It's really apples and hamburgers. Hong Kong is being controlled by a brutal dictatorship which killed 30 million of it's own people over the past century.
Catalonia is the rich part of Spain not liking the poorer part of spain. That's it. Catalonians are the embodiment of the western view of the French. The French, it turns out, are mostly not elitist jerks.
Catalonians, no matter what you ask them about Spain, instantly respond with "Oh that's spanish, not Catalan, I don't know anything about that". It's absurd posturing, and nothing more. Just like BRexiters, Catalonians have the erroneous notion that their wealth comes to them without any influence by the rest of their society, it's essentially cultural objectivism.
Did you really just compare Catalonia: A bunch of rich, entitled Spanish brexiter equivalents to Kurds who are being slaughtered by ISIS, Assad, Russia, and Türkiye?
Really???? I spend 2 months per year in Catalonia. There are no kids without legs in the streets. There are not 4 million refugees there.
Catalonia is identical to a bunch of Rich British wankers feeling that they are entitled to "more".
I started making 6 figures a few weeks after my 18th birthday, over 20 years ago. I've worked with hundreds, if not thousands of people in their teens, or under 23, who made 6 figures. That's the industry, it's not even worth mentioning.
These posts are always just lame humble brags with a contrite anecdote or two and a weak inspirational ending. yawn.
> Punk's original ethos was "I don't like my parents' music and culture and I don't know how to play an instrument but I still wanna express myself".
This isn't even close to the reality. You might enjoy reading a book entitled, "Please Kill Me: The Unauthorized Oral History of Punk Rock", by Legs McNeill (he coined the term Punk).
The Ramones were kids who had an intense love of post-war Americana. Inspired by late '60s/ early '70s glam-rock & proto-punk scenes, they wanted to bring back to the garage which had been lost to 10 minute soloing prog-rock bands and soulless disco music. I feel like "We Want The Airwaves" is the "Why?" section of /ramones/README.md.
The Clash? Mick Jones and Topper Hedon were very well-versed musicians. Joe Strummer was a passable rhythm guitarist, but was an amazing lyricist.
Sex Pistols? They were the boy band of the MacLaren empire.
:( I'm sorry to hear that. Have you considered getting a job as a developer? I hit $100k just before my 19th birthday and have never been below it since (I'm almost double now), nor had problems finding work.
In parallel, how about hiring an army of nerds to defeat meddling in the election both by foreign agents, and by agents hired by domestic politicians. Social media and hackers have more power than corporations now. It's easier to manipulate the people with anger than it is to manipulate politicians with bribes.
Palantir called me yesterday for a pretty senior position. I politely told them that they would need to pay me $500k just to talk to them, and they said they could probably make a $750k/year package.
I responded by sending the recruiter some doctored emails of Peter Thiel having sexual relations with a pig, and a copy of our constitution. He never responded, I don't know if I'm going to get the job.
Anyways, it makes me wonder. I used to believe that the people I worked with were generally ethically good people who stayed true to their own values, whatever they are. I told a friend of mine about this story, and he asked if I could refer him in, an that $200k was his sell-out number.
Personally a long series of tragedies in my life ensured I just don't give a $@$!$@! about money, and I have zero sell-out number.
What about you. Would you work for Palantir or an equally despicable company?
OKCupid held onto their integrity as long as they could. After the HotOrNot-derived dating apps popped up, and the Match purchase, they definitely lost their way. If I had to date again, I would just meet people at bars, without OKCupid's rather effective personality matches (engaged to one person I met there, married another, slept with dozens), dating apps mostly seem pointless.
A decade or so ago I worked at AdultFriendFinder.com, then the largest dating site. We had 20 or so different properties, covering every niche from "jewishfriendfinder" to "alt.com"
On paper we had about 50 million users. The reality was that we were a porn site, and our business was entirely driven by porn site referrals. Our smarter referral partners would game the system to setup thousand of users to get extra bonuses, and we encouraged it, so that we could ethically claim that we didn't create the fake users.
These sorts of lies are pretty much status quo in the dating industry. Zoosk is far worse, I walked away from a contract there when I realized how much of a sleazeball their founder, Shayan Zadeh, really was/