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In tech, is there really a need, though? All of this year’s new hires I’ve met communicate exclusively in English. No-one cares.

The housing crisis is prevalent everywhere in Europe, though. But it’s not like droves of people have to sleep rough. Yes, rents keep going up, but they are still only a fraction of what you would pay in the US.
And you can actually still buy houses. Really cheap, even. Far off the highways, but some people opt in to exactly that.

Hard disagree. Else, there would never be any revolution, but history shows otherwise.
Or, as Marcuse put it, the prerequisite for radically rejecting something is not that you have to know what will come afterwards, but at first, you’ll enter a process of rejection of the existing situation and during this process of rejection, you’ll gradually free yourself from shackles and figure out what is to come next.

I mentally multiply all votes by ℹ anyway.

They are now putting laughing gas in energy drinks, as I found out recently. It’s also in whipped creme which might be one reason people are all over it.
I’m loving it. So much better than CO2. Also makes for good social commentary.

Yeah, the 90s were a good time for movies that could not have been mainstream in any other decade. I’d place Judge Dredd, Demolition Man and Total Recall in the same “corny, but excellent” league as the 5th Element.
Then you had unofficial double features of sorts: Smoke/ Blue In The Face, Casino/ Goodfellas.
12 Monkeys needs to be mentioned as well, it’s probably the most palatable movie on my list.
In the “disconcerting, but unforgettable” league, I’d place As Good As It Gets, The Crossing Guard and, of course, the grisly “8 mm.”

Oh, yeah. It unofficially spawned “Friends,” too. Also, if you watch the music videos of the OST songs, you’ll find many (all?) of them have a “Singles” movie poster hanging somewhere. What an amazing level of coordination.

The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?

Normative nihilism is going to get us all.