from Italy.

Complete bullshit. I saw multiple when I was there, and some of the oldest mosques in the world are in China, dating back to at least 800AD

The question is foolish and reflects a complete lack of knowledge on the subject.

Taiwan is recognized as part of China by the majority of countries in the world, Including the US.

I’m not in tech, I’m in manufacturing, and I’ve become trapped in my job because wages in the industry have gone down by about 10% in the last year. Thankfully I’m grandfathered in from the relatively high wage I got in the post covid wage rises, but my raises have been sub inflation two years in a row. Even going by the entirely bullshit official government inflation numbers, my real wage has gone down since I started.

Prices on housing and food are so sky high, that I can’t even get approved for a one bedroom apartment or studio despite making $60k, because they’re charging 55% of my after tax wage per month. I don’t live on the coasts, either. The job I came from before this was paying me $21/hr, and is now offering $16/hr, which is literally less than Taco Bell and just above minimum wage. Food and other transient monthly costs are so high now that after feeding my family and paying my bills, I’ll be able to save about $3k this year, down from 8.5k last year.

When I first hugged my little brother after I switched to vaping he said, “you don’t smell like cigarettes” and my heart just broke. I can’t ever go back, even if vaping isn’t really helping me quit nicotine, it’s still saving them from being around the smell like I was when I was a little kid, and I hated that damn smell. Should’ve never started, but it’s easier said than done.

Pigs eat slop. If you feed it to a pig, it’s slop. Humans are long pigs, and they consume content, ergo, content is slop.

Restrictions on “politics” always and forever mean restrictions on heterodox political positions, while allowing orthodox views.