Fuck man. I’m coming to Germany next year because it’s not the USA. Can you fucking not?

Damn dude. Why didn’t I think about that? All I have to do is work 80 hours a week at the gas station, send my kids to substandard schools, not buy decent food, not have access to public transit, not have access to decent medical care, not have any cultural options, be white since rural areas are not kind to people of color, drive 40+ minutes to anything worth driving to, not have municipal water or sewage or possibly trash pickup, etc.

Why do I keep wanting to live in places with services and good quality of life in a capitalist country where I make 3x the median wage and still can’t buy a house? Silly me.

In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’ve lived in rural areas previously, and I’d rather rent for the rest of my life than ever do that again.

Job: Software Dev

Internal stakeholder or C-Suite: presents nebulous idea for workflow/product/feature with no actual end goal

“We have a CRITICAL need for this product. It will REVOLUTIONIZE everything we do here. The stakes could not be higher. THIS MUST BE COMPLETED ASAP”

My boss: Okay. We will move heaven and Earth to get this done for you.

Me: Works 60 hours a week for two months to ensure the new product is successful

Also me: checking usage statistics six months later…last used by me during go live testing

I hate my life.

If I’m an EU leader, I’m looking at my defense spending very seriously and looking at whether I can continue to support my country with any needed global imports because the USA is done. Russia can steamroll Ukraine. China can become global hegemon. The US will continue to project its waning power for a bit longer, but the global order will succumb to authoritarian strongmen.

Without the US playing world police, global trade gets much more difficult. With Europe’s anti-immigrant sentiment ramping up, I’d expect Europe to become more isolationist. You’re going to be losing your trans-atlantic trading partner to an authoritarian regime that will now support other regimes that actively work against the liberal world order upon which the existence of the EU/Schengen zone depend.

I know you probably didn’t mean it that way, but this is not just a problem for Americans.

OP be like, “You have to start slow and work your way up to the girthier toys.”

I’ve been saving for a down payment for a house for two years. It would appear my money is not wanted in the USA. I also have dual EU citizenship. My plan is to improve my spoken German and take my family overseas.

As an atheist married to a Salvadoran woman with whom I have two hispanic children, I feel like after they run out of illegal immigrants we’ll not be far down the “committing suicide with two bullets to the back of the head” list. Or maybe we’ll just get sent to a camp that treats ADHD if you catch my drift.

I visited Germany in 2022 and was very impressed with the walkable/bikeable infrastructure and ICE trains even if they were late on occasion. The food wasn’t my favorite but the culture and people were kind and they still seem to value rule of law and societal decorum to a certain degree. The idea that making a nazi salute in public is jailable/fineable is really how it should be everywhere but “free speech” yadda yadda…

I have wanted to leave the US since 2003. Just didn’t have skills or money until now. I’m still going to struggle with a language barrier and finding a job with A2 level German. That’s my biggest issue right now I think.

My mom moved to the US not knowing English. How the turntables have turned.

I'll also be casting my vote in Cook county. I have hispanic kids. My wife is Salvadoran. She is a US citizen born and raised in the US. I'm a white atheist and a dual citizen of the EU who has had the audacity to previously speak poorly about my corporate overlords. I grew up in the south. I don't trust these project 2025 fucks to stop at illegal immigrants. Biden sucks, but I'll vote for him anyway because the system literally gives me no other option. Until the system changes or fails, this is what we must do.

If you value the supreme court, lower court appointments, social security, healthcare, childcare, the environment, action on climate change, a competent CDC for the pandemics we're going to experience more frequently, etc., vote Biden. Yes he's old. Yes he sucks. Unfortunately he's the lesser of two evils. And by a wide margin.

This is your brain on conservatism.

I don't use a single Meta product on purpose. I'm sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.

I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.

Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.

And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.

Typing this out makes me wonder what I'm waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.

My dad used to say “your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower” as a joke sometimes, but then he would beat the ever living fuck out of me with whatever was in reach and it didn’t seem like he was joking at all.

I was confused by what this meme meant, but it reminded me of that.

Fuck reddit.

Feeding user data to an LLM. Jacking up API costs. Being generally unusable on mobile. Usurping old.reddit.com to try and force me to the official app on “unmoderated” and NSFW threads.

Now with their IPO and a need to deliver ever increasing subscriber numbers and improved metrics for shareholders every quarter, the writing is on the wall.

I hope it goes to zero. The only sad thing is all the knowledge that will be lost due to the sky high API pricing when the site eventually does sunset. I’m guilty myself of trying to de-enshittify google somewhat by adding reddit to just about every search. Hopefully people smarter than me have ways to archive that info.

I can never tell if these memes are astroturfing by monied interests/russian bots pretending to be progressives, if populism leads to the same brainwashed takes as the right, or if progressives are actually this dumb.

I consider myself a socialist and a progressive, and I understand that this was a case of defrauding electors and why the case was a felony. It’s not “paying hush money to a porn star”.

I can’t imagine someone on the right saying this in earnest, as they’d never care about Native Americans or any minority. Only thing I can think is that it’s the right trying to sow discord on the left by feigning moral outrage, or the populist progressives on the left being unable to understand how the world works at all. I honestly can’t tell who is making these brain dead memes.