Show people that the left and center are able to provide

I wonder if they can, with the reversed population pyramid most EU countries experience.

In the early 90s something similar happened in Belgium (1).

What lessened the extremism in the following couple of elections was investment (in infrastructure, healthcare, economic opportunities, etc) outside of the cities as well.

It turned out that for every tax frank gathered, 80 cents were spend on prettifying the larger cities and the major port. People were mostly (rightly?) pissed off that government represented a terrible ROI for the same group of people for decades. They would’ve been better of without a federal government. They saw their lives get worse, whilst at the same time that government applauded themselves for the great things they achieved.

I’m not sure how feasible the same solution is today, as there’s very little investment budget anyways. Most of tax revenue goes to pensions and healthcare of a reversed population pyramid.

those thoughts are prevalent enough to cause this problem.

Can take people out of the soviet, but can’t take soviet out of the people (1).

Sadly it’s a system of thought that isn’t concerned with observable reality. It’s a sentiment I recognise in most (political) extremists: the idea that your problems must be someone else’s fault (the brown, women, billionairs, … pick your poison).

And, as you noticed, banning it will indeed only validate that sentiment.

(I grew up in DDR, luckily left in early 90s. A solution is therapy, as those people are stuck in generational trauma, which is known to lessen or completely void you of empathy. But that doesn’t scale to halve a country).

There’s no room next to the onion. That’s where I keep my other onion.

Using “us”, as if your opinion is consensus :) And at the same time ignoring all the abuse resulting from your point of view.

It’s indeed a pointless conversation if one party can simply ignore all the hurt, pain and destruction their proposal causes.

China is a bad relationship?

It’s an exploitative autoritarian regime, institutionalising severe human rights abuses (1).

I’ve got some bad news for you but 90% of what you own is made in China.

That’s not news. It’s not because an abuser buys you gifts, that there’s no abuse going on?

I don’t get the abused spouse like logic, where because you get out of one bad relationship, you’d need to start a new one?

that do not engage with politics in China

There’s no such thing. A person nor company can unilaterally decide “not to engage with politics”, as politics engages with them in thousands of ways. The best they can do is self-censorship, which, even when successfull, is in itself a form of political engagement.

which one is the dictatorship?

False dichotomy 🙄

We need them more than ever now that the US has decided to go full mask off.

Who’s “we” in this case? And why would they “need” someone now, because of stuff in the US?

I wonder if complex numbers predate the discovery of electromagnetism

Further, the guy above goes “look at how Xi is suplexing Taiwan?!?!”

I think you’re the only one reading it that way. The rest of us understand that it happens within a context of an autoritarian regime.

which is in the hands of a private company which largely operates independently of the government

Independent untill the party decides they’re not independent. (Eg).

the guy alone has that amount of crushing power.

Nobody of right mind takes this at face value. This isn’t a pro wrestling heavyweight championship belt, with Jinping suplexing the Hong Kong protestors.

It’s obviously as head of an autoritarian communist regime, using corona measures and a militarized police to suppress people for the extravagant act of desiring freedom from the CCP.

Nice 🤜

Infinite library cards!

There’s never been a time where the world was conflict free, and people merrily skidoodled around.

Happyness is as much internal, as it is influenced by your environment. It takes both. And the relationship is bi-directional.

Blaming the latter for the first, is a dead end.

I don’t have an account on other social media.

Once in a while I do searches like “alternative to X site:reddit.com” for software, movie recommendations, etc. So I do use it, just don’t participate. Mostly because it’s designed to breed hate and distrust.

Birds of a feather flock together

First I used was dial up. My first recollection of using it was to browse my local kids tv network website.

I think RAG will be surpassed by LLMs in a loop with tool calling (aka agents), with search being one of the tools.

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B

Converting free text to standardized forms such as json