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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Also, having been on the other side of such a situation: it’s not cool to pressure or guilt trip your guests. Either be hospitable and let them do whatever they want, or don’t invite them.

    If people aren’t hungry, then they aren’t hungry. Maybe they are on a diet, maybe they misunderstood OP’s intention and ate beforehand. Maybe they are recovering from something and don’t want to eat too much.

    And as for the two that did not showed up. It’s a good practice to reconfirm the night before. Sometimes people forget. Sometimes life gets in the way.

    If they did reconfirm and still didn’t show up and did not have a good excuse, then I would start looking for better friends.

    Hope OP has better success next time. I do understand that the situation sucks.

    But it’s also a situation that, in my opinion, is preventable.


  • I agree with this take.

    AI will definitely make some white collar jobs way more productive, and thus change the nature of that work and reduce the number of people employed in those jobs.

    A good example is translation, where translators are now mostly reviewing translated texts instead of translating from scratch.

    This means the ability to read fast and take on the role of editor is what remains important in the remaining jobs for translators.







  • While I do agree with you, I also see twitch, TikTok and Patreon presenting models that are quite competitive with YouTube.

    From a privacy perspective, free junk content like TikTok, YouTube and twitch will always be hard coupled with targeted advertising.

    But Patreon (and onlyfans for that matter) do offer a model that can work without ads.

    In fact, if Patreon also introduced an ad-supported tier and allowed you to more broadly see other content aside from the direct person you sponsor, it could probably grow quite a lot.




  • I know a lot of people don’t like the American First Past the Post system, but to be honest, even in a proportional system like here in the Netherlands, you end up with very similar dynamics.

    Truth is, progressives are always a small minority, in every country. Because they are always ahead of the curve on change.

    In the US, this means that you only get a handful of progressives in the most progressive districts and never a really progressive national government.

    In the Netherlands, this means progressives are always represented, but need to compromise to form a government. And often, they even get skipped and the centrist and conservative parties form a coalition.

    Truth be told, Biden is as progressive as you could hope to get in the USA.

    And, while I do think it is important to criticize him - and even threaten to not vote for him - to enable him to move more towards the left, it is also important to vote for him.

    Progressives always win, not through getting majorities, but because they have the right ideas and eventually the other parties catch up to them.

    For recent examples, gay marriage in the USA or marihuana legalization are now law in the USA.

    I am 100% confident that American policy on Israel will also shift thanks to progressive voices. And it will not require a progressive majority.




  • For decades, Israel and the US (and European countries) have pursued a policy to destabilize middle eastern regimes.

    People don’t realize this, but there was a wave of Arab nationalism that was killed by sponsoring Islamic extremists. Had that not happened, the middle east would be much more secular today than it is.

    Israel attacking and destabilizing Lebanon and Syria and the US maintaining a dictator in Egypt are part of this strategy.

    In turn, this leads to hate towards the West and Israel by the Muslims affected.

    It won’t stop as long as American voters care much more about gas prices than about human rights. American politicians are willing to sponsor genocide to have some control on oil prices in order to win elections.







  • That also seemed odd to me.

    I think they are confusing a wealth tax with fair taxation.

    The shown numbers seem to roughly correspond with what would be owed if they had paid fair capital gains tax over the past years. In other words, if all the tax loopholes were closed.

    Bill Gates just didn’t have nearly the same amount of capital gains over the past few years compared to Elon and Jeff.

    A wealth tax would tax then proportionally similar, so Jeff wouldn’t be paying 10x the tax that Bill G would pay.