I don’t have a fight in this race

Very true, but I suspect most people would rather double down on their beliefs, much like this comic:

I suppose this is the more common outcome as they will have a considerable pool of friends/family/colleagues that can reinforce their faith and are likely to also feel personally offended

why do people react so strongly when a book dares to reinterpret sacred ideas?

For a lot of people, their religion is part of them, so to make fun of it is to make fun of them.

For others, mainly the leaders, it’s an affront to their power. “How dare someone make fun of the tools I use to control people”?

Open Veins of Latin America. Finished reading it today. It’s a 1973 book that explains some of the reasons for the massive underdevelopment of Latin American colonies. The general gist can be summed up as “it is a place full of riches, and the colonizers only want to extract everything and send it back to their masters” - that still applied to the industrialization efforts funded by foreign capital.

Although Spain and Portugal were the nominal masters, they, too, were fucking themselves over with debts to Dutch and English bankers back in 16th and 17th centuries, not to mention bad trade deals, effectively killing their own industries and those of their colonies.

EDIT: Galeano also exposed a lot of the shady deals made mainly by USA companies with governments in order to “develop” the southern countries, like ensuring that they’d get less taxes, better exchange prices and better credit options, that their goods would only be shipped by USA owned ships, etc. Not to mention that, during 1950-1970, the price of the commodities sold by Latin American countries kept falling (probably growing below inflation) and the income from the exports kept getting lower, despite larger volumes.

I can imagine it in a situation where we effectively go back to the stone age, with little to no trade between the small (<50) communities

Why haven’t they tried a bridge? Fucking amateurs

That’s just typical brazilian interest rates

That murder-hobo part. I never really understood the expression.

It stems from the typical RPG dungeon-raiding parties since the times of Dungeons and Dragons. You have a group of homeless people (hobos), traveling from place to place, killing (murder) almost everything that crosses their path in order to collect treasure.

The majority of jobs simply don’t allow any sort of WFH: if it involves creating or transforming something, people have to be physically manning the tools. Healthcare can’t be WFH, education sucks when it’s fully online.

Smaller communities are great for peace and quiet, but terrible when you need anything they don’t have (or don’t have in decent quality), like jobs, transportation, healthcare and education. If you happen to be “socially weird”, you have to adapt and “unweird” yourself

Dink Smallwood’s wood

Hopefully game reviewers will heighten their expectations to meet these inflated prices.

I find it more likely Nintendo will DMCA them for daring to speak about their games

As others pointed out, it’s not only the US economy that will be hit, but also everyone that trades with them.

To illustrate some examples, Canadian aluminum might end up with 25% tariffs. That means anything made within the USA that uses said aluminum will get a price increase. Canadian companies might end up with a surplus, since their main customers won’t be buying as much (instead of paying 100 dollars for a tonne, 'mericans will pay 125 dollars per tonne). That surplus will drive prices down if they can’t find someone else to buy the aluminum.

Since the tariffs aren’t only on Canadian aluminum, but a lot of stuff from a lot of countries, some of that stuff will end up with a significant surplus and no new buyers. For smaller countries that rely on USA exports, that’s going to hurt a lot.

Eh, nobody will care about some bits being lost there, I’m sure

AI and shitty cropping? Deepfry and make it look like a fully compressed 150x150 jpeg to make it 120% shittier-poster

The right thing for meta to do is to implode and cause a complete crash on the stock exchange as it is erased from history.

Start anything that idiots would call “communism” and the CIA will send a coup to your country in 1 week or your money back, guarantee!

Nobody ever laughed in my face or told all their friends or spread rumors about me, they just said no thank you and I moved on.

Lucky you, I asked a girl out once in HS, got denied, afterwards she and her friends would often look at me and giggle during classes or breaks and avoid any contact with me. Later, through a friend, I learned they came up with the nickname “priest” for me (as in catholic priest, who has to vow for celibacy), as that was the “obvious career choice” for me

I’m old, but never sent or received a fax or rented from Blockbuster specifically, we had plenty of local “mom&pop” stores.

Never paid with cheque, by the time I was old enough to have any significant amount of money (~2011) they were already almost entirely phased out

There’s always fishing

I suppose the burning of Rome made a lot of previously subjugated people celebrate wildly for the misfortune of their conquerors.