They should make a “Firefox Core” which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the “fun” stuff.

I’m not the parent commenter. But I’m Chinese and I can confidently say that living in the United States for your average citizen is far more comfortable than living in China.

You can say all you want about how unfair the US economy is to the average working-class citizen but at the end of the day, it’s still a high-income country, and we have running water, electricity, unfiltered Internet access, good public sanitation, and reasonably-modern housing. There are some villages in China that I’ve been to with a total of six electric plugs, toilets that need to be flushed with a bucket, a barely-working 3G cellular connection, and where you can’t drive faster than 20 km/h without destroying your car.

Don’t take these things for granted, because you don’t know what it’s like to live without them.

If only there were some organisation staffed by experts in international law with the ability to prosecute and decide whether certain acts committed by individuals constitute crimes against humanity.

I think there is a line to be drawn between what is theoretically better and what is meaningfully useful.

It is realistically not useful information for an attacker to know what country you are from by observing your UTC offset. It’s simply much easier to guess this information by observing your other behaviours. For example, the text and time of your post is already leading me to guess UTC+5:30 as the time zone in question. But again, knowing what country you’re from is not really useful information most of the time, as even if my guess is correct, that narrows it down to a whopping one-eighth of the human population.

I am no expert, but these are my guesses:

1. Exporting energy, in many cases, involves the movement of physical goods. Global shipping has become riskier (and therefore more expensive) because of the deteriorating geopolitical situation.
2. Once a country installs renewable energy capacity, that capacity stays forever and essentially never degrades. Who’s ever heard of a wind farm getting torn down? Renewable energy such as hydroelectricity, solar, and wind are getting cheaper and cheaper by the year as technology improves, making it an attractive alternative to fossil fuels.
3. Countries are starting to become more cognizant of their energy sovereignty. Developing domestic energy production is now an important national security concern worldwide. Nobody can shut off your sunlight, your rivers, or your coal mines, but unfriendly neighbours can threaten to cut off your supply of imported oil or natural gas.
4. Many large exporters of fossil fuels happen to be on the receiving end of geopolitical turmoil. Russia is still balls-deep in shit in Ukraine and their biggest customers (China and India) are demanding discounts as a result of the international reaction to that. Venezuela just had its president kidnapped. Iran and the UAE are being bombed to smithereens by American and Israeli ordnance.

Selected quotations:

The required input for the computer is usually inscribed on the chassis at the bottom. However, the text is usually faint and can be easily rubbed off after the computer has been used for some time. Mine says 20 V 2.25 A.

A hundred “rifts” have opened up in the MAGA movement, but this does not seem to have had any noticeable effect in policy-making decisions.

If you are using the laptop at the same time, there is a chance that the charger may not provide enough power to the computer to operate and force it to temporarily draw from the battery to supplement the power from the charger. This causes additional wear on the battery.

For example, if you plug in a 15 W charger and the computer wants to draw 20 W, it will draw it from the battery. Spikes in power consumption are not uncommon during ordinary use as the CPU will temporarily engage turbo mode during certain tasks, such as when it is loading a Web page or starting a program. Depending on your operating system, plugging the charger in may also cause the OS to disable battery conservation features which leads to more frequent spikes in power consumption.

None of this would be a problem if, for example, your charger delivered 45 W of power, because during those spikes, it just means the battery receives slightly less power as more of it is consumed by the computer.

If you are not using the laptop at the same time as you are charging it, I can’t think of any potential negative effects.

Okay, so let me put it this way:

Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town. This is a strength of China’s system, I grant, and it’s one of the few examples of one of their socialist policies which actually somewhat works. Their national pension scheme is the other thing I can think of that functions decently well.

But it’s certainly no Soviet Union where if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.

I do have to agree with you there. Though too much urban migration does come with its own problems. Chief among them that I observe is that it severely depressed wages and lack of work. China is moving through its own sort of gilded age right now with rapid technological advancement and extreme inequality.

