In Europe, not having a car generally is perfectly fine

In cities.

For those living in the countryside, not really, as distances are huge and public transport is rare (think a single bus that stops at a bus station a km or two away and passes maybe once every 2h) or non-existent.

That said, over 70% of people in Europe live in urban areas.

Of course Russia and China are trying to interfere like crazy - they too want to get their desired outcomes and their governments are as sociopathic as the rest.

Yet, judging by the outcomes they’re getting, they’re minions at this next to insiders and even “allied” foreign powers like Israel.

Knowing that, ask yourself the question “why so much focus on messages that it’s China and Russia damaging America when those countries aren’t getting much from America compared to the likes of Israel or even more compare to very wealthy insiders?”

As I see it, it serves the dominating Propaganda forces to get the riff-raff distracted with the “usual suspects” (which have a long history as antagonists of America) and it’s a very easy thing to do because it dovetails with the usual nationalistic tribalism (“Americans” v “foreignes”) and America is insanelly big on Nationalism compared to all other countries but the overty Authoritarian ones.

So the Fascists in America are fed the “immigrants want your jobs” variant of “foreigners bad”, whilst Liberals get fed the “foreign powers are making our country worse” version - it keeps both groups looking away from those actually pillaging their country and undermining whatever little Democracy the country still has.

You’re find plenty on very wealthy and well connected insiders who gain from having the plebes - both those aligned with the Fascist Party and those aligned with the Neoliberal Party - focused on the “evil foreigners” rather than looking for blame in their own house.

There are several people in America with Means, Motive and Opportunity to push “foreigners are fucking up our country” narratives, both a Fascist-appealing version and a Liberal-appealing one.

LOL!

Keep up batting for the ultra-rich!

This is the Liberal’s version of “blame the foreigners” similar to how the Fascists blame immigrants.

It couldn’t possible the fault of insiders, many incredibly wealthy including some who actually own most of the fucking Press, plus yet others in positions of power and influence.

Of course not, those are “our” people. The country couldn’t possible be fucked up because of “our” people. The only explanation is those filthy foreigners.

It’s the exact same tribalist bollocks being deploye to protect the real monsters which are very much inside the walls, it’s just that one group of right wingers blame immigrants and the other blames foreign states - one arse, two cheeks, same shit.

Even more funny when this bollocks is used for America as done here is that thr one single country which American politicians support unwaveringly even when it’s against the very interests of America - Israel - ain’t one of the “filthy foreigners intervening in our nation”. I would looove to hear an explanation of how Russia or even China influence America more than Israel.

Whatever those nations are trying to do to manipulate America and Americans, it’s nothing compared with what some specific Americans are doing to the rest, especially the ones which own parts of the Press - China and Russia have very little influence in the country compared with those extremely wealthy people towards whom the Liberals point no fingers.

Proton is integrated with the Steam app in Linux, so usually you just install the game and then run it from Steam and it just works in Linux even though it’s a Windows game, without you having to know anything about Proton.

Similarly you can use something like Lutris or Heroic which does the same for Wine and game stores like GOG (it’s even integrated with the store and downloads the game for you, same as the Steam app does for the Steam store).

For some games you might have to learn enough to tweak settings, though for Steam and Proton that’s often just changing the Proton version you’re using for a game in its game launch settings in Steam, which is hardly complicated.

The need to really understand what’s under the hood is generally only when leaving these standard paths: for example if you’re trying to run a pirated version of a game (which might even be for perfectly legit reasons: for example one of my Steam games won’t run in Linux no matter what I do, but the pirated version works fine, probably because of the DRM in the official version) or some old obscure game CD you have around, as the scripts in Steam, Lutris or Heroic that silently configure Proton/Wine correctly for a game might not at all exist for those unofficial or older installers.

It’s almost as if they shamelessly lie…

Respect is a Social Contract, not a Right.

It’s not the AIs which are crap, its what they’ve been sold as capable of doing and the reliability of their results that’s massivelly disconnected from reality.

The crap is what a most of the Tech Investor class has pushed to the public about AI.

It’s thus not at all surprising that many who work or manage work in areas were precision and correctness is essential have been deceived into thinking AI can do much of the work for them and it turns out AI can’t really do it because of those precision and correctness requirement that it simply cannot achieve.

This will hit more those people who are not Tech experts, such as Lawyers, but even some supposedly Tech experts (such as some programmers) have been swindled in this way.

