Most countries in the world are “really metric countries”. And yes we do use the cm a lot for measurements inside the 1-100cm range.

Not at all, Marxists are quite critical of Russia, for example, f

That remains to be seen. Hasn’t happened yet. But perhaps some day?

Yes, that is exactly what you did. Repeating it does also make it funnier.

I read all that and I must admit I am still not quite sure what part of all that is markdown, and why any of it is markdown.

I get that this sentence must be the key concept: ““Markdown” is the name of a particular standard way of formatting text so that programs can reliably interpret parts of that text as representing the writers desire for their text to be displayed a particular way.” But it reads like a tautology without really explaining either statement.

It is funny because tankie thought is literal positive reaction to anything Russia and China does. Your comment shows it is also pure projection.

Falling into the boomer and whole generational strife fallacy is basically falling for oligarchic propaganda. Intergenerational strife makes people forget that the actual enemy is the oligarchy.

Especially when you live in a roughly compass oriented grid city

I would imagine most of us Europeans would have difficulties with that. “compass oriented grid city” hasn’t really been a thing here since Roman times.

Because it is not always France?

How is this magic technology going to be freely implemented eveywhere and especially in the poorest parts of the world? You description of the mechanisms of invention and investing does not sound at all like how these things actually works in the world we are living in.

Some parts of the globe is going to run out of water, some areas of the globe are about to get way too much of it. You know, climate change and all that.

Yes, it is a well known fact that Americans have more people per capita.

Tuna pizza is the best, and Americans are so missing out on it with their bizarre narrowminded gatekeeping of pizzatoppings. Americans have like 3 things that are allowed as pizza toppings, which is so strange considering pizza should just be a vehicle for whatever goodness you want to put on it. Even the otherwise food conservative Italians have figured this out with their pizza al taglio.

Noone has claimed that.

Yeah, Americans love to fantasise about their beloved 2nd amendment (regardless of political persuasion), but they have never ever used it for what they (falsely) claim it was intended for.

What is an uber pool? I am imagining some sort of German engineering wonder.

You are arguing from ignorance. The terms republic and democracy and so on have rather solid definitions in political science. Republic is not a very informative descriptor of the poltical system of a country, it just means that the role of head of state in’t heritable, ie. that it isn’t a monarchy. The actual political system of a republic can be basically anything except a monarchy.

A republic just means that a country doesn’t have a heritable head of state. All of those listed countries are in actual fact republics. It says next to nothing about the actual political system of a country besides the role of the head of state. Lots and lots of dictatorships are republics. Many democracies are republics as well, but as you can see it is the dictatorship/democracy part which describes the important part of those countries political systems, not republic.

Many Americans are confused about this, because they have been indoctrinated into thinking that republic is the main descriptor of their system. Mainly because it was an important descriptor back in the 18th century, when most countries were monarchies, but much less so in later times when most existing countries are republics.

There are lots of republics where the president does serve as a literal figurehead without any consequential powers, so a republic does not necessarily turn up with a Trump. In fact the US is rather unique in how it has combined republic with absolute monarchy in the office of the president, probably very much a sign of how antiquated the constitution is.

Of course we can’t really know what goes on behind the scenes. But obviously these kinds of games are designed by committee (namely board members). So every single detail is going to be dictated from above, and as new games are released by other publishers with new succesful features these dictates changes mid-production. I can’t but imagine that the development of live service games are a complete shitshow from start to finish.

So perhaps at some point they decide to get rid of the entire mess and start afresh, only for the process to beging again of course.

They know they can do that sort of shit because they hold the power. They can blatantly and unconvincingly lie, their followers will regurgitate those lies, but neither of them really believe them. They are just posturing and having fun with words, just like fascists always have done.

Never believe that [fascists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The [fascists] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.