I don’t understand why you’d use GDP here. Is the assumption that, normalized for currency differences, all countries have the same gdp? That’s not true.

I think argued earlier that tue money goes less far in the us because the cost of living is higher, so then normalize by cost or standard of living? But even that would assume that the average wage in the country is supporting the same lifestyle in both Russia and the us. Which it isn’t. Some countries live “better” than others.

I think raw numbers are probably best here. 100 trillion in military spending is 100 trillion.

I think they’re probably more worried about the us invading them. We’re the ones who’ve been invading countries most in the past 100 years, not china.

I’m in Thailand and knockoff Disney stuff (and Legos) are pretty normal. And it’s nice. The kids buying them have to deal with seeing their ads plastered all over town, so it’s nice there are versions they can buy. I just wish they were so shitty quality and the big companies markup wasn’t so fucking insane. Lego sets pretty regularly hit $200-$300 here. There literally is no Nintendo Thailand, so game prices are pretty random based on import fees that retailers can negotiate (or sneak through).

The nice thing is no one gives a shit about piracy. No risks really.

Signing doesn’t provide security of privacy protections. It just means you paid apple a fee.

The vast vast vast vast majority of men in the world are uncut and fine.

The vast vast vast majority of the worlds men have foreskins though.

Circumcision is taking a kid and doing something irreversible to them without consent. Trans treatment is taking a kid and preventing irreversible things from happening until they consent.

Lol. I pitched getting these last year and my boss laughed. “Have you worked with these people? They’re incompetent. They can’t tell you how a single thing works, let alone the whole system. It sounds nice to have, but we’ll have to do it ourselves”

We moved from America to see Asia years ago. We were just talking last week about how racist we still catch ourselves being. We have a sick relative at home who we talked about moving here. They’d be close to us so we could help. And healthcare here is cheap/free often and pretty good.

But there’s part of me that just thinks American = superior. No matter how long I live here I’m not sure it will ever go away. It’s been psychopathically programmed into me. “Yeah it’s expensive, but at least you’re getting a good doctor”. (I’ve had awful and great doctors in both countries) It’s infuriating to realize.

because it probably can’t get less bulky and look less dorky,

Airpods are probably one of the ugliest pieces of tech ove seen in the last decade and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to matter. Never overestimate apple’s customer base.

Americans: “Stop with the what-aboutism arguments when they apply to us. Others? Sure, I’m fine with that.”

I mean, it’s more complicated than that. Both declared themselves victor. Mainland went communist. The west couldn’t live with that so they propped up to authoritarian govt of Taiwan and ignored the communist government for 30 years, funding the murder of hundreds of thousands of dissidents. They couldn’t “capture” it without dragging themselves into the US’s cold war fever.

It’s only been the last 40 years that Taiwan has become democratic, and only the last 10-20 that the parties who wanted unification started to lose elections. Even then they keep wavering back and forth in elections some trying to tie more to China and some trying to break off entirely afaict.

We have plenty of evidence that were just a “random” assortment of atoms following natural laws. We see those laws around us everywhere. We manipulate them to build crazy things. We have no evidence were anything BUT that.

How does the security counsel prevent global war? They’re powerless to do anything to any of the super powers and by proxy also won’t do anything to anyone else either.

They’re torturing and interrogating them. That’s literally the story here.

I fucking hate the cold but I’m also lazy and hate wearing clothes. If it’s just a bit I’ll take the hit just to avoid putting (more) stuff on.

Bum gun >>> bidet

You can download windows (direct from Ms) for free now. Does that make it better?

I would guess that most republicans politicians are actually pretty highly educated. Trump even went to ivy league schools. They value it, just not for their voters.

Plumbers. He’s talking about people who’ve done plumbing appreticeships. It seems pretty obvious.