The hubris of thinking that a random driver-exploiting app is some kind of godsend utility and we’ll be scared of losing it.

At this point the old school taxi companies have their apps too, you’re not the cool kid anymore, uber

OK so let’s get that straight, a chemical cleaning company owns a ranch in some secret valley where they produce salad dressing and no one suspects anything. the US is weird. (\s because irony doesn’t always work on Lemmy)

SALAD DRESSING?! Are you Americans going to a restaurant and ask the waiter to bring you a salad with clorox?

Amazon

Okay now I’m stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.

How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was… peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.

When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish… it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dunking on “dumb spanish speakers”. There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it’s famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that “Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian” etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.

funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.

My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn’t speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it’s because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany’s so it’s a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is “'Murica fokk yea” I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).

My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:

• insane amounts of empty space. It’s one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn’t count as “far away”, another to experience it.
• guns. Not like in “them americans only shoot themselves”, but like in “any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it’s normal” wtf mates, you can’t keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
• malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don’t get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain “hey let’s put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here”?
• And a very specific nitpick: calling places “european” like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being “the most europe-like cities in north america” and… they’re not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that’s it.

So this is either a big oil corp spending pennies on theorycrafting some exciting buzzword technosolutions

Or

A big oil corp which figured out that if they want to stay relevant for more than 10 yrs they need to diversify into other energy sources. With all the deserved hate they attract such companies are probably most likely to invent and implement aomething like this at scale.

It doesn’t change the fact that they should be nationalized asap and their decisionmakers jailed.

If I was to guess I’d say it’s the only way they can do anything meaningful. If the goal is to curb google’s monopoly on the internet it would be neat to break it down and apparently search was a case that can be credibly pursued on antitrust grounds. Web integroty hasn’t yet reached its intended scope, even if everyone with minimal knowledge know where it’s going, “everyone sees the writing on the wall” is not a valid ground for legal persecution.

every now and then, even on this community, I see praises towards the new leader of FCC (IIRC) who’s taking a hard stance agains big tech and elsewhere (Doctorow’s blog IIRC again) about the wider “bidenomics” of going out against monopolies and trusts by empowering existing laws and agencies. Guess the answer is “because now there is an administration in power who at least pretends to care”.

Because for the last 15 years or so the agencies responsible for figuring it out and enforcement were toothless, corrupt, incompetent or all three together.

China does not have one road anymore. Once Russia invaded Ukraine the entire project collapsed. It is not possible to run the rail from China to Poland (there already was a functioning hub for China-EU railway transport in central Poland before the war) without crossing Ukraine or Russia and Belarus. And all three of these countries are kinda off-limit for who-know-how long. Meanwhile the West kinda soured on the Chinese products and offshoring so once the war is over there will be no more incentive to resume large-scale operations of the belt and road.

Not just that, but if he’d kill EV industry in the US the country would quickly get flooded by Chinese cars and batteries.

…all of which was announced via social media, which implies that despite shortages of food and water the people there have constant access to the Internet. Cyberpunk is now. Unless a thunder from the thunderstorm fries a cell tower nearby of course.

as a capitalist I’d be worried to hand over my profit-producing assets to another capitalist, who has delusions that he is a caesar of the world’s most important empire (this applies both to Xi and to Trump, mind you, probably that’s why Koch brother has recently announced a multimillion fund to prevent Trump presidency)

Wait so americans wanted to solve trade imbalance with China, that is overreliance on import from China and indirectly reliance on the Chinese influence… By selling out control over American companies? Capitalists are dumb.

Even the article says some of it trickles down to you over the pond

You better start enjoying them anyway. Unless we get really good at sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere it will be only getting worse. The atmosphere-ocean system isn’t at equilibrium yet and we keep pumpin’ every year.

Yeah, the oligarchs. It’s quite likely that top people at Wagner are/were rubbing shoulders with some of the Russia’s rich so there may be more for the mercs in it than just the money.

Because you can’t argue that. Any other ground reason for policy can be challenged or counterargued or relies on values which are arguable.

No one is going to plainly argue “ok but how about we do not protect children?”. And if someone tries a different angle such as “this law is not really going to protect anyone and will bring a lot of problems for children and adults alike” it will be easily dismissed as “you insidious snake, why do you want to hurt children?! Don’t sabotage child protection!”. Which autokills conversation.