No, I mean if we’re talking about comparing US and Chinese consumer chips on most phone activities in 2025, you aren’t likely to notice a major difference.

If you want to compare mobile camera systems, that’s a separate comparison. I like Google camera software/processing a lot, but Chinese companies have been innovating tremendously with their mobile camera stacks. I’m way more interested in the Huawei 14/15 ultra offerings for example.

Yeah this view is pretty dated. Like it or not, China has caught up and started leading in several industries over the last 10 years. They have the capacity, skills, and domestic demand for competitive high quality products. Their domestic chip from SIMV is only a few years behind at “5nm” which was the 2021 standard. I’m still playing modern games on a 8 year old i7. Most consumers who use their phones for social media probably wouldn’t notice much difference between a 2021 phone vs 2025 phone besides a better camera and software.

I think I fall in the same camp of agreeing with a good chunk of his points while disagreeing with others and I even have laughed at many of his jokes. And I’m totally fine with that for people I enjoy watching. However, what turned me off of Bill Maher a decade ago was his overall manner and attitude. He just started coming across as arrogant, obnoxious, smarmy, and untimately unkind, even when I agreed with him, which I did not enjoy. It was much in contrast to other satirists who may have mocked people, never felt like they were out to denigrate. Maybe his content has changed, but I haven’t noticed.

This is an unhelpful and condescending comment. It dismisses the meaningful activities people engage in online as “not life”: self expression, creating art and community, working, socializing, enjoying entertainment, and learning new things. It proposes a false dichotomy wherein not-online is utopic with universally accessible activities and, especially, an absence of the very same people who make online spaces toxic hellholes. They are present in “real spaces” too. These are not mutually exclusive things. You are likely to find that pro-social activists online are often try to be pro-social activists in person as well.

That being said, I agree that people get terminally online and that balancing digital and physical lives are important. Managing attention and mental health are important, especially when content about important and meaningful topics turn into viral and incessant feeds that are geared to overwhelm human brains that weren’t evolved to handle such constant cognitive/emotional stress.

Take care out there folks.

As a Canadian who generally fits this category, i am fairly privileged, have all my basic needs met and some security for the future under status quo conditions. I have my struggles, but they have not so much to with marginalization or oppression. But it depends on who you are. Indigenous women are still going missing, racists are still gonna racist, billionaires are still exploiting people struggling with food and housing security, etc. same goes for the USA. For millions of Americans who are upper-middle/upper class, heteronormative, and white, life is continuing on just fine, feeling safe and experiencing a government that functions as well as it ever has from their perspective. They’re too busy living their lives to get caught up in the “noise of angry squabbling of childish politicians”. Maybe expenses have gone up, but they can still sustain all their expectations out of life. He’ll you can imagine there are a not insignificant proportion of the Russian population are like this.

Wheels.

I know that the people who love you will miss you.

Yes… that’s why they use the word “could”. This is how research works and what reasonable science reporting looks like. There were no promises or wild claims made in the article.

Sometimes the “realism” critique is certainly pedantic and unproductive, but other times what’s really meant is contradiction. Situations should make sense within the fictional world. And in the fictional world of DC, norms around politics and economics are portrayed to be analogous to western neoliberalism with capitalism assumed and unquestioned. So with the Wayne family being a relatively well-regarded billionaire family like the Gates or the Buffets, there is still the issue that it is clear under the current system and that portrayed in DC universe that such wealth cannot be accumulated and sustained without massive exploitation of working class people somewhere along the line. So billionaire + “good guy” starts to become more of a glaring contradiction even in DC. But sure, we can explain it away as fiction with magically ethical capitalists. The interesting thing about the billionaire Wayne discussion though, is when people apply this fictional view of capitalism to how they interpret the real world. And now we’re back to propaganda.

What I would say that sets West Wing and B99 apart is sometimes there’s a tonal difference or way in which certain themes are handled/portrayed that signals to the viewer that the writers acknowledge this isn’t what real life is like but we hope one day we can get there. And it’s a spectrum right. Some do this to varying degrees, other more propagandistic media do not.

I tend to lump it in with The West Wing as idealistic wish fulfilment of how we’d like things to be, or a picture of our human potential.

The other option is “women”

Yes, we are in agreement on the outlook. As they’ve been saying in Ukraine, “The situation is grim”. My point was more about continuing to fight on all fronts, including the political/legislative fronts.

There are people in Congress who want that and are exactly working towards that. It isn’t lost yet, and they are not giving it up without a fight.

I don’t want to shake the ruling class, I want to take away their power to exploit people. I want insurance companies reigned in. Getting Obamacare passed did more than what a thousand vigilantes could, and that was after the Republicans and lobbyists gutted it.

If people really want to stick it to the man (conservatives and liberals alike), then they can vote in representatives and Senators who will actually legislate for the people, rather than ones who will enrich themselves off their backs.

You can revolt, you can eat the rich, it feels great. But what matters is how the system gets changed or doesn’t change. Plenty of revolutions have replaced the system was something worse, with these heros who took down the ruling class in their place. Keep a close eye on Syria, here’s hoping for the best.

Lol that’s some serious cherry picking my dude. One is one of the best action movies of the last 20 years and launched a franchise. The other is a middling coming of age story made for streaming. There are plenty of bland action movies just as bad as Damsel and without an ounce of activism that come out every year. Try comparing it to Get Out, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Mad Max Fury Road, hell even Inglorious Basterds might be considered activism now that fascism is back in fashion.

My friend, the messages that only uneducated people can be pro-fascist and educated people are immune to propaganda is propagandistic. It’s reductive and misleading. Evil does not limit itself to the ignorant. Still,I think we have different meanings of “educated”

Sure we can quibble about the median quality of a college education in the US, you you have to draw the line somewhere. But the issue I’m pointing at is people get lazy conflating education with social progressiveness and egalitarianism and dismiss people with different worldviews as “uneducated”. There are plenty of intelligent well-educated people who are morally bankrupt or deeply mistaken. After all, eugenics came from some of the most “educated” minds in the world.

Yeah… that’s the uneducated citizens part dude…

Yes and no. Yes, it is true that more uneducated people voted for Trump, and lack of education means people do not understand the risks and negative implications of voting for Trump over Harros for themselves. No, that argument doesn’t explain the whole picture. It is also true that educated people who understand the implications voted for him anyway because they saw it as benefiting them/their worldviews. Keep in mind half of college educated male voters and over a third of college educated female voters went for Trump.

I think there’s probably something wrong with the math around per-response water consumption, but it is true that evaporative cooling consumes potable water, in that the water cannot be reused until it cycles through the atmosphere and is recaptured from precipitation, same way you consume water by drinking and pissing it out, or agriculture consumes it for growing things. Fresh water usage is a major concern and bottleneck, especially with climate change. With the average data centre using 300k gallons of water per day, and Google’s entire portfolio using 5bn gallons per day, it’s not nothing.

EV never has to be recharged… Because it recharges on the way downhill.

“World’s largest EV never has to be plugged in” is sufficiently click-baity without being so dumbly self contradicting