Consumer actions are meaningless here. If Altman can become Trump’s new best friend (can’t wait to watch the Altman/Musk drama), there will be so much public money directed toward OpenAI that they can stop wasting their time on the puny people.
I also canceled my subscription, and acknowledge it won’t make a difference. Feels like the early days of Facebook when people threatened to quit if they didn’t bring back the old design.
Democracy rewards mass appeal, and that in turn encourages demagoguery and gives a platform for stupidity. It's been an unavoidable problem with the system since Athens.
Iran obviously missed the memo. All they have to do is setup a wealth fund and invest heavily in a Trump venture; then they can become a most favored nation and forego all this conflict.
This dive instructor was using this insurance company for his clients, and thus had a responsibility to prevent any known risk (data privacy loss in this case).
So he had two options: take his clients and his business to another insurer (and still inform all his current and previous clients about their outstanding risk), or try to help the insurer resolve the risk.
Listening to political speeches from Singapore are so refreshing compared to the juvenile garbage that we have to endure in the US from US politicians.
Singapore is a dictatorship wearing a democracy's outfit.
One party has been ruling continuously since its formation and you can't go against its ideas.
There is no real competition for ideas like we have in the US.
So, yeah, the "discussion/debates" will be high quality when it is one sided. Just like North Korea is free from low quality debates, Singapore too is free from that.
> In June, university students and alumni delivered letters opposing a new racial harmony bill to the Ministry of Home Affairs, arguing that it provided the government with further powers to clampdown on dissent. The authors were later investigated by the police. In the same month, police charged three activists – Annamalai Kokila Parvathi, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori and Mossammad Sobikun Nahar – with organizing a procession in a prohibited area under the Public Order Act. These charges came after they led a march to the Presidential Palace to deliver a letter of concern about the Gaza conflict. If found guilty, they could be fined up to SDG 10,000 (USD 7,360) or face six months’ imprisonment.
Have you not been observing what is happening in the US right now? Any dissension is labeled as "domestic terrorism" - this is coming from the highest levels in US government.
So is the facade of democracy much different from a dictatorship?
I'm not here saying that Singapore is doing everything right. I'm just noting that public political presentations from Singapore seem vastly better than watching Trump, Leavitt, Noem, Bondi, Patel, or virtually any other "leaders" speak. The quality of communication - message aside - is utter garbage. It's a very sad state of affairs. What we see here is dumbed down language that caters to the least educated, most easily misled masses. And this illustrates where democracy fails: democracy assumes a reasonable level of education and comprehension. We don't have there here, especially when psyops tactics have been employed by some news networks for two decades now.
It really doesn't matter what I say or what evidence I present to you.
There is ample... overwhelming numbers of on the ground video of non-violent protestors being assaulted by armed, masked men who are jacked up on false authority. They harm people, they even shoot people, and they lie about it.
The upper administration responds to these events within minutes, naming the harmed citizens as "domestic terrorists". Later, when bodycam and bystander videos are released, this is disproven. Time and time again.
To be very, very clear: anyone not physically attacking an authority figure but who may be protesting, making videos, or yelling, is not a terrorist. That is an observer or a protester.
That’s true across much of the world. It’s also true past vs present. Listen to US politicians even as recently as the 1980s vs now. Our political class today is justifiably a pathetic laughing stock.
I saw an interview with Trump in the 80s. He was remarkably clear and articulate. He stayed on topic, he used multi-syllable words, and he generally sounded like someone worth listening to.
The comparison of today vs then is frankly shocking.
Learn from him in what way? He communicated articulately in grammatically correct, full sentences in the past. Now he rambles nearly incoherently.
What are we to learn from this? That his mental state has deteriorated? That much is obvious. Even ignoring all other evidence, it is utterly clear that he is a fraction of the communicator that he once was.
> Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?
Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.
In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
What’s really wild to me is having spent time in both Mexico and Thailand, I have seen some people in Mexico that could have a twin in Thailand. That was really unexpected.
This is a really interesting comment. Sometimes when I see photos of native people from South America (especially anything Amazonian), they do look a bit South East Asian to me. Do you think those people that you saw in Mexico were mixed (or fully) native (not European by descent)?
Asians and indigenous people from the Americas are somewhat closely related (the Americas were populated from Asia not too terribly long ago, about 20,000 years), so it makes sense.
My Vietnamese friend and I once went to a Philippine food festival. Most of the Filipino people there tried to talk to my friend in Tagalog. He’d talk back to them in Vietnamese. Granted, he doesn’t look Vietnamese to me, either. He looks like an islander.
I'm from NZ (mostly european but part Maori heritage) and have had people talk to me in foreign languages, ask me in the supermarket if I'm from Spain (weird), give me random discounts etc.
I also get "you look/feel so familiar" a lot.
Happy to know I'd fit in in a number of places haha
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