I say this as someone with an apple laptop:

You don’t buy Apple unless you want to commit to paying over double for accessories.

If you buy an Apple product you’re opting in to being fleeced by them for any related purchases.

It’s a premium brand at the end of the day, there are always more economical options

This article is kinda flawed as it runs with the assumption trump has a well thought out and concrete political ideology he follows.

Trump is a narcissist who literally just cares about his own power, his own wealth and ensuring he stays out of prison.

In a 1 on 1 meeting, he never stands any chance against a charismatic politician. We see it over and over again.

Given that, 75% of this article seems to be the author upset Mamdani is using the same trick to help get trump off his back.

Probably still not one for work

Holocaust education was “confusing” young people into sympathizing with [the people being decimated in a genocide] instead of [the overpowered genocidal aggressor]

Wow what a ghoul

They’re not confused, they just have a modicum of empathy

He only ever looks genuinely happy when he’s around the worst people on this planet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Donald_Trump_and_Jeffrey_Epstein

There’s a nice overview with over 100 citations to various sources for everything claimed.

Almost anyone else on the planet would have been locked up for a long time with only a fraction of that evidence

She’s trying to position herself as successor to trump now people are going to be slapped by the reality of his presidency.

Nah I’d say it was around 2014/5 everyone started to lose their minds, the pandemic was just a catalyst.

Not necessary preppers as that is someone who’s motivation is to mitigate some hypothetical future bad thing happening

I think most self-hosters are doing it out of a combination of technical exploration and mitigating real issues that exist today, e.g. cloud service outages or market exits causing something previously bought to be useful to become a temporary brick or permanent e-waste. Well, and cost in some cases, no one particularly enjoys having an extra bill for hosting.

That’s totally going to be applied without bias

How would a general strike be neutral or positive for the economy?

General strikes have to involve a meaningful percentage of the working population and are only supposed to end when the demands are met. The people on strike stop working, reduce spending as much as possible and stop paying tax.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that wouldn’t affect it massively in a negative way, so I’m genuinely curious as to what you think would happen in that scenario

Edit: I’m not sure I understand why this has been met with downvotes and no comment? I don’t see how I’m saying anything false here

Unless it’s a misunderstanding that I’m saying people should not do a general strike, which couldn’t be more wrong. Tbf I think Americans should have started one long before this point.

Hurting the economy in a sustained manner is the mechanism through which general strikes are an effective tool of the working class

Don’t listen to politicians, watch what they do

I assume the recruiters use the sex offender register as LinkedIn

I’m curious about this point because, and correct me if I’m wrong, the UK government can already freeze people’s assets via the police today, it doesn’t need a national ID scheme to do this.

Credit scores are used today to deny people access to housing and finance services predominantly, but can also block people from having mobile phones and even jobs.

And they’re opaque we have no real way of knowing what data is used to determine them and in what way. That might include what you tweet about for all we know

Given a lot of people out there need to be able to access finance in order to be able to handle unexpected emergency costs, a bad credit score very literally could cause someone to not be able to afford groceries. Average personal debt is rising faster than inflation across the western world, so this is an increasingly big problem.

It’s worse because it’s a real problem today, not a hypothetical future one.

The ultra wealthy are the ones stealing your future.

They’re also spending a lot of money to make sure as many people as possible do not realise it is the simple existence of the ultra rich causing all the problems.

Wealth creates income that buys more wealth. The share for you and everyone else you know decreases every day, making existence more expensive every day.

We have to tax the ultra wealthy out of existence, and if they don’t allow that the French have proven an effective next step.

I don’t think it’s necessary, but I can see some of the reasons it might be introduced

Firstly digital IDs typically come with obvious convenience benefits for the user. E.g. apparently Gen Z doesn’t really carry wallets, so this means they have a way of getting ID that’s better for that way of doing things. They should also be harder to forge, so hopefully can help reduce fraud and identity theft.

I’d say from a government’s perspective, a digital ID program is cheaper to run and allows them to speed up access to some government services. I’d say most of the opportunities for abuse from the government come from when the ID becomes a mandatory thing, then you might get voter suppression and limitations of access to public services

I find this kind of sentiment a bit funny, because we already have much worse

Credit scores are opaque ratings of people kept by private organisations used to refuse business to people effectively based on their spending & borrowing behaviour, many of these will now happily encourage you to link your accounts so they get itemised data from some people now too.

This could literally be happening today and they would just need to say “sorry your credit isn’t good enough”. Credit score factors into your ability to rent & buy accommodation in the UK already.

There’s no reason for these companies to switch to using a government ID for these kinds of decisions because that would have to be a more transparent process and less easily used to their benefit.

FWIW, I’m against mandatory ID even though we effectively already have it in the form of national insurance. IMO the ID being digital should be a non issue as long as it’s optional (there also needs to be a free physical version of any national identity for those without phones).

For anyone that’s not twigged it yet

They’re already turning this into another culture war to ensure they can continue to enrich the establishment.

The petrochemical industry has a lot of money to burn on propaganda if it’s facing an existential threat.

Remember this when you read anything other than “we should be decarbonising as quickly as possible”

The best thing for everyone (in basically every possible way) except petrochemical shareholders is heavy investment in renewable technology and the ending of petrochemical subsidies.

Tbf aviators are a classic style that doesn’t fall into the same category IMO, if you dress appropriately for the look (and have the right shaped head for them ofc, there’s not really a one-style-fits-all for sunnies), aviators can look pretty good

The other main versatile style you see a lot is the wayfarer kind popularised by Ray-Ban

I don’t mean for anyone here to catch a stray

But who the fuck genuinely looks at Oakleys and thinks, yeah that’s a cool look that doesn’t make me look completely out of touch with basically every part of the modern day