There will always be a space for God behind the curtain of what we don’t understand. And indeed, if you set to stone what God is, then when you lift the curtain a bit, then you have disproved God. But if you’re more flexible about it, then their will always be a space behind the curtain we do not understand. And even if we would ever understand the whole mechanism of how the universe came to be, then we can still imagine there to be a meaning behind that whole mechanism. Add to that: science is about what we can observe. But if you believe there are things you can perceive that are not vested in observable phenomena, you have something that can never be disproved by science.

I think you’re being overly optimistic about the dying part. Folks here are not exactly a random sample - even if many people see the enshittification of Facebook or Reddit, they will feel unable to leave. Especially for social media there’s a huge network effect - the value of the product is in the fact that “everyone” is there. Or for Google products: there are just so many different problems for the user to solve (if there’s a current solution at all!) before being able to move. So yes, the focusing on quarterly profits extracts value at the cost of everyone else, but it might not be enough to kill the product. Or at least not for quite a long time. For me the root of the problem is that we gave up on countering monopolies. This has always been a grave enemy of “efficient” capitalism, but over the last few decades we kind of stopped efforts to prevent this. It automatically leads to worse service for any client, not just in the digital sector. Worse, it leass to concentration of power in such few hands that any political system shifts into an oligarchy.

I wish the Democrats would have a clear agenda on that. A few fundamental fixes to the system to prevent another decent into lawlessness (thins like elections on a Sunday, no corporate money in politics, strong demonopolisation, especially in media,…). But I haven’t seen anything “radical” from them yet.

Lots of the collateral damage affected plenty of civilians then. I must admit I’ve saw so much about that aspect that I assumed it was intended.

The usa shouldn’t have started this war, for sure, but that’s a pretty heartless statement.

Lots of collateral damage then

The strikes against Qatar and UAE are hardly military in purpose though…

That’s actually a quite condescending thing to say. And also not a surprise at all.

This is low-key one of the craziest pieces of recent news to me

Which polls? No the cancelled Gallup ones for sure.

Having worked in departments providing data all my career, I’m not surprised in the slightest that people do not care in any way about where the numbers they got come from.

Sheer incompetence? Gives them the chance to propaganda away all the separate instances one at a time, rather than having a single huge pile of evidence once?

But where to depert them to? Maybe… Cuba?

Hadn’t used my account in years. But deleted it now. It seems unlikely that the old Twitter will ever return.

I don’t think untrained violent people will respond less violently when the likelihood of violence against them increases. I would say y’all need to build barricades to safeguard neighborhoods, you need masses that can only be mowed down, and need to avoid being easily singled out. Using the car you are sitting in as a barricade is incredibly dangerous because there is a track record of using vehicles as weapons.

I was indeed not talking about the history of quality of life of the people, but about the way hard politics are organised. As far as I can tell, this has become even more centralised under Xi. When it comes to freedom of thought and expression of the people, I see as much reason for pessimism about recent evolution in the West (especially in the Anglo-Saxon world), but I don’t see much reason for optimism when it comes to China. E.g. look how they are not even allowed to know their own history, or how independent thought in Hong Kong is being stuffed out. Lifting, what, 800 million people out of poverty is an impressive feat, and certainly holds a few lessons for laissez faire capitalists. Then again, large part of that poverty were self inflicted wounds. And that growth shouldn’t blind one for the immense cost at which it came, and the large challenges ahead to keep things afloat.

Still the same party in control, still the same way folks get selected for power. Not exactly comparable to a country losing a war, getting split in two, one adopting liberal democracy, the other a Soviet style communist system. And then later rejoining into a single country again.

Well it’s been that long that they went full circle again. I guess my age is showing (I’m a geriatric millennial). Until a decade ago, or maybe two, a successful AfD would have been unthinkable. Just goes to show how far off OPs comparison with Germany is.

Interesting comparison to Germany. As you may be aware, there was quite a significant change in government structure right around 1945. While yes - if new evidence from that period were to be released, it would indeed reflect poorly on Germany. But everyone would know it’s news from basically another country. Whereas in China nothing has changed when it comes to the structure of the nation. And they sure as hell did not go through a period of national mourning or apology to reflect on past mistakes.

I’m not behind our prime minister at all, but the core of what he’s saying is “we’ll only do this if we share the risks involved among the whole EU”. Given that no-one seems to be willing to do that, it would appear that he has a point that the risks are significant. I also heard him call the idea “theft”, which sounds crazy in the context we’re in. But then he’s talking about the practice of taking money from countries we’re not at war with, setting a bad precedent if you want to be a financial center for the world. That one’s a little far fetched, even without a formal declaration of war, Russia isn’t just a random country at this point we have a few issues with.