This is legitimately what the conservatives believe, that the EU is “free riding” on bailouts by the US.

It’s better to think of working, middle, and upper class in terms of how much of their income derives from labour vs capital.

Working class = majority of income from working.

Upper class = majority of income from owning capital, i.e. can afford not to work at all.

Middle = somewhat evenly split.

Traditionally working class was associated with “lower” jobs such as labourers, and those working cushy office jobs usually earnt a high enough income to accumulate enough capital to become middle or upper class.

This is more aligned with the British definition, where their “middle class” is more equivalent to the US “upper middle class.” Make no mistake though, with many jobs not paying enough to accumulate capital, professionals such as teachers, accountants, and nurses would firmly be considered working class, because they you know, need to work.

The original subreddit simulator ran on simple Markov chains.

Subreddit simulator GPT2 used GPT2, and was already so spookily accurate that IIRC its creators specifically said they wouldn’t create one based on GPT3 out of fear that people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between real and not generated content

Some academic fields a decade or two ago went through a phase where they intentionally used “she” for all pronouns. The idea was because academia was so male dominated, even a neutral pronoun would still make people inagine a male lab worker, statistician, etc when reading. Intentionally using “she” was thought to force people to imagine a woman and normalise that image.

Unfortunately this is an increasingly unviable strategy, because even “good” creators have started using clickbaity titles and thumbnails, even if their content has remained the same. Some have even retroactively changed the titles/thumbnails of their older videos to this style.

Clickbait is engineered by behavioural scientists to be as addictive as possible, and has been proven to trigger similar neural pathways to other addictions, such as drug or gambling.

Basically every creator with a shred of self awareness has admitted that they hate creating clickbait thumbnails, titles, and phrases like smash that like button and subscribe; they end up doing it anyway because A/B testing with randomised thumbnails and titles clearly show that they work.

The live A/B testing in particular obscures whether a creator employs clickbait or not - you may be under the impression that a certain creator has remained principled, when in reality you were just allocated to the control group by chance.

I feel that it’s one of those situations where the game is rigged, and the only way to “win” is to change the rules yourself.

Look into DeArrow (by same creators of SponsorBlock), which offers crowdsourced “de-clickbaited” video titles and thumbnails.

Nope, this is exactly how surveillance capitalism works

I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.

When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn’t see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.

Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.

Tbh I personally still don’t see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

Already existed for half a decade.

Google Coral is probably the most famous and is mainly suited for small IoT devices, e.g. speeding up image recognition for security cameras. They come in all shapes and sizes though.

M.2 Accelerator A+E key | Coral - https://www.coral.ai/products/m2-accelerator-ae

Ubisoft asked the Rayman team (who have produced some of the best platformers) to develop Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, regarded as the best metroidvania of 2024.

It failed to meet sales expectations, so they disbanded the teams and cancelled the sequel.

Turns out gamers™️ do vote with their wallets, and they vote for churned out sequels.

Gameboy

Gameboy Pocket

Gameboy Light

Super Gameboy

Gameboy Colour

Gameboy Advance

Gameboy Advance SP

Gameboy Advance SP Backlit

Gameboy Player

Gameboy Micro

Skip the proprietary ninite and just use a proper package manager, like chocolatey, scoop, or winget.

Ninite relies on a private company to add popularly requested programs, and has an extremely small, often outdated repository of packages.

If you must have a GUI, chocolatey has that as well.

Damn we really got Grok transvestigating JD Vance/Erika Kirk

Mayocide when

Clearly never been to a gay bar

I think you misunderstand what the Bank of Japan is. It is a central bank, so it does not take deposits from households, and buys government debt by controlling money supply (i.e. printing money). It holds around 46% of Japanese government debt, far more than domestic insurance companies and domestic banks (~15% each).

The Japanese public are definitely not willing to lend to the government at such low interest rates. The majority holder of Japanese bonds is the Bank of Japan, who needs to purchase large amounts of bonds to conduct its monetary policy. This has lead to some accusations of the two having an incestuous relationship, when central banks are supposed to be independent.

Before the Bank of Japan started hiking interest rates, most Japanese people were stuck in a liquidity trap, where they had to pay to store money in the bank. This was due to a combination of low/negative interest rates, and lots of banking fees due to the oligopolistic banking sector. 7-eleven (the convenience store) bank is unironically the fastest growing bank there, in no small part because they were the only bank with a wide ATM network which didn’t charge fees during business hours.

It is certainly… interesting that the Japanese government, with access to such cheap credit, decides to invest it abroad for higher returns, rather than invest it domestically and pursuing structural reforms to improve its own growth, and in doing so perpetuating the spread between government assets and liabilities.

FYI there are a lot of investors who do this exact trade, i.e. borrow cheap money from Japan, and invest it abroad.

You can buy an eSim adapter online for ~$15 off sites such as AliExpress.

Such adapters are open source, and can support up to holding and swapping between 20 eSim cards, which makes phones with physical sim cards strictly dominate those without them.

This already exists, albeit not in federated form. It fundamentally doesn’t work because the market players have an incentive to withhold as much information as possible, because any mistakes consumers make from not comparing prices is direct profit surplus.

Collecting the information in the first place is also difficult, because it would essentially require getting the consent of most sellers (which they are disincentivised to provide), or just scraping it (often illegally).

Thus, such an aggregator requires too much work/risk, which needs to be compensated for. Consumers generally don’t like the idea of simply paying for independent advice/brokers, so we are stuck paying in other ways, such as via personal data and behavioural surplus for commercial tech sites, of which numerous exist.

Most search engines such as Google (eww I know) already have a shopping specific search page. eBay and Gumtree also have existed for decades.

eCommerce platforms like AliExpress and Amazon also already do this, if you set the filters to only be third party sellers.

There’s also category specific aggregators such as PCPartPicker/Newegg.

Scrotox is an unironically popular procedure (for your scrotum)