The russian assets in the White House want to portray Zelensky and Ukraine as insufficiently thankful for USA aid and as disrespectful towards the usa, and to use those supposed slights as justification for cutting off aid. To reinforce this narrative with their audience, other fellow travellers are now repeating those lies.

This goes back to the white house meeting where Trump and Vance claimed that Zelensky was disrespectful because of how he was dressed (normal) and how he didn’t thank anyone according to them (he had, profusely, there’s video of it). It was a clown show and the meeting didn’t deliver the desired images + soundbites, so now the usa republicans are working overtime in providing the necessary soundbites for fox news etc.

And that man clearly does not live in such a state, nor did I (or anyone else I think) claim that his circumstances apply to the entire usa. You’re wrong in assuming that other people are not aware that different places have varying laws and tax systems.

Your whataboutism defence of regressive tax systems is also very strange to me. That other places have unfair practices in place, is no excuse to put up with an unfair system in any one place. Call them all out on their brokeness, but if you do call them out, you’ll have to be more specific in your example(s), state things that are actually verifiable instead of some vague whataboutism.

Ps, while I did not think your whataboutism defence was relevant, this “Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates.” was easy to verify and it turned out to be false. Home ownership rates are on average slightly higher in Europe than in the usa, here’s statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-rate-in-europe/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Trump and Putin their relationship isn’t going to reverse. Trump is a gullible idiot and Putin is not, if they meet and negotiate face to face, then Putin is going to get what he wants. Especially because Trump has said before negotiations even started, that he wanted to give the occupied lands to Russia. Trump is such a “master negotiator” that he sells out his own side before the talks even start. This is why Putin wants to negotiate alone with the usa, without the eu countries or NATO present.

Many thanks for the links, was interesting.

Just by the existence of food standards laws, we know that there must have been food standards problems. Stuff like mayonnaise composition being put into law, must mean that there had been a mayonnaise quality problem or worries at a certain point in time, I just can’t find any specific info on when or what. Those scandals were probably recorded just as well in the news papers of my small country, but if no one writes a new article or paper about the scandal 50+ years after it happened, then that info won’t turn up in an internet search query.

Do you have examples of this stuff happening in continental European countries? I’d love to jump down that rabbit hole.

In the past I’ve read descriptions of systematic bad practices in the industrialized Uk, but I can’t recall reading about similar things happening in other western European countries. Nothing systematic anyhow. I’d image that the french would have had a(nother) revolution if anyone had tried that stuff with their food.

I think that if food delivery was treated how my last postal package was treated, then all food would be arriving as a soup, or maybe as a goulash.

Parliamentary democracy with a monarch as non-executive head of state. So being monarch is a mostly ceremonial role, with the seldom used power to temporarily veto or morally object against bad ideas. Juan Carlos saved the Spanish democracy in 1982 for example.

In a system where men and women are treated equally (double surnames, same parental leave etc), it might no longer be needed for central governments to register people’s sex, only the healthcare system would need to know. I’m just thinking out loud here, this might be a bad idea for other reasons.

I read an interesting article about this phenomen a few weeks ago; https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/aging-time-speed-faster-reason-cause-b2673746.html

What those statistics do not take into account is the different incidence rates of men/women being out alone at night.

Because women feel more afraid going out into the dark alone, they’re less likely to do so, creating less opportunities for them to be robbed/raped/killed.

To make an analogy:
What are my chances to drown in the sea if I never go swimming in the sea? 0% chance.
What if I go swimming once a week, with a risk of drowning of 0.5% each time I do so: then there’s ~23% chance that I’ll drown by the end of the year.
What if go swimming twice a year, but because I’m such an amateur the chance that I drown is 5%: there is ~10% chance that I drown by the end of the year.

Conclusion: even though it is 10x more dangerous for the inexperienced swimmer to go swimming in the sea, in a given year the experienced swimmer is still 2.3 times more likely to drown in the sea than the inexperienced one.