There are many great uses for AI, especially stuff other than LLMs, in areas where false positives or false negatives are no big deal, but that’s not were the Make Money Fast slimy salesmen push for them is.

“This is the technology worth trillions of dollars”

You can make anything fly high in the sky with enough helium, just not for long.

(Welcome to the present day Tech Stock Market)

Live by the sword …

It’s telling that the choice of the Judges/Administrators of the Royal Court Of Judges for a mural by a celebrated artist which is accusatory against the actions of said Judges, created on the wall of that building, was to hide it.

Guilty people are generally the ones whose instinctive reaction to critiques of their actions is to hide or suppress them.

Well, in my experience it’s the immigrants themselves doing it and never the locals.

Further, even in a poorer European country like Portugal I’ve never heard say, Germans or French calling themselves “expats” even though those are much more wealthy nations - it’s pretty much only Brits and Americans living there who speak of themselves as “expats”.

I think the use of expat is specifically a thing for people from countries were national delusions of grandeur are widespread (which I know for sure from direct experience is the case in the UK and seems to very much be the case in the US) rather than merelly the coutry of origin of the migrant being “better” than the host country.

Also these experiences of mine I’ve mentioned are in some cases from way back in the 90s - this shit was already done over 2 decades ago well before the recent anti-immigration sentiment in the West.

I had to do this myself at one point and it can be very frustrating.

It’s basically the “tech makes lots of money” effect, which attracts lots of people who don’t really have any skill at programming and would never have gone into it if it weren’t for the money.

We saw this back in earlier tech booms and see it now in poorer countries to were lots of IT work has been outsourced - they still have the same fraction of natural techies as the rest but the demand is so large that masses of people with no real tech skill join the profession and get given actual work to do and they suck at it.

Also beware of cultural expectations and quirks - the team I had to manage were based in India and during group meetings on the phone would never admit if they did not understood something of a task they were given or if there was something missing (I believe that it was so as not to lose face in front of others), so ended up often just going with wrong assumptions and doing the wrong things. I solved this by, after any such group meeting, talking to each member of that outsourced team, individually and in a very non-judgemental way (pretty much had to pass it as “me, being unsure if I explained things correctly”) to tease from them any questions or doubts, which helped avoid tons of implementation errors from just not understanding the Requirements or the Requirements themselves lacking certain details and devs just making assumptions on their own about what should go there.

That said, even their shit code (compared to what us on the other side, who were all senior developers or above, produced) actually had a consistent underlying logic throughout the whole thing, with even the bugs being consistent (humans tend to be consistent in the kind of mistakes they make), all of which helps with figuring out what is wrong. LLMs aren’t as consistent as even incompetent humans.

The stinkier the cheese, the more the fascination!

… not forgetting to add a term of endearement, such as “sweetie”, “honey” or “babe”.

In my experience people will use “immigrant” to talk about were they’re from by referring their nationality (i.e. “I’m a Portuguese immigrant”) or explicitly adding a “from” and then using the country name (i.e. “I’m an immigrant from Portugal”).

If talking about where they’re an immigrant in, they will explicitly use “in” (i.e. “I’m an immigrant in The Netherlands”).

Even though “emmigrant” is about where you were born and aren’t living in anymore and “immigrant” is about were you went to, in my experience emmigrant is only ever used when physically in one’s country of original and talking about living elsewhere (i.e. when in Portugal I would say “I’m an emigrant” whilst when in The Netherlands I would say “I’m an immigrant”).

It’s funny since as I’m writting this I remembered that when I first left my country of birth to go live abroad it actually took me a while to figure out the proper usage of the whole immigrant/emmigrant thing.

As I said, I was an immigrant in The Netherlands and worked often with other immigrants from all over there (mainly because until I learned Dutch I could only work in English-speaking environments and in my area - software engineering - those attracted immigrants), and most people would use “immigrant” when talking about were they came from (i.e. “I’m a French immigrant”) and I only ever heard expat used instead of immigrant by people from Anglo-Saxon nations, overwhelmingly Brits and Americans.

That said, “expat” was used as a single word combining both “immigrant” and “emigrant” - in other words, unlike with the immigrant/emmigrant pair, the single word expat is valid both when one is physically on one’s country of origin and when one is physically in one’s host country: when I lived in Britain I did hear Britons saying that they were “expats” and meaning it as “living elsewhere than Britain”.

