The thing is it’s all clever inside baseball references, not intentional.

It sort of detracts from the magic to rationally think about Friends, X-Files, Seinfeld, and Buffy all being in a shared universe. Vampires LOVE New York.

The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.

Sarcasm tag added

Well, to be fair, a kleptocracy is a poverty mindset applied to wannabe plutarchs or oligarchs. Oligarchy is the DEI version of Plutocracy because it’s not just wealth based. Edit:/s

And learn how to use it.

And get your FF fork loaded up with the right extensions to prevent fingerprinting.

Ugh, this world is so cooked, but we keep reaching out of the oven and turning up the heat on ourselves.

The best my brain ever felt was when I worked in a corner of a building that was a dead zone. No distractions unless I sought them out and physically went to them.

Agree with less cookies and trackers if possible. Google doesn’t need to see my emoticons.

Also would prefer a JS free-version if possible, but I can see how that might not work.

Or maybe you’re also collecting the IPs of everyone here by cross referencing usernames with the emoticons used in comments and copied from your site. Statistically, this would actually be pretty easy to use to doxx people’s IPs/locations that way.

Lol, that’s fair. Maybe I should really feel surprised that people paid attention enough to Google it.

I genuinely can’t believe that there is any overlap at all with the maybe 500 people who actually listened to his speech or even read an article summarizing it and those who don’t know what the meaning of “oligarchy” is.

How does anyone get engaged enough in the political process to watch a speech from Biden and not recall Bernie Sanders saying this every day of his life for the last 30 years?

Well, considering that I speak 4 languages myself, maybe that’s not the take I was going for.

Done the same. Didn’t think it could happen to me. I was wrong and paid the price.

I speak 4 languages, and when I need surface level basics for a trip, I’ve found the Duolingo helps get the wrote memory part of see a shape, hear a sound.

For actual terminology or grammar, it’s OK, but it doesn’t deserve the hype it gives itself. I can make up my own lessons with Google Translate better than Duolingo.

I believe that a clickbait title about 400 idiot people starting the first lesson in Duolingo and then quickly quitting without deleting their accounts is the through line here.

Narrator: “But he didn’t mean the critically acclaimed 2013 movie ‘Her,’ but instead the 1991 classic ‘Mannequin 2:On the Move.’”

Cut to GOB driving the stair car with a mannequin in a wig tied to the top.

This is all about pressuring Bytedance to sell to any of the large US companies dying to get that user base. Remember that one party is currently loaded with tech bros with no ethics.

Bytedance seems willing to play chicken and hit the wall as a gamble about coming out of this less hurt than anyone else.

RFK Jr eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger.

How to pass the loyalty test and yet fail at the same time.

Because it’s a test. A test of how far the “loyal” ones are willing to go, and to see who they can’t count on moving forward.

In theory, but in practice the BBB is usually a pay-to-play sort of racket where as long as a member doesn’t have active litigation happening, you can likely swing an A+ rating and still be a terrible company. It’s business oriented, not consumer.

While this might have been true for a while, but payola is alive and well. My spouse has Spotify and still has to listen to music podcasts for real discovery. Otherwise she’s one more person swatting down Espresso playing over and over.

I feel like stuff like this is always aimed at average people and the data collection is what offsets the price to make it the cheapest option. Only new money would use it to chase trendy things like this. They end up being slight convenience with added work and expectations on the consumer.

High end appliances aimed at real wealth are usually more about how they can be built in to the house design. Rich people will pay more for a thing that makes the house look like a magazine, and will last years.

Why would a rich person want a fridge that tells them they need to buy milk when their actual human assistant does that?