A 19 year old today would have been 8 when the 360 was replaced by the XBone, and may have kept playing on one for a few years beyond that. It wasn’t quite that long ago when that generation was still current. Perhaps these particular kids / child labourers are so young they think the “retro” cutoff line is the start of the pandemic.

Yes, EU policy is clear. Foreign companies deliberately undercutting European business to monopolize whole sectors is only ok if they’re American, not Chinese. Amazon good, BYD bad.

I think the Maoists and the Anarchists both have some very good ideas. The Maoists seem pretty serious about doing important reforms, but I think the anarchists would be more fun to have a beer with.

Axis of Authoritarians

Axis of Evil

Trotskyists have the right idea about focusing so much on publishing and distributing their own newspapers. Unfortunately those papers are filled with unapproachable Trotskyist rants, usually about big global issues, and contain basically zero real journalism. A free leftist local newspaper with a website and a print copy handed out at a few busy transit stations every morning could, for example, actually send a reporter to report on local goings-on in the town hall and so on. Given how so many local news outlets have closed over the past couple of decades and left many towns and cities without any local news, the average person might actually want to read such a paper.

Hey everyone let’s quite literally judge this book by its cover

I like the shade of yellow in the text

The real crumple zone is fragile masculinity.

How many 9/11s is that, twenty? If only there was another country to blame it on then something could be done about it.

Do they teach that line at schools in the US? I’ve seen Americans on the internet mention it very regularly, but it just seems so odd. Some (liberal) democracies are monarchies and some are republics. Why do Americans all seem to think those things are mutually exclusive？

Comparing the most recently available GDP growth data for one year across multiple major economies : cherry picking

Wondering why data from several decades ago (during the height of rapid massive industrialization that countries tend to only ever do once in their entire history) wasn’t included : not cherry picking

Too late, it’s real. I tried to use a public toilet in Sweden once with QR code payment lock on the door. I couldn’t get the fucking thing to work while I was in the middle of doing the gotta go dance so I ran up the street and found another public toilet at a place that still had an actual human person taking coins.

Yay, happy hail Satan day everyone. I remember when Intel chickened out and rounded up their 666 megahertz pentium 3 processors to report as being 667 megahertz. Absolute cowards, no wonder China is kicking their ass.