Given the historical record on attempts at Mercosur-EU trade deals, this is likely to fail yet again, since the EU’s agricultural voting bloc (mostly in France and Italy) doesn’t really want the market to be populated by cheaper products from abroad (at least not any more than it already is). But at this point, given the several ongoing food crises that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused, the chances for a successful agreement are about as high as they can go, so they might as well go for it.

That’s true, but sometimes I definitely need a little push from someone in situations like this.

Nah, some people just really suck at being assertive (and/or have really bad social anxiety).

Sounds like the person you’re married to is kind of a dick, honestly. Thinking less of other people for not understanding your own unclear language just shows a massive lack of introspection. As a local autism, though, I definitely disagree with the last point, as a significant difference between someone who has autism and someone who doesn’t is that language is understood differently (I would know), and that means you can both understand and be understood incorrectly very easily. This post is kind of deliberately divisive anyway, but I believe the point of saying something and being misunderstood, despite your best efforts (hopefully), still stands.

I wouldn’t say that’s particularly surprising. Most people in Lemmy and similar platforms have been here since the mass exodus from Reddit, or are programmers themselves. These groups are usually more privacy-minded, and see this as a significant privacy issue. This doesn’t really necessarily mean it’s an echo chamber though, I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how they use and like Windows, and I think the reason why they downvoted your comment (making an assumption here, I don’t see downvotes in my instance) is because it seems to be completely unprompted by anything or anyone, and a bit abrasive.

What does that have to do with echo chambers, exactly?

(Do note I’m not an astrophysicist, so this may be a bit wrong, but I think the main part of it is right.) Not exactly. Everything in the universe is constantly drifting away from everything else. The reason it is pretty much only visible at the scale of galactic clusters is that literally every force in the universe overpowers this expansion, unless the distances between the objects are truly absurd, in the range of millions or billions of light years.