I went through a pretty big libertarian phase way back in my late teens.

Not the ‘deregulate everything’ type, but rather more of a ‘everyone’s place in society is governed by the choices they make’ social-darwinist sort of angle.

Once I got out and experienced real life more (and learned about all the little nuances behind everything) I realized just how wrong I was.

Nowadays I’m a big leftist/socialist

To be fair, before Trump took over the party, the Republicans were generally considered to be in a death spiral.

The prevailing idea was that the party just didn’t have a future. Their brand was this basically an unappealing mix of boring religious people and self-professed ‘sensible’, common-sense stewards of the status quo. Looking at demographic trends at the time, they were trending towards irrelevance.

Then Trump took over and brought back the enthusiasm. They also started to court minority votes (Hispanics, Blacks) which tend to be very socially conservative. At the same time, the democrats slipped into the ‘boring status quo protectors’ role.

Hopefully the Dems wake up, but it might take a while.

The Dems should definitely move more central on social issues, as the US election system has a huge built in rural bias.

Then focus on more broad-reaching progressive economic topics. Less focus on legislation targeting specific marginalized groups and more on policies which would impact everyone directly. As a potential example, Universal Basic Income (“Freedom Bonus” or whatever it was called) was one such policy which was floated a couple elections ago.

You’re right, I agree with you and I think his goals are both damaging and stupid… but at the end of the day his strategy is winning and we will obviously have to adapt to beat it.

Sure, that didn’t help, but she also was a “more of the same” candidate (she’s rhe current VP!)

As much as I wanted her to win, she was always a stupid choice in at a time where voters can essentially all agree on one thing: they want change.

Status quo politics is dead, the dems just haven’t realized it yet. As braindead as Trump and a most of his policies are, people like that he doesn’t give a shit about disrupting things to achieve his goals.

Exactly this. I gave up on it once or twice (always starting from the beginning).

Eventually I got past the initial awkward phase and it became one of my favorite shows!

(Most) stocks represent partial ownership (read: control) of a company and most of their value is derived from that.

For an extreme example: if the stock price were to drop below the amount of money that could be made by just selling off all of the assets, then someone would (in principle) just buy all the shares, sell the assets and make a profit.

Each share represents a small bit of control over the company and their assets.

Personally I always always buy phones with two sim slots. It’s super practical if you travel semi-often.

Idk about apple, but basically all of the mid-range androids have this feature. I guess this is about the US though, so it’s probably Apple.

My credit cards I’ve had in Germany/Austria were all basically glorified debit-cards which had their own bank account attached to them. Technically I had a credit limit of a couple thousand, but I never went into the negative.

The only difference (for me at least) was that I could use them to rent a car, which is nice.

Yeah most of europe is waaaaay better when is comes to mobile plans compared to the US.

I don’t use use that much data, but my 8gb plan is just under €6 per month.

In the US, I had a plan like this for over $30…

I can’t check at the moment, but that sounds like something ‘Simply Perfection’ would be capable of.

It’s essentially an addon specifically for tweaking the appearance of gnome stuff.

Trams are the best! I’ll go out of my way to take a tram over a bus any day

They are just so much smoother

It’s really fun! I picked it up yesterday and I’ve been playing on ky deck.

I will say that I usually prefer tower defense games with more ‘linear’ pathing (think bloons) but it’s been a good time regardless.

It’s not colonialism to prefer one culture (or certain cultural traits) to another. In fact, it’s natural.

I’ve lived in a number of countries and each had their own distinct cultural norms. Each has had aspects which I perceived as either positive or negative.

Add it all together and I definitely have preferred certain cultures, not because they are “better” but because they more closely match my own preferences. Other people would prefer different cultural norms.

IPTV is generally for live TV channels rather than on-demand.

It definitely looks a lot like Toronto, but it’s been a while since I was there

Melbourne has the world’s largest tram (streetcar) system!

Not a raspi, but I had similar issues on my opensuse HTPC which turned it to be related to issues with (or missing) media codecs in Firefox.

After (re)installing all of them, it worked like a charm.

Do you mean the exoskeleton?

Why does it need to be equal to population?

I’m not saying that all immigration is bad, but rather that above a certain level it gets difficult to integrate people. For european countries this is a much lower number than the US, since populations are much lower. At the same time, there are many more refugees than in the US.

It’s a genuine challenge here in Vienna, for instance, at the moment because recent immigrants make up a large percentage of school kids, who often have few language skills, tend to be very religious, and have extremely conservative views on things like feminism and gay rights. Unfortunately, their views tend to self-reinforce rather than become milder over time due to being the majority view among their peers/in their school/community.

You can’t really blame the kids, obviously they are just a product of the culture they grew up in, however you also can’t just ignore the issue. There isn’t any mechanism for preventing immigrants groups from clustering in specific areas (and I don’t think most people would be in favor of anything that draconian)

In an ideal world, maybe there is a perfect solution, but the reality is that the current system is facing a huge challenge. Like it or not, this is directly tied to immigration rates.