It’s definitely still true in Central Europe

Or how people tend to prefer Pepsi in blind tests (I think it’s sweeter or something, if i remember correctly) but overwhelmingly chose CocaCola if given the choice.

It’s a fun story, however I also found it really interesting after learning German that this is really overblown outside of Germany.

I once tried to reference it with German friends and they didn’t even understand why it was supposed to be funny!

I know this is unpopular and goes against the ideals of the early internet, but the open internet (especially social networks) is hugely damaging at the moment.

This isn’t just “people having different opinions”, but rather full-scale cyber warfare that’s currently happening. It’s also only going to get worse…

Propaganda works, and it works quite well. Nobody is fully immune.

So unless you feel like having Musk/Russia/China dictate your life (through forcing their shit agenda), banning their attack vectors is really the only play.

Grew up in the rural northwest US, been living the last decade-ish in Germany, Austria, UK.

All of these places have rich and poor, but the poorest in the US have it sooooo much worse than those in the other countries I mentioned.

Also, they are geographically isolated which kept them out of most destructive wars.

The poorest inhabitant of the USA has rights, possibilities and duties that only the richest in any other country can only dream of.

Sorry but this is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever read.

I grew up in an area of the US with poverty issues and now live in Europe. The lives of poor Americans are so much worse than where I live now (central europe) that it’s almost hard to fathom. Poverty in the US is systematically CRUSHING and can be near impossible to escape. It’s a soul-destroying existence…

There are certainly places which are worse, but we just don’t have that here in Europe to nearly the same extent! I’m far from rich, but life is much nicer here…

Being a scientist is a ridiculously hard career path these days.

Yeah weed easily smells at least as bad

“I wish I could work at home tidying up the house for no salary and have no income of my own!”

As a fun aside: both my wife and I would both love to do this! Unfortunately it’s just too tough financially in the modern world, so it’s never a really serious discussion.

Plus we would have to flip a coin or something to decide who has to be the breadwinner.

We don’t really have a relationship that revolves around power-roles though, so it’s a bit of a different discussion.

At least europe it has kind of switched to the opposite in recent years.

I did a doctorate in physics and women had a much easier time finding PhD/post-doc positions because there is just much more funding available.

Most groups in my institution were majority women.

Professorships are still nearly all men, but that’s largely down to the sexism of the previous generations (back in the 60s-90s when they got their positions). This will slowly shift in the coming decades.

It’s less about that and more about stopping an extremely powerful attack vector currently active in your own country.

Literally the biggest reason why the western world is in such a giant political crisis is the weaponization of social media.

No love for Assad, but given all the islamist groups involved I have a bad feeling that this is going to end up even worse…

Citizens united at the very least

In the short-term: yes.

In the mid- to long-term: obscene inequality (like we are seeing currently) inevitably leads to awful awful things…

He’s useful to the orange man… unfortunately that might be enough