America has to be careful not to push Europe into the direction of China though. And with how Trump acts that might happen sooner than they would like. Bullying like how Trump prefers to do only works until some point. Europe mostly seems to bet on America changing its tune again once Trump is gone but we have to wait and see if the rot in America hasnt set in too deep already.
Japanese language learning environments really are ridiculously hostile and I've stopped engaging with them unless im searching for a specific resource.
I've dabbled a bit in Mandarin and while eventually i ended up liking Japanese more as a language, the Mandarin language learner community felt like such a warm bath in comparison. The people were friendly and welcoming and willing to help and genuinely excited to find more people wanting to learn the language.
I hope you still feel you arent losing when your job is gone and thus your income and woops there goes your home because you cant afford your rent/mortgage anymore.
Eventually that king will demand more and more. Humans are just fundamentally incapable of wielding that much wealth and thus power. And the pattern repeats again and again and again: billionaires actively lobby to destroy the livelihoods of huge swaths of people, destroy the environment, kill jobs or complete companies, do whatever they feel is necessary just so they can get even more money.
> I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil.
Wealth equals influence. So yes, it kinda is a measure of evil. It goes so far as Musk turning of Starlink at a critical moment to help the Russians for example. Or buying access to POTUS. Or donating money to groups to help undermine labor rights.
Basically, the type of person that can get this rich is in 99% of all cases also the type of person that doesnt give two shits about other people.
Its not. We already see this on social media: creating pictures and clips has become basically effortless and the result isnt utopia, its a massive steaming pile of worthless shit.
They were not opposing automation. They were opposing loss of jobs, wages, dignity in work and all that. And they turned out to be completely right. AI is just the next attack from capitalism in a long line of attacks aimed at workers. And this time its coming for every single worker, given that the explicit purpose is to create AI that can replace every single person.
University rankings have pretty much nothing to do with how well they teach students, only their research output. And good researchers aren’t automatically good teachers ( and vice versa).
There are still small pockets with actual humans to be found. The small web exists. Some forums keep on going, im still shitposting on Something Awful after twenty years and it’s still quite active. Bluesky has its faults but it also has for example an active community of scholars you can follow and interact with.
Maybe he used to be one, who knows. But I doubt he read a book or seen a movie in the past few decades. He got roasted by Joyce Carol Oates on X recently for being an oaf and he immediately started replying to tweets about acclaimed movies. And nothing insightful that proved he had seen them, just 'this is a great movie' or some other stupid oneliner. It would be hilarious if it wasnt so sad that the richest man on earth is such a pathetic little man.
> It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.
But its up to men to do the work. Women needed decades and decades to figure out what it meant to be a women and how to get what they wanted. They took the time and effort to organise, resulting in suffragettes and women's clubs and feminism and all that. Men could so far skip this all and just coast by on being the default. And now we're stuck with the situation that there are barely any male role models (except incredibly vile and toxic ones like Tate and Peterson), and trying to figure out what it means to be a man in a world that is rapidly changing, where men no longer can just be the breadwinner.
Not only that, but women are also demanding more from men (more emotional maturity, more support with chores and child raising, having a fully developed personality). And too many men seem either incapable or unwilling to change, preferring to lash out against 'woke' and voting for extreme rightwing politics that aims to put women back in the kitchen.
Yeah, this is also a huge part of it. Society has made it incredibly dangerous for any man to be around children, because a single allegation is enough to destroy a life.
Too many lonely men seem to think that women can and should fix all their problems. That if only they had a relationship all their shit would be over.
While the first step should be to join a hobby club or do some volunteer work or find a sport to do (and definitely not the gym or running or any other solo sport). Just find something where you regularly interact with people, and especially the same people over a longer period of time.