Thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a try the next time that the algorithm goes nuts.

I had been using YouTube for years without being presented rightwing propaganda in my suggestions. I mostly just watched strategy gaming, history, technology channels and some peculiar travelling blogs. And my suggested was just mostly those things.

Then one day I used my YouTube account to cast kid shows for my niece for the first time. After that I was suggested more kid shows which didn’t interest me personally, but I also started getting suggested cat videos, which I obviously clicked. And the week after that half my suggested feed was rightwing misogynist/racist/culture war misinformation, and it took a lot of “do not recommend channel” to clean it up again.

So now I believe that there is a concerted effort by some malicious actors to train Google’s algorithm to assume that if someone is interested in cat videos, that they would then also be open to becoming a misogynist racist prick.

Maybe it’s because it was in the same language group as those others that polish got singled out. People who speak an Indo European language will expect to be lost when first trying to learn a language outside of the group, but might not expect to be so confuddled from a related language. Expectations basically.

Personally I’m ok with discord for private social communication, imo not everything needs to be archived or searchable. But there’s people/devs who use discord as a knowledge repository and that’s the recipe for disaster imo.

The recipe: Old problem questions, solutions, how to guides, … All hidden behind a login wall and if you do get in, then you still have to contend with the crappy search engine, so you might just as well ask the probably already answered question yet again. And one day it’s probably all going poof or behind some kind of paywall. Basically also what quora has been trying to do for years, but I don’t think any people with more than a few braincells complain about quora being hard to access, since most of their content stinks anyhow.

My scalp condition is that I have too much hair. Too dense and thick, it gets greasy after not washing it 1 day, so I don’t even dare to replicate your experiment.

I also used to have a cold weather dandruff problem, but that was solved entirely when I started always air drying after every shower. Thanks to a random tip years ago on reddit. My dandruff problem was apparently because of humidity.

My family (parents etc) have mostly learned their lesson now after all the news coverage, but before that I used to resort to hiding my good non sticks whenever they were staying over. If my parents complained about the shitty old pans that were available, then I pulled out my very sticky nonstick ceramic pan that they had roughed up despite my protests. I’m never throwing that shitty ceramic pan away, it’s way too effective as a rhetorical ploy now.

Friends I still mostly don’t trust since I don’t know their kitchen habits well enough, but they’re less likely to try to help with cooking anyhow, only with dish washing and there it’s easy to hide the wrong sponges.

If your chipped nonstick is teflon, then it’s garbage now imo. I would never cook in it again, too risky imo.

And I now realize that I’ve become paranoid in my own kitchen.

In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that’s one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.

And the most damning part of all imo: “the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves. Chemists at the plant used lead screens, tongs, and masks.”.

The plant owners definitely knew that they were killing people, there should have been murder charges imo.

I have a hunch that this cat was roleplaying that he killed a big ape and was now eating it.

I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.

If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.

I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.

Sausages outside a refrigerator are pretty normal in most of Europe I think. In butcher shops most sausage types are stored in boxes or on hooks at room temperature. I hang my dry sausages on a hook at home. Once you start cutting them up and then not eat them all at once, most are best stored cooled though.

Cheese should be stored in a cool + dark + ventilated spot imo, like a cellar or a non heated room in pre global warming France ;). But if you don’t have such a spot, then most cheese should really be put in a refrigerator imo. It would really surprise me if this was a taboo in France.

I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.

And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.

About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.

Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.

I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D

And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…

This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.

The quotes are there because it’s a common misconception that as soon you have any kind of 4g signal, you have access to a fast connection, which is not the case. So in many countries at some point they proclaim that “xx%” of the population now has access to “4g”, which will be technically true, but the actual % that has access to fast 4g will be substantially lower.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.

Afaik, high internet speed requires higher frequencies and high frequencies reach less far + have less penetration through/around obstacles. That’s what makes providing “4g” virtually everywhere easy (good enough for phone calls at least), but if they want to provide actual high speeds everywhere, then it suddenly becomes not so easy (nor cheap).

That the USA and Canada don’t provide proper high speed internet access/choice to many of their rural citizens is caused by the rent-seeking mentality of their network companies + the governments that enable this. Most of those rural citizens live in places where there are more than enough people for it to make economic sense to invest, but investing would lower short term profits, so they don’t. Instead those customers are stuck with the choice between a single provider who is offering bad service, or no service at all. And as we’ve seen with the Boobies American, they’ve got enough of their dumb citizens convinced that they are oh so exceptional that this is the best that they could ever expect.

Tbh, that 4g coverage up north looks pretty damn good for how few people live there. To me it just makes no economic sense to provide that good a service there. So I’m curious and as a Finn you might know: does it make economic sense or was this investment done for other reasons?

And why are you unwilling to accept that there is a lot of nothing land in Finland? Most of Finland is a lot of nothing land, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer and darkness in the winter.

Your country is neither unique, nor exceptional in this regard.

The Finn already addressed this in their first post: 97% of the country has 4g. That is country, not people in the country. So yes, a reindeer in Lapland has a better potential internet connection than many rural north americans.

Edit: I found some recent numbers: this carrier claims to provide 4g to 99% of the population, 5g to 96%. https://www.dna.fi/wholesale/about-us/networks That 2nd statistic must be pretty damn rare, the country of Nokia indeed.