I don’t think so, I have witnessed so.

You have inadvertently hit the nail on the head. They just call it socialism. There are several shades of poverty, for different reasons. One shade is due to the fact that a lot of services, like welfare, education, and medical, are only available to you in your hometown, probably the one you were born in. But if you have migrated from bf nowhere Gansu province to a big city where the jobs are, you rid yourself of that safety net. It’s hard/costly to change this hometown registration so most don’t and become quasi undocumented workers in their own country. And they are the ones who work insane hours in shitty and dangerous work conditions and it’s then who will look for anything to save a yuan.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to China. But even in the 2000s it was not uncommon to have to pay for toilet paper at a vending machine. Not at all public facilities but the more local you went, the fewer tourists would be there, the more this happens. So getting roll for watching an ad is an improvement.

And as the article points out, they cannot have nice things, i.e. free sandpaper toilet roll, because people will just steal it. I feel like this becomes exponentially less dystopian when you frame it as you can either have no paper at all or watch the ad/pay for it.

And there is another cultural difference. The Chinese are more like the Romans when it comes to these bodily functions. Much more willing to take care of it communally or at a hole in the ground surrounded by a thigh high “modesty” barrier. So asking an attendant for extra roll is something that the majority of Chinese would have less of a problem with, I think.

How dare you!

I wouldn’t buy these type of glasses either. I have neither the money nor the need so I’m not in the target group anyways. And if I had money, I would under no circumstances give it to a company like Meta.

I don’t think the huge privacy concerns are going to hold. There is all sorts of equipment people can buy that is less obvious to film you surreptitiously. Always scan your air b’n’b, people. We are virtually all okay with strangers filming shit in our vicinity with their smartphones as long as we feel it isn’t us they’re filming. I think this will over time translate to an unbotheredness w/r/t smart glasses. And after a while even the LED light altering others to a rolling camera will disappear. These devices become main stream by their usefulness. The HUD for directions or names of acquaintances is one useful aspect. The immediate way to record your toddler’s first steps or the funny face they pulled. An interaction with the law. Over time, this will outweigh the creepiness that we have perceived since the Google glasshole days.

“Nambia”

I fear you either misunderstand my comment or what martyrdom means. I’m no fan of the man who got shot. And for me he’ll never be a martyr. But those who did like him can now hail him as such, make him a hero - for all the other people who liked him. Martyrdom is in the eye of the beholder.

When and where did you go to school? That capital A that looks more like the lowercase one I’ve only ever seen from people from North America.

Whoever wrote this was probably still in school and I would guess in a North American one because of the cursive they wrote in. I think they also copied the text, badly, and that explains the mistakes.

I fear it will the shooter’s legacy that we will all remember the name. He may have otherwise continued his life as a weird, argumentative footnote in history. Now he will be a vessel of martyrdom that will fill itself with content poured in by those who instrumentalize his unfortunate death.

No, no, no, and no. If you see nothing but hateful and negative content, then you have been badly served by algorithms where they roam or you’ve been bad at building your feed on the fediverse.

Define civility.

Is this happening even for their premium subscribers?

A dult R ecording S urveillance E nforcement

would be a better acronym if you ask me.

Consider leaving reddit. Vote with your feet. I did when they made these API changes and I beat the FOMO with my furious anger.

A lot of good ideas like that died when reddit pulled APIs or made access to them prohibitively expensive for developers. They are so set on making you use their shitty app.

Not everything but a lot. The short answer is cost. This will be long and simplified simultaneously:

Ever since the latter half of the last century companies have really loved one way to reduce cost in manufacturing. And that’s labor. Go to a place where the cost of living is low and work those people to the bone for a pittance.

After WW2 a lot of stuff was made in Japan, then in South Korea and Taiwan, and then China. We have since moved on to places like Vietnam, Myanmar (when politically palatable), and India. All of these stories are different and the same. Japan’s industrial heartland was bombed to smithereens and had to be rebuilt, top of the line. People needed jobs, those people were good at it too, and manufacturing jobs went there. The economy grew, wages grew with them, and it became too costly again. Enter South Korea, after successfully democratizing in the 80s (I think). They looked at what Japan had done and did a version of that. The economy grew, wages along with it, and it also became too expensive. Enter the People’s Republic of China in the 90s, ready to blend communist political power with Manchester red capitalism. A billion people who need jobs. So they looked at what the other so-called tiger states had done and did a version of their own. The economy grew, wages grew with it, and they are teetering on the edge of being to expensive again. But their sheer size, both geographically and inhabitants-wise, keeps them in the game longer. Because the policies the communists implemented to grow and steer the economy are quite unique and perhaps the lack of having to explain everything (i.e. democratic oversight) puts them in quite a strong position. And over the last 30 years anybody who is somebody has gone to China. Big market to sell goods to, big labor force to make stuff, somebody else’s rivers to pollute. It was so tempting a deal that both the US and Europe blindly became very dependent on China. Certain base chemicals, e.g. for medicine, were almost exclusively produced there. I think there world’s entire canned mandarin industry is one village in the middle of nowhere. It takes time to change this. 47 is trying to do it the impulsive, not so thought through way (tariffs). But he may yet learn that you cannot make an iPhone in the States for the price suicidal youths put it together in Shenzhen. At the heart is always cost. Labor is expensive in Ohio, cheap in Guangdong. Slightly cheaper in greater Hanoi. If we could just stop the genocide and coups, Myanmar. India has a harder time catching up because - at least for the time being - there is democratic oversight. But the gravy train will move on. Subsaharan Africa will be the next big thing. Capitalism.

Er war auch erschüttert, wie viele Menschen gar nicht wissen, was ihr Rotwein wert ist.

Everybody draws their own vague red lines in the sand. There is no universal law. If you like it and it doesn’t feel icky, go ahead and like it. If it feels icky, don’t. Or make sure they get no money out of your enjoyment.

Flip a coin or start both on Duolingo and see which one interests you more. This is only a hard decision in your head. If you’re not planning to move to somewhere where they speak either, this is just a hobby.

They are both romance languages so you’ll find mental handholds in either language that can help you with the other. Similar conjugations, spellings, irregularities, etc.

The French you’ll learn with internet resources or most text books will most likely be French French. As a learner, that will probably still make understanding the Quebecers an extremely hard task. It’s like somebody from a Louisiana bayou talking to a Scottish highlander. On paper, they are both able to speak English but there are accents and differences in vocabulary that increase the level of difficulty, even for native speakers.