Decent chance he’ll croak before the end of his term. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

According to one story of French philosopher Voltaire’s last words, his response to a priest at his deathbed urging him to renounce Satan was “Now is not the time for making new enemies.”

How exactly will they force compliance for companies not based in Italy, or even the EU?

It’s going to end up that way whether EU does something now or not. He’ll just pick up his ball and leave like he’s done every time so far.

It’s terrible. Most of them probably aren’t even real…

I think the idea was having people go “If even HE doesn’t support Trump, it must be real bad indeed”. But it was completely tone-deaf in either case.

Good thing then that I never, ever in my entire life have given Amazon a single cent, nor will I.

Behold, a cynic.

Negativity bias has been an evolutionary advantage for hundreds of thousands of years of our development. You don’t exactly “breed out” a trait that has been honed to such a degree in a generation or two.

Flanders, Belgium. Things are… okay-ish, but I feel like we’re balancing on an edge, and any little push will topple the current regime and bring power to the far-right parties who continue to gain ground every election. At this point in time, our little country has one of the least unequal societies in the world in terms of income. Something tells me that in say 10 years we’ll look back to today and reminisce about the “good old days”…

A cocktail of prescriptions (Venlafaxine, Olanzapine, Myrtazapine) and self-medication (weed mostly). Mindlessly spending my paycheck because there’s nothing to really look forward to long-term.

Part of the strategy is to exhaust us by blasting our supposed impotence at us perpetually. Don’t fall for it though.

It’s worse than that. If wages had kept pace with productivity (thanks Reagan), we would have been working 2-3 day workweeks at full wages for over twenty years by now.

They literally stole over half of our lives. That amounts to class genocide.

Makes perfect sense. Unfortunately.

Oh man, we’re really going to see the return of thousands of people dead from, y’know, poison in food etc, aren’t we?

I try to take some solace in the knowledge that throughout history, this sentiment (“our leaders are hopelessly corrupt and there’s nothing we can do about it”) was probably the de facto default for almost anyone. Not that that makes things better now but it helps keep things in perspective.

Keep taking away reasons for people to live. I’m sure millions of desperate, voiceless victims with nothing left to lose will not backfire for the people in charge at all.

I don’t really agree that it’s much easier to start on Reddit. Especially nowadays.

-Post from an IP that was once used by a banned account? Also banned (after first being shadowbanned)

-Try to post in any niche sub of your choosing after making an account? Forget it, wait three weeks and farm 3K karma first (which encourages shitposting and reposting, lowering quality)

-Deviate a fraction of an inch from whatever sub’s 500-page rulebook? Banned.

-Try to argue an unbanning? That’s a permanent mute.

-Post anything - and I do mean anything - in a “wrong” sub, get immediately permabanned by a slew of subs you didn’t even know existed.

-Some mod doesn’t agree with something you posted? Even if it was 5 years ago in a sub that has since been deleted? Banned and muted.

Reddit is an absolutely terrible experience for new posters. How they even manage to retain a tenth of them is beyond me. I encourage them to keep it up however, more traffic for Lemmy.

In the last decade or so, when people called USA a 3rd world country, it was mostly tongue in cheek.

Not anymore.

It’s been a while but AFAIK you control three or four party members so it’s more like the older BG games than NWN1 in that regard.

Storywise it’s set in the Forgotten Realms near the regions of the first game but it’s a completely new story with new characters. Iirc the story manages to decently subvert some expectations. I remember a conversation with a dead god in the expansion that was on par with meeting Sovereign for the first time in Mass Effect.