They go into a lot of detail on how these markets work without a whole lot of discussion as to whether or not this should be happening.

I mean, it isn’t surprising in the least. I imagine most USians care less about the effect of the outcome (how many people voting for a major party could tell you much about their own candidate’s policies, nevermind the opposition policies) and more on whether their team won or not. It is turning the whole thing into a sports competition, so of course people would gamble on it.

Which I imagine, is exactly the intended result.

In the future you either watch adverts for entertainment, or seek out the Puppeteers lurking in the sewer system.

At first I was like “Oh, well a DNR is not that crazy a thing to hav-oh.” I would probably take my chances with bleeding out too.

I love checking the byline on these opinion pieces.

The author is a member of the “Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong” and has based most of his career on fearmongering Tiananmen Square. He was banned from entering China years ago, so obviously is extremely unbiased.

I could almost see that for highly specialized expensive hardwareyou don’t need longterm.

A mouse is not that. Who the hell is subscribing to a mouse. Not some kind of monthly mouse subscription for people really into them, but just the right to keep using the one mouse you have. That is insane.

He is actually Juche Bot, nobody would suspect him if he posts a photo of himself.

"Well you see, it is only fair that we charge the cost of what a lifetime of treatments would make for us. In fact, we should be celebrated because we would make $400,000 off the victim patient if we treated them normally.

Really we are heroes. Oh and also uh job creation!"

or liberalism, socialism, communism or any number of other -isms.

I would put money on many of them not really being able to define a democracy or republic. Their level of political awareness is [generally] staggeringly low.

They pretty much glaze over with anything more complicated than “blue team left, red team right”.

Even if it worked perfectly, you would end up using it once and then putting it under the sink. Never to be seen again.

They are making it sounds like they are unearthing ancient progenitor weapons to subjugate the population. Man, I knew I should have gone into archaeology.

That’s tentatively great to hear, though I am honestly surprised that they got that pushed through there.

Now whether or not it will actually happen is something I’d like to keep an eye on. As an example, the employers side citing the freaking games industry as a good model of work-life balance is absolutely ludicrious. Hopefully the trade unions get more traction on their proposals instead.

Not Korea, but we have a similiar work culture with a lot of the same issues and been trying all sorts of reforms to cut back on people literally dropping dead from overwork and while there are some improvements, a lot hasn’t stuck. People often don’t report their working hours correctly, work without clocking in, and management sometimes looks the other way if they are benefiting.

Admittedly, our efforts were pretty lackluster. We tried a Premium Friday for a while that encouraged companies to give their employees the last friday of the month off. Besides having as much impact as a pizza party, I don’t know a single company that did it.

My father made the mistake of telling me I would become less liberal, instead of more conservative.

He was right, but unaware of the monkey paw curling.

Doesn’t surprise me in the least. Another way they decided to fix their birth rate was by giving one time lump payments to new parents. Which would definitely never be abused.

I can’t imagine working 100+ hour weeks is having any impact on their ability to have kids or anything like that.

Not surprised. Their current president is basically this writ large, one of his campaign promises was to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality. And he was elected.

If I recall he also wanted to remove the 100 hour/week working limit. I spent a few months in the ROK (and the DPRK) during grad school and you couldn’t pay me to live there. They make the Japanese work-life balance look healthy.

This guy just seems pretty standard for politicians there now honestly.

Just for the fun of it, let’s grant that Russia has some secret mind-scrambling ray that can pinpoint a single person in a crowded studio, undetected. That premise is ridiculous enough, but let’s just run with it.

Where did they deploy it from? Was there a guy in the studio? Building nearby? Biden has security service protection that is going to be screening all those places, nobody would even be able to use a handheld mind ray.

Or does Russia have mind-melting space lasers now? From which satellite are those being beamed down?

Snakes becoming synonymous with evil/bad things has done so much damage to the poor critters. When I was last living in the west (a long long long time ago) I had two pet snakes there were rescues from people trying to kill them. They’re awesome animals that deserve a much better reputation than they get.

I am thoroughly envious that you have managed to avoid that meme this long. You aren’t missing anything.

Nope, they are pretty much as bad as the rest of them. I think like 96-97% of their salespeople make basically no money. That was their whole shtick back in the 50s of recruiting housewives as salespeople, you see it in a lot of period dramas and the like.

I know a few countries they operate normal stores because local laws prevent them from doing their whole tupperware party thing, like China. I have heard they are moving more away from that model in other countries too, but I have no idea how true that actually is.

I don’t think the actual product is necessarily bad as far as I am aware, but they still have scummy sales practices.

My partner will probably never financially recover from her time involved in a MLM. She was involved in one from well before we got together, and she has since escaped thankfully. I am extremely lucky to be in a position while I can reasonably support both of us so she can focus on the debt, but it’s not going to be something she ever really pays off.

MLMs make me extremely pissed off, becaues they absolutely ruin lives. They should be illegal everywhere, but only very few countries actually have a blanket ban on them. China and Saudi Arabia are the only countries I know of offhand.

Obviously the US invented freedom, it did not exist historically.

Therefore it is an obvious requirement that you be American to be a free-thinker, so only American news outlets can be free. If they say something wrong, then they have obviously been subverted by China/Russia and are no longer free.