If you’re curious what their official children are up to: https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-04-20/nicaraguas-political-dynasty-heirs-in-a-golden-cage.html

Tldr: the eldest daughter accused her father of sexual abuse and had to run to Costa Rica. The lives of the other 8 adult children + the lives of their families are mostly controlled by the president’s wife.

Canceling to downgrade your 365 subscription is the “normal” Microsoft way, so that part is not a new scummy practice that was invented for this scummy occasion. I do hope this forced upsell comes back to bite Microsoft in the ass, most consumers won’t be aware of the downgrade option, but consumer agencies shouldn’t let this slide, it’s setting a very bad precedent.

The ms instructions:

1. Go to Services & subscriptions and if prompted, sign in with the Microsoft account associated with your subscription.
2. Find your current subscription and select Manage > Cancel subscription.
3. The Cancel page will show you the features of your current subscription plan. If you’re switching to another plan with less features, select the plan that works for you.
4. Follow the instructions to complete the switch. Your existing subscription might not change immediately, but it will automatically change to the new plan when the plan renews. You won’t be charged for the new plan until it renews into that plan.
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/switch-between-microsoft-365-subscriptions-3fcc1efc-2722-427f-8efa-db94b9b0a36b

Why do people hate Lenovo and Razer? From what I’ve read in the past early Razer laptops had a battery problem, but that was it. I can’t recall systemic laptop design issues. And Lenovo has a malignant bloatware problem, but that’s not a problem at all if going for Linux. So I’m out of the loop on what’s supposedly wrong with these 2.

For good graphics performance in a smallish package, I like Lenovo Legion.

If graphics aren’t a concern, then I have no more specific recommendation, too much choice. I like flip style laptops, but I don’t know if those have proper Linux support. I’d also look for a screen larger than 14", but with thin bezels.

The worst build laptop that I’ve ever held in my hands was from MSI. Cooling problems that made the fans work almost permanently at full blast (even after repasting by the shop), underperforming for the specs, a chassis with too much flex and a broken screen hinge after slightly more than 2 years (just out of warranty). When I looked up the screen hinge problem, it turned out to be an old recurring problem that MSI never bothered to fix when releasing new models, like they couldn’t be arsed to give a fuck.

This laptop was bought in about 2017 or 2018 after which I put MSI on the do not buy list. It’s possible that they’ve improved their quality since then, but I doubt it, given that I can find the same complaints in forum posts from 2024:
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/are-hinge-issues-still-a-thing.343279/page-5

Your 30 seconds search turned up 2 results at the limit of what this family could afford, without including the additional costs such as utilities, parking, … + all other stuff that the other person mentioned. Which means that those results are significantly outside their budget.

If their budget is 1200 $/month, then they cannot afford an apartment with that list price. My guess would be that they could afford a list price of 800 to 900 $/month, maybe 1000 $/month if a parking spot was included in the rent. But I don’t live there, so this is just a bad guess.

Still better than old school linear tv, where you paid to watch things being constantly interrupted by paid commercials.

I’d imagine that a conservative professor of ethics would be the one telling doctors in training that when faced with the dilemma of saving the life of the mother or that of her unborn child, that they must then save the life of the child because it is without sin.

This was taught in a Catholic university near me to doctors of my parents generation, but I suspect they stopped doing that here since about the 1990s. In other places of the world the Catholic church is still at it though.

I had been using YouTube for years without being presented rightwing propaganda in my suggestions. I mostly just watched strategy gaming, history, technology channels and some peculiar travelling blogs. And my suggested was just mostly those things.

Then one day I used my YouTube account to cast kid shows for my niece for the first time. After that I was suggested more kid shows which didn’t interest me personally, but I also started getting suggested cat videos, which I obviously clicked. And the week after that half my suggested feed was rightwing misogynist/racist/culture war misinformation, and it took a lot of “do not recommend channel” to clean it up again.

So now I believe that there is a concerted effort by some malicious actors to train Google’s algorithm to assume that if someone is interested in cat videos, that they would then also be open to becoming a misogynist racist prick.