For a purportedly socialist country, China lacks a lot of state infrastructure that comes along with that. The USSR guaranteed work and bread, at a minimum (mostly), but in China, a curious sight emerged which I observed in some of the poorer neighbourhoods of Hangzhou: old people pushing around carts of discarded cardboard boxes and tin cans. They weren’t employed as cleaning workers. They were collecting these to sell for their recycling value. And even though the Westerner might laugh at the notion of making a living collecting literal garbage for pennies, it only takes fourteen pennies to make a yuan and ¥5 will buy a bowl of rice, fending off starvation for another twelve hours. Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.

China has no functional social safety net, government assistance is minimal, and workers are exploited by a ruling class of wealthy elites with minimal interference from the state, in a shockingly similar way to capitalist countries. You cannot even form a real trade union in China, because all big companies are already “unionised” with workers represented by farcically corrupt organisations which work in tandem with the capitalist bosses.

I will give one more example: Coco is a nationwide chain of beverage stalls which sell tea, coffee, and juice drinks. I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country. I took a photo of this but I couldn’t find it to post.

As someone who is Chinese and living in the US, Americans who have not been to China overestimate its shittiness and people who have been to China once or twice overestimate its glamour. Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes. I’ve been to a tea plantation where there were a total of six electric plugs in the entire village and the toilets flushed with a bucket which had to be filled from a pump outside. It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US, where at least people usually have electricity and running water.

Sorry, but I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”. You don’t even need to speak English to access those most of the time. In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.

Can’t believe Portugal is nearly the same size as Portugal

Usually, this means “If you decide to lie about what was discussed on this call, we will have a recording to play back to make you look stupid”.

Yeah, most decisions by SCOTUS nowadays feel like they are justified with “We don’t like X, so now it’s Y” and attached to it is a dissent that says “The majority only says Y because X is not politically expedient for them”

I posted this comment four months before Trump’s election and I feel it is appropriate to post it again:

Left-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will do [bad thing]

Right-wing voters: [Conservative politician] will not do [bad thing], quit fear-mongering

…

Conservative politician (newly-elected): As part of our agenda, we will do [bad thing]

Left-wing voters: See! They will do [bad thing]!

Right-wing voters: No, they will not actually do [bad thing], it’s just banter

…

Conservative politician (having done [bad thing]): I am pleased to announce we have just done [bad thing]

Left-wing voters: See! They just did [bad thing]!

Right-wing voters: [Bad thing] is good, actually

…

(2 years after [bad thing] was done)

Right-wing voters: It’s [other party]'s fault that [bad thing] happened, I need to vote for [conservative politician] so that they can fix [problem caused by bad thing].

I’m pretty sure all cultures adapt and learn from other cultures. That’s just how human culture develops. Vietnamese takes on French favourites resulted in bahn mi and Vietnamese coffee, both of which are very good. Poor Hongkongers wanting to eat like Brits resulted in Hong Kong’s famously weird “Cha chaan teng” food and Hong Kong-style milk tea. And, of course, Europeans went crazy over Mesoamerican chocolate and created a cornucopia of confectionery products made from the cacao bean.

Well, colonialism did bring tomatoes and potatoes to Europe.

I think the joke is that Americans like to adopt foods or cooking techniques from other cultures, then change them to fit local tastes. This is how a lot of “traditional American” foods came to be. There is also a stereotype that American cultural practices (gastronomy included) are “not real” or that American culture as a concept doesn’t exist because it comes as a fusion of cultural practices from other countries. The meme is poking fun at people who may hold that belief.

People also have a habit of describing the American versions of things to be “not real”, even if it never really claims to be. For example, fettuccine Alfredo in the US is an adaptation of fettuccini al burro (a real Italian dish), but is described as “not real Italian food” because it isn’t actually eaten in Italy. Or that orange chicken is “not real Chinese food” because it isn’t eaten in China. Which, to be fair, is true, but most American diners are aware that Panda Express, Olive Garden, and Taco Bell aren’t accurate representations of food eaten in China, Italy, or Mexico. They’re Americanised versions of food inspired by Chinese, Italian, and Mexican cuisine.