Yes that’s my plan. I’m definitely smart enough to be one. I just need to wait for the right opportunity.

The founding fathers, in their infinite wisdom, designed the three branches of the government of the United States of America to have a series of checks and balances to protect their fragile republic from threats such as this. Now we all get to see it in action:

The Judicial branch has ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly and should be broken up, but it doesn’t have the power to do so directly, it has to advise the Legislative and Executive branches to do it. However, the 4th and 5th branches of government - the CIA and the Lobbies - both want Google to remain intact. The CIA finds Google’s tech dominance extremely useful, and the Lobbies’ patrons make a lot of money from it.

So, the Judicial branch advises the Legislative and Executive branches what they should do, but before they do anything the CIA and the Lobbies review the advice and then tell the Legislative and Executive branches what they will do, which in this case will probably be some massive (small for Google) fines.

See? Checks and balances! The different moving parts all working together to ensure that the Government serves the people it was created to serve.

“You activated my trap clause.”

👆👆 This

Over the past several years Alipay and Wechat pay have gone from nowhere to everywhere in Hong Kong, and though I’ve gotten used to them for payments, my West-trained brain just kind of blanks out all of the other stuff in them as visual noise. But when I do open up one of those sub-apps out of idle curiousity, there’s nothing but benefits in there. It was a full year before I tapped on the icon called ‘bill payment’ and found I can use Alipay to pay for literally all my bills - utilities, services, everything except the Western parts of my life like Netflix and Xbox Game Pass. And it’s not like the banking systems’ autopay services where you give up control and let the (London-owned) bank and service decide whether you pay or not - if a subscription service decides you have to sit on hold for an hour to cancel your subscription manually through a phone call, you can just stiff them instead: the app will side with you, and the subscription is de facto cancelled unless they want to explain in small claims court why they have such a user-unfriendly unsubscribe procedure.

Anyway that’s a long-winded way of saying that despite the wild bazaar vibe you get from those apps, they’re also extremely regulated in the public interest. The Government lets Alipay and Wechat make a fortune just by running those platforms on the understanding that if they step even a little out of line and leverage that privilege against the public, they’re done. And that includes transaction fees.

Meanwhile Paypal is streamlined spotlessly but they take a fat chunk in transaction fees compared to the *checks notes* zero transaction fees that I’ve paid on Alipay. No transaction fees ever.

“Hey everyone, we found an upgrade to planned obsolescence: we call it planned obsolescence 2.0. Instead of designing hardware to break and require replacing after a few years, we’ll design the software to break every month! We’ll say it’s an upgrade. It’ll reduce our material costs and we can pass those savings on to the shareholder.”

I love using Socratic Dialogue during lessons. When students are grasping the material well, you get very palpable feedback that they are, and it lights a fire in their enthusiasm when students understand that they have so much agency in the student-teacher interaction. On the flip side, when they’re distracted or disinterested it slows your lesson down to a crawl, and time is the most scarce resource you have as a school teacher. Essentially you can get wildly mixed results because you’re entrusting your students with a great deal of influence over the flow of your lesson time.

Always have an alternate plan if you plan to engage in dialectics with students. A good educator can present the initial ideas and concepts, and then gauge the responsiveness of the classroom and know whether to prompt dialogue or just lead. When you can get students really grasping a topic just from talking to them about it, it’s the best feeling. And when you tell students that homework is to read the textbook pages that were planned for that lesson but that they didn’t need, it’s a huge confidence booster for them, too.

The unfortunate reality is that most schools are curriculum based. There’s assessments with set criteria at regular intervals, and between those assessments you have finite lesson time to prepare your students for the assessment criteria. So truly open-ended dialogues are rare; they’re a luxury you can afford after you’ve squared away the closed-ended lesson objectives.

It’s a plague. So many of my students play it, and it’s very hard to compete with it in terms of appealing to young children. Their business model for content makes Roblox a theme park of free games for kids who don’t need to go to mum and dad for money or installation permission every time they want to try something new.

Especially when the user experience is constantly guiding users who don’t know better to do exactly that

“You keep saying how we’re all one big family, so give me a share of the business ownership and add my name to your will.”

Conscious and Conscience are different things (but understandably easy to conflate)

11M views. 11M well-informed Westerners casually parroting this arrogance.

Now I wonder how many of those responsibly-up-to-date Westerners have seen the videos about how weong this one was?

The only downside is the game being set in Florida but we won’t get to be Florida Man

I remember when making videos and streaming was about fun, not making profit.

Everything gets commodified in this shithole system. Everything.

Influencers feel more egregious because what they commodify is the sense of human connection and community itself.

But if they weren’t doing it, the market would ‘innovate’ some other person or some other method to do it.

http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/

Go wild.

Good luck getting around the “all statistics about China are propaganda unless they’re from white people who show they’re unbiased by espousing a healthy dislike of the Chinese government” brainrot, though.

Tell us more about the bridge. Does it bear enough load for me to drive a T-34 over it, and once I get to the opposite side from the libs will it burn easily?

Defederating from the 'grad can be attributed to liberal malice, but combined with getting precious about copyrights and throttling flow of information? Wouldn’t be surprised to find an agency or think tank tongue has started slobbering into their ear holes.

idk about you but I’m gonna fill my giant spoon with ice cream and listen to communist anthems really loud in my pajamas

Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.

Most of the .world comments I’ve seen here fit that criteria.

Full video of the speech and Q&A is in this article: https://www.rt.com/russia/584154-putin-valdai-club-speech/

Have a gander at the people behind Brave Software. They’re all cut from the same silicon wafer as everyone else in the Silicon Valley executive biome. And the (lack of) readiness of the information about who is behind Brave is another tell in itself.