In the future you either watch adverts for entertainment, or seek out the Puppeteers lurking in the sewer system.

Was that why his hair like that? I always assumed he always just did copious amounts of cocaine before public appearances.

Invested it in chainsaws, obviously.

That one is one of my favorites.

Assuming that Russia would somehow benefit from cutting off the gas supply, why wouldn’t they just…turn it off on their end? If they really wanted to make it permanent, why not destroy it on their end? Traveling out of their own territory just to blow up the pipeline in a high risk underwater covert ops mission in enemy territory as what…an elaborate false flag?

There is nobody with more experience at being president of a wide array of countries!

But that loss will be mitigated by the remarkable thwarting of Mr. Putin’s original plan to take over Kyiv and destroy Ukraine as a nation.

What? That was never the stated objective. The whole three days to Kiev line didn’t from Russia either. Russia never wanted to destroy Ukraine as a nation, though that may very well be the functional result thanks to NATO.

Imagine trying to spin “our opponent didn’t destroy our capital!” as a victory when they weren’t even trying to do that.

I am in the mountains around Mt Fuji now (that is a massive area, I am not significantly doxing myself folks, don’t worry) and it is pretty nice, but I definitely wouldn’t mind more towards Hokkaido. I love the cold though, I will take a snowstorm over Tokyo summer any day.

Our healthcare system is honestly pretty solid. The annual health checks we have is probably the single biggest reason for our high life expectency. I was surprised to hear a lot of folks in the US never go to the hospital for preventative care.

Retirement eh…well, we will see if a pension still exists by the time (people aren’t sure, and they keep trying to kick up the retirement age). In theory, we have pretty decent retirement options with a public pensions everyone pays into, plus a private pension your employer pays into. I know folks retiring now, and none of them really ever did any investing at all. Especially that generation, there is a pretty common distrust of the financial markets and banks.

I did some calculations a while ago, and assuming (big assumption) that the pension systems remains fairly constant to my retirement, I would be capable of retiring reasonably comfortably. Not going to be traveling the world or anything, but definitely more than enough for me. Especially as I plan to retire somewhere even more rural than I am now, which would lower the cost of living drastically.

This is true, I honestly don’t know how you can negotiate with nato/western forces in good faith at all anymore. Even outside of Ukraine, they’ve shown that they don’t place any value in their word (see: Germany admitting they never had any intention of honouring the Minsk Agreements). That kind of admission severely tarnishes any future diplomatic overtures.

The currencyappreciation has probably a lot to do with it. The USD to JPY exchange went from 160 (the worst I have ever seen) to 140, in like a week. Still needs to recover a lot more to hit the 100:1 rate it used to hover around. A lot of that is in on the back of the BOJ increasing interest rates in the first time in…an extremely long time.

A lot of people don’t invest a whole lot/at all here, so for the average person outside finance people are actually quite happy with the way things are trending. I know a lot of friends who cancelled all plans to travel internationally this year because the yen was so weak that it just wasn’t feasible.

Most interesting, is we are doing basically the exact opposite of what the US wanted us to do. Every time I see us break lockstep with the US, I allow a little bit of hope to flourish.

The western public will look at the headline, that is the extent of their attention span, and cheer over the fact that the article must mean that Russia is surrendering.

In the interview, Zelensky said there can’t be direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia but there could be indirect negotiations through a third party.

I know that diplomacy is not exactly his background, but it should be fairly obvious to anyone that a requirement of negotiation is that you are actually willing to talk to the people you are intended to negotiate with. This is this crazy international relations theory we call “common sense”.

I could almost see that for highly specialized expensive hardwareyou don’t need longterm.

A mouse is not that. Who the hell is subscribing to a mouse. Not some kind of monthly mouse subscription for people really into them, but just the right to keep using the one mouse you have. That is insane.

I have seen people actually calling for the US to stage a coup, so I think they realise they don’t have to care about pretenses anymore.

“We have serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people,” he [Antony Blinken] said.

read: We have concerns that the people didn’t elect the candidate we selected for them and will continue to protest until you select a sympathetic candidate. Have you considered Juan Guaido perhaps?

“Francisco Rodriguez, a professor of international and public affairs at Denver University, said the Venezuelan opposition must document any alleged fraud and make their findings public.”

Honestly, fair take from somebody in the US. If the opposition does have clear evidence of fraud, they need to document and provide that. If they aren’t showing anything, they probably don’t have said evidence.

Ignoring for a second all the western interference, the fact he won with 51% of the vote makes me more inclined to trust the results at face value. The amount of precision it would take to fudge results JUST enough to win with a majority but not so much as to seem unrealistic would be extremely difficult to pull off. Unless people think fraud is as easy as just swapping a couple numbers around in the final tally.

This is a sign that the Kyiv Independent has been corrupted by Russian bots and must be disregarded as a viable news source. Everyone knows that Russia has lost 568,980 troops a day every day since the war started.

We should only trust news from cartoon shiba from now on, obviously.

"Well you see, it is only fair that we charge the cost of what a lifetime of treatments would make for us. In fact, we should be celebrated because we would make $400,000 off the victim patient if we treated them normally.

Really we are heroes. Oh and also uh job creation!"

Even if it worked perfectly, you would end up using it once and then putting it under the sink. Never to be seen again.

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That’s tentatively great to hear, though I am honestly surprised that they got that pushed through there.

Now whether or not it will actually happen is something I’d like to keep an eye on. As an example, the employers side citing the freaking games industry as a good model of work-life balance is absolutely ludicrious. Hopefully the trade unions get more traction on their proposals instead.

Not Korea, but we have a similiar work culture with a lot of the same issues and been trying all sorts of reforms to cut back on people literally dropping dead from overwork and while there are some improvements, a lot hasn’t stuck. People often don’t report their working hours correctly, work without clocking in, and management sometimes looks the other way if they are benefiting.

Admittedly, our efforts were pretty lackluster. We tried a Premium Friday for a while that encouraged companies to give their employees the last friday of the month off. Besides having as much impact as a pizza party, I don’t know a single company that did it.

Doesn’t surprise me in the least. Another way they decided to fix their birth rate was by giving one time lump payments to new parents. Which would definitely never be abused.

I can’t imagine working 100+ hour weeks is having any impact on their ability to have kids or anything like that.