“Surely they can’t kill me if I help them win”

Gas Gas Gas

The better a country becomes at using surveillance technology, the better it also becomes at hiding that it does. Until recently, China has had very little such experience, and thus everything it did was in plain sight. While in the West, intelligence agencies were already watching your moves, listening to your phone calls, and evaluating your metadata through your appliances, you could still see the massive security cameras from the past century on Chinese crosswalks. This is not a question of ideology or economics, every major country and organisation will inevitably try to keep pace as best it can with the evolution of vulnerabilities and threats. The perception of being a surveillance state, on the other hand, depends on the aesthetics of its technology, on the degree that you have the feeling of being stared at by it. Once China replaces the last of its last clunky old cams with more elegant models, citizens and tourists will eventually let go of that perception.

I sometimes read nothing for months and then binge a 2000-page novel over a single week

I just bought a VR game set in medieval Europe, why is there nobody you can pay to cover you with their clothes while you shit in a bucket in the middle of the town square? I demand to relieve myself in the comfort of a human outhouse, it is crucial to my enjoyment of the immersion

If they have something we don’t have, it’s theft; if they know something we don’t know, it’s fraud; and if they do something we don’t do, it’s sabotage

Maybe I’m not American enough to understand this, but how does this get bought? How do you store and cool this big-ass jar once you open it, how do you use it up without getting sick of the stuff, why wouldn’t you just buy it in a tube or a bottle, and why would anyone spend 20 bucks on a condiment?

Stock markets are to economics what bouncy castles are to architecture

Between this and the balloon thing, the US seems to have a broadcast malfunction where the audio channel is CNN and the video channel is Looney Tunes

I’m not pretending I know anything about working in a factory or a warehouse, but I have done quite a bit of walking recently, and you really feel much, much better if you wear additional pairs of socks especially if the shoes tend to rub against your ankles

I mean I suppose it is technically impressive but these morticians are still making a mockery of the trade

Don’t waste your fucking time arguing with a billionaire!! He’s in on it, they are all in on it, he’s trying to buy time

In commemoration of the massacre at Tiananmen square on the Fourth of June 1989, I shall now repeat the names of all the brave freedom fighters who died there:

idk why but the woman in this picture looks about to unhinge her jaw

The main difference is that a chatbot is actually available to talk to you

You’re not a light otaku until you can recite from memory at least 25 crystals that are used used in solid state lasers

Of course you can cringe at furries, or you can keep from infringing on private matters between consenting adults and cast your gaze on any of the thousand greener pastures that are better suited for enriching the leisure of a communist

Even if you ignore the unplastered brick wall with the trident hastily slapped on, the uncomfortably tiny glass table without a cloth, the main course being served on a saucer, and the fact that they brought the emissary of their most powerful ally water in plastic bottles and then just left it there, it really speaks to the post-Soviet rebirth of Ukraine’s cultural identity that senior diplomats on state visits are served Italian food

Ah yes, the classic “she wants him to adopt her indentation practices, he wants her entire race to face total annihilation in a death camp” office romance

Lol they can’t even buy the bullets to shoot themselves in the foot