And yeah, 2nd generation don’t call themselves expats, but they also don’t call themselves immigrants. It’s only people from outside talking in general about people who are the direct descendants of immigrants in a country who will use “2nd generation immigrants” for the groups as a whole. Calling somebody who is a national of that country and has immigrant parents “an immigrant” in that country is only ever used as an insult by Far-Right extremists.

From my own experience as an immigrant in The Netherlands and Britain, “expat” is generally used by Americans and Brits when living abroad and pretty much nobody else no matter what their skin tone. I mean, I’ve seen on or two Ozzies using it but it’s way rarer with them and I suspect they were just copying the Brits and Americans. The New Zeelanders I crossed paths with weren’t “expats” and neither were the Canadians. Similarly I never heard any of the other Europeans immigrants there refering to themselves as “expats”.

I think “expat” is more a thing of people who thing they come from a “great country”, as if somehow it’s a priviledge for the other country to have them there.

From my observation when living in The Netherlands as an immigrant (from Portugal) sometimes working in companies with lots of foreigners, most of us said of ourselves as being “immigrants”, except Americans and Brits who often said they were “expats”.

Curiously, generally the other people from different nations, including the Dutch, would use immigrant rather than expat when refering to the status of the self-proclaimed “expats” in that country - “expat” was very much their label for themselves.

The Americans and Brits were there in average for just a long as the rest.

I don’t think it’s really length of stay, at least not directly, I think it’s about the immigrant believing or not that their country of origin is a “greater country” than the country they’re living in. You can see this for example in places like Spain where British retirees have retired to and live the rest of their lives in their own Little Britain communities calling themselves “expats”.

This also matched to how some of the British immigrants most pissed of about their homeland (for example, a gay guy who had to move to The Netherlands to marry his partner, as back then that was not allowed in Britain) made a point of using “immigrant” for themselves instead of “expat”.

It’s about national delusions of grandeur, IMHO.

I belonged to a small left-wing party in my own country where the oldies (the party was born from the union of parties which dated back to before the anti-Fascist Revolution in my country, which was more than 50 years ago) kinda decided to pass the baton to the younger generation and almost as one stepped aside and passed control to mainly 20-something years olds, all of whom scions of the Middle Class.

The result was that the party went up in votes when the Left had a resurgence, got into an informal coalition with the mainstream supposedly (but not really) center-left party in Government, to keep the right-wing one out of power, and after that in a period of two elections collapsed to the lowest vote ever.

As I see it, the party leadership lacked experience (being all from a narrow social circle and lacking all both broad and long life experience) and didn’t even have a concrete pre-made Ideology to guide them like, say, the old-fashioned Communists or even the Neoliberals have, because they dropped the strength of ideology of the old guard when they took over and instead just made it up as they went with no strong anchoring on fundamental Principles or a well thought framework, so ended up copying stuff they saw on the Net from Anglo-Saxon countries which was basically right-wing shit disguised as left-wing (i.e. for example “Equality” by treating people differently depending of the genes they were born with, aka Identity Politics), were easily manipulated and outsmarted by the mainstream party leadership and wouldn’t really spot social or economic problems until they had hit their narrow socio-economic segment for a while, or have well-thought strategies to solve them, ending up being just another bunch of politicians making the same promises as the rest (which means that outside the party faithful they had trouble gaining trust from the electorate who just saw them as people who sounded the same as the rest.

IMHO, I think left-wing movements need variety both on the ages of the people involved and their backgrounds in socio-economic terms and life experience, to avoid falling into political traps, becoming little more than groupthink circle-jerks and being disconnected from most of society - being left-wing means working for the many rather than the few, so you should probably have people from all over and of all kinds, in positions within the movement were they’re actually participating in setting the direction of that movement, rather than having only a narrow age range, socio-economic background or path in life in control.

The fetishization of youth is narrow-minded and self-defeating for a left-wing party, especially nowadays, when most young people grew up under Neoliberalism thus have interiorised as “the way things are” many economic and social practices they grew up with which really aren’t “the only way to do it” just the way things have been done in the last 5 decades, and have never thought about Politics in Power Dynamics terms since, unlike in the old days, there is very little talk of non-Governmental forms of Power in present day politics.

This is just as true for the fetishization of old age, social class or educational level - it’s not a specific age range, socio-economic origin or path in life that’s the problem, it’s the narrowing of ideas, perspectives and sources of information that is the result of one group monopolizing the discussion and decision-making.

We have ‘freedom of expression’

The HRA says that we are free to express ourselves as we see fit so long as it is within the confines of the law.

That’s only freedom of expression for those who make the laws.