Jesus wasn’t telling the poor destitute to sell everything, he told the wealthy that it was their only way to salvation. A guy with a pair of shoes, a few sets of clothing and a phone is living as bare bones a life style as is possible in any modern society.

You are doing the Fox News bit of complaining that food stamp recipients have cell phones and refrigerators

Because they were never allies, they both just want to end US hegemony over global finance. They have veey different and often adversarial long term domestic and foreign goals.

No, but the participants still have to pay a lot towards the show. They don’t just get to piggy back off of the host amd Big 5. There are participation fees that cover the EBU expenses. Those have to be covered in by the participation fees

Iceland, Belgium, and Portugal are likely to leave as well, with the Polish Culture minister calling for a boycott if Israel participates a few months ago. The more countries that drop, the more expensive it will be to participate for the remaining countries as well.

Not sure if you have noticed, but your government has already started the armed combat against the people

I saw once that the reason Kristen Stewart was so hated in the Twilight movies is because all the young women who grew up reading the books imagined themselves as Bella. They were never going to like whichever actress was cast into the role since they would no longer be able to project their own likeness onto the protagonist.

They are going to pivot all that processing to the next snale oil scheme. Do you think its a coincidence that rhe AI hype came immediately after crypto crashed?

Most modern farming in the US isn’t about food, it’s about collecting government subsidies. Nearly all government farm subsidies go towards corn, which is mostly used for ethanol bio fuel, then it is used as livestock feed, then it’s used for corn syrup as a sugar substitute in food and beverages. Meanwhile, states like California and Washington which grow most of the actual domestic produce we consume receive almost no federal agriculture subsidies. Subsidies should have been gradually rolled back 30 years ago with the money being used as grants and loans to help farmers transition to growing actual food for actual people to eat, but those are harder to farm, so farmers have demanded that their subsidies stay as is

Yeah, I only have my gmail accounts for logins to various websites. They will only have LLM generated spam emails to train on from this

Poor guy probably lost big on Bored Ape Yacht Club

It’s a Charlie Brown and the football situation. You can only fall for the same bait and switch so many times before you just give up. In a democracy it leads to voter apathy. And primaries are poorly run. If it isn’t a prominent one, you likely won’t find much information on the candidates prior to the primary election, and for the president, they sre pretty much decided by 4th one so if you’re state does a later primary, chances are that your preferred candidate has already dropped out by the time you can actually vote for them.

Focusing on cannabis since the guy is complaining about his hemp farm.

The Democrats here in Ohio have done fuck all to protect the decriminalized cannabis that we voted in support of by 60% back in 2023 (same with abortion the same day). Republicans immediatly set to work to limit home growth and how much you can buy. Did the Democrats run ads in Ohio about how they were going to protect our right to grow and consume cannabis? Did they talk about how Republicans were going to roll back the provisions we all agreed on? No. They ran ads about how they were going to help Trump hurt trans kids and “secure the border” here in Ohio. The Democrats and Republicans have lost all credibility with everyone that isn’t a die-hard supporter of the parties. People stop voting when they feel like neither party cares about their interests.

We are looking at the mistake of allowing capital to offshore everything in the 70’s and 80’s. China didn’t force those companies to stop maintaining their existing infrastructure and outsource all their manufacturing overseas, they chose it in the interest of lower costs.

See, my first thought would be to crack down on the tech parasites that are ruining out society instead of changing the law to accommodate them. But I’m just a dumb American who lives in a place where corporations are allowed to do whatever they want including killing whistleblowers, but I’m sure that the fascist parties taking power in Europe won’t do that.

There is nothing stopping the EU from going the DeepSeek route and just stealing the finished LLM’s from American companies. But the truth is that the EU shouldn’t want to have all these data centers training generative models. The us is already dedicating 4% of our electricity production to them, with people in states along the Great Lakes and Eastern seaboard seeing massive increases in their electric bills to pay for them (~30% for me in Ohio, ~75% for my brother in Virginia). I can understand if you are a technocratic neoliberal in the EU parliament that is taking bribes from tech firms why you would want this, but for anyone paying attention, rhe promises tech companies are making to burn hundreds billions of euros while gutting privacy, 🔏IP, and consumer protections at the top of the bubble makes no sense.

You can hold someone accountable when a person runs over a child or a pet. Who is the responsible party when a waymo kills someone?

Because at it’s core, the EU is still a neoliberal organization that promotes business interests over public welfare. It exists to ensure giant corporations in Europes developed core can compete against massive non-European firms. The only reason they don’t push for American levels of cruelty is that the people of the EU would riot and overthrow their governments if their hard earned benefits (universal healthcare, worker protections, pensions, mandatory vacations) were severely threatened.

They thought like would go up forever, and now that the line is starting to slow down, they gotta do a sacrifice to make the line look like it is still going up

It’s happening in your country too. The status quo is clearly untenable, so people will vote for the one who offers to change it. Reform UK willbe terrible for everyone but the wealthy, but people are done with parties that only seek to assist the wealthy. Labour’s austerity refusal to aid British citizens will only lose them votes

I disagree as part of being a history 4X means that peopl will expect historical events to occur. And PI have repeatedly made it clear that they want their games to have an expansion/contraction element to make each playthrough feel unique beyond just the pop-up stories that occur. Civilizations trnd to collapse/struggle at the conclusion of theor Golden Age. Just look at The UK and US for a modern example.