We shouldn’t confuse the effectiveness of these protests with their legality. Yes, the protests moved the government to change its approach to prevent even more unrest. Still, the CCP considered them to be illegal and reacted with force, arresting participants or those that spread information about the protests.

Of course, that is also not what I would consider ‘publicly or vocally’.

I have a Taiwanese friend who is very much anti-CCP, but he does go to china for vacation every now and then.

Yes, you need to be in the right headspace, you cannot expect to vocally or publicly criticize the government and go unpunished. But politics are not everything. China is beautiful in many ways and has many great people. I think it would be a good idea to take the opportunity and make this experience. And afterwards, your opinions on china and the CCP will have a stronger foundation than they do now.

edit: you say you are politically active: is this evident from your social media accounts? That might be problematic.

bath towels: weekly

bedding: every 2 or 3 weeks, depending on the season

Olives

Training good models requires lots of training data and computational resources, so the only ones who can afford to train them are big corporations with access to both. And the only objective they have is to increase their profit.

Donating blood plasma is good as it helps people in need. Sure, it sucks that there is a company in the middle making a profit, but not donating is not the solution to that problem, as it hurts the people in need more than the corporation in the middle.

I think its kinda similar to the tipping situation. Yes it sucks that restaurants don’t pay their employees properly and that you have to tip to support the employees. But not tipping hurts the employees rather than the restaurant owner.

In both cases, if we want change, we need to change the legislation.

It’s not like I hate other operating systems, I just really like the idea of FOSS and try to use it whenever possible.

I reject that kind of black and white thinking. We don’t have to classify people as either “cool” or “uncool”, or “good” and “bad”. We can criticize one thing someone does, while also praising something else that they do.

One issue I have with hexbear is that you can’t argue with its users on hexbear itself. Most comments from outsiders are deleted within a day, and most of the users aren’t interested in discussions and simply resort to name calling and personal attacks. The more “sophisticated” ones will tell you to “read theory”. The amount of hexbear users actually capable of producing arguments seems to be very low, at least from my experience.

These issues exist on other instances as well of course, but on hexbear its particularly bad. The only other instances this toxic I have interacted with were lemmygrad and exploding-heads.

If there was a way, there’d be huge corporations offering it as a service.

it didn’t disappear, just got to small for you to see 😉

I’d say an ally is someone you have an alliance with, so someone with who you have agreed to pursue a common goal. So yeah, I’d say if you are someone’s ally, they are also yours.

That differs somewhat from how it’s used in the LGBT+ community, where it refers to non-LGBT+ supporters of LGBT+ rights.

I know that the industry commonly uses malt extract, sugar beet syrup, caramel syrup, or roasted malt

If you own housing that you rent out more than you use it yourself, you’re a landlord.

If you rent out your house or apartment while you’re on vacation, I wouldn’t call you a landlord. But if you have a house or apartment that you only ever offer on AirBNB without ever using it yourself, you’re a landlord.

Btw, I don’t agree that being a landlord makes you deserving of a guillotine, but I do agree that we should limit the ownership of housing to natural persons, with a limit on how much space a person can own.

I really enjoyed Watch_Dogs, despite the shit it got at the time.

I could imagine a disease turn people delusional and aggressive. What’s always seemed unrealistic to me was the premise of zombies being chill around each other and/or animals, but going bonkers when they see an uninfected person.

Also, these people would be done in by cold wheather, injuries, lack of food and water rather quickly, so they likely wouldn’t pose the threat they do in movies.

Not a parent, but my first name is the first name of a close friend of my parents, and my middle name is a slightly changed version of my grandpa’s first name

Not exactly like the ones you oncluded, but I really like this one: Challenger - Lemmino

I don’t see anything wrong with an occasional blunt, but regularly smoking weed will fuck you up in the long term, do not recommend. How about a hobby?