--(y) #4

(y) #5

It happens to all empires. They all amass huge gains from hard and soft power allowing for extremely cheap imports which in turn result in immense quality of life gains for it citizens, but as things settle and the decades go by, newer governmental generations don't understand what, exactly, those expenses are for, and start seeing them as just that, expenses, nothing more. So they cut back on what they see as useless fat, and next thing you know, they're falling and someone else is grabbing all that power for themselves. It happens over, and over, and over again. Now it's the US turn, with China likely being the up-and-coming empire.

I wonder if this move to slightly soften the Great Firewall will intensify as China becomes the world's major power. They use censorship for fear of internal rebellion, which is almost a national sport in China, but there's some chance, small as it may be, that with China being Number One, and the population Super-Hiper-Mega-Happy with the CCP as a result, that the government's extreme fear of "them" miiiight fall enough for free speech not to be so suppressed. So, who knows? If this experiment proves not to cause the kind of disruption they so utterly dread, it might stick. Though I'm most likely wishful thinking.

(y) #4

these treacherous profiteering companies will be broken up, and their execs will go to jail, IG Farben-stylee. Personally, I can't wait for Zuck to go cool off in the slammer.

I swear to God, if I ever meet someone in the flesh who tells me something or someone has been slammed, blasted, destroyed, torched, trashed or grilled, I'm gonna punch them in the face.

It's impossible to read any headline without those toddler English-level verbs used and abuse all the fucking time these days. It's really annoying!

(y) #3

fund NASA to the tune of $1bn.

Of course, your South African Nazi friend wouldn't profit from that, which is your main concern really.

Always remember this when you talk about a company's "success".

(y) #2

(y)

HEELLOOO!!!

Hello?

That's not a cheap phone. Or rather, if it costs $75 in the US (before Trump's new tariffs, I mean), it'd cost about $120 USD here due our tariffs. Our cheap phones, the ones that do cost about $75 here, would cost $45 for Americans were they sold in the US.

They are indeed 4G or 5G, but they come with 32 GB or 64 GB of storage, only 2 GB of RAM, a low DPI screen, an old SoC, and Android Go -- and an older version of it at that. These "may" run the full Facebook and TikTok apps, but slowly, and switching from one app to the other takes time due to the tiny amount of RAM, so it's usual for users to install on them alternatives such as Facebook Lite, TikTok Lite, Instagram Lite, and anything else "Lite" one can find, whether official or not, as such phones are mostly unusable otherwise.