I speak a couple of languages with enough fluency to spot accents (including English, having lived in Britain for more than a decade) and in my experience even small countries have lots of distinct regional accents.

That which you describe is pretty much true everywhere with all languages - people from abroad who don’t speak the language can’t really spot accents unless they’re at the fluency level of speaking that language and even those from countries were the same language is spoken can’t really tell apart most of the accents in that different country beyond rough categories (so for the British Isles that would be “English” accent, “Scottish” accent and “Irish” accent).

You’re kidding, but the “posh” accent of the British upper classes is to a greater or lesser extent trained rather than merely acquired when one is learning the language as a child.

Also people with regional accents often actively make an effort to change their accent to RP (aka the BBC accent) when they move to places like London, though I supposed that’s pretty common the World over when people whose regional accents are from places deemed “provincial” move to the big cities in more prosperous regions.

Oh, and immigrants, I almost forgot immigrants: many people with foreign accents do make a lot of effort to speak the local language with the local accent. In fact, for many immigrants in Britain this joke is pretty close to reality.

So there’s actually a drop of truth in the joke.

Most of the shit going on right now can be explained by fatcats in the West, having run out of Economic growth to capture as the West’s growth rate pretty much collapsed (quite possible due to the very actions those fatcats during the Neoliberal era, were amongst other things Social Mobility collapsed), have increasingly started pillaging the wealth and productive capacity of the rest of society, or in other words, exploiting everybody else.

It’s a vicious cycle were the tightening of the screws on everybody else leads to lower productivity and higher discontent which in turn leads to further tightening of the screws on everybody else in order for the elites to keep on getting wealthier at the same rate.

AI was supposed to be a way for the fatcats to be able to extract even more wealth from the rest whist having less exposure to all those pesky natural human and societal responses to that.

The country of the Great Firewall actually making free and open computing possible in the World at a time were most supposed Democracies are closing it all down claiming it’s “for the sake of the children” or “to protect us from Terrorism” or some other thin self-serving excuse for expanding civil society surveillance, would truly be the ultimate role-reversal.

That’s the lesson they learned from the NAZIs.

Hence using Bombs, Starvation and Snipers to kill Palestinians rather than Firing Squads and Gas Chambers - you can squirm some plausible deniability from the former but not the latter.

The enemy of my enemy isn’t necessarily my friend, they just happen to be aligned with me in that one, single, specific enimity.

It takes a lot more to be somebody one can trust than merely sharing a single dislike.

As I read it, that meme represents people who don’t actually think like this and instead whilst claiming to be skeptics blindly accept whatever they’re told by those who voice dislike of one or two of the same things they do (for example, American Imperialism).

If the Future of free and open computing ends up being Chinese, it’s gonna be hilarious.

Also the too few fingers per hand.

People (I suspect most if not all Americans) are unironically cheering for an automated version of what the Stasi did.

Basically the kind of manpower-heavy surveillance like the Stasi did has been done for a long time, but the full automation of it as done in countries like the US and UK has only been possible for about 4 decades for text (and for just keeping track of who people made voice calls to, but noy the contents of them) and maybe 2 decades for voice contents.

You need digitalization so that all communications are digital and computers to properly automate the tracking of people’s communications and voice-to-text software to convert voice information into text so that the automation also works on the contents of voice comms.

Mind you, what’s being done in the US and UK (and Russia, and China - it’s just that the US and UK were supposed to be Democracies) is the same as the Stasi did in East Germany, just automated and with no need to place eavesdropping devices to eavesdrop on conversations not over communications devices, as people nowadays carry their own personal eavesdropping device with a microphone, camera, full networking and fully controlled American software in it - the smarthphone - so it can just be remotelly ordered to record and conversations and images in its range.

I suspect a lot of the influence of Israel and the US on European politicians who again and again act against the European Public Opinon and in favor of Israel and the US, is the ton of blackmail material those two states have gathered on politicians the world over in the modern era of digital communications mainly via American systems, using portable networked pocket computers running OSes from American companies and which have everything needed to be a fully-features surveillance device, including a camera.

Every single vaguelly criminal or even just shameful action of any European politician with a chance of reaching a position of power, done via or around a smartphone or computer running an American OS and/or using American chat software, is almost certainly stored in a database somewhere.

Certainly that would explain A LOT of what’s going on in European Politics, especially when it comes to Israel turning full-on NAZI whilst European governments mainly just make believe nothing is happening or propose purely symbolic performative measures with zero effectiveness in stopping the Genocide.

“What about …”

The current Economic structure is designed so that the thing that makes the most Money is having Money and tilted so that the more the Money the bigger the effect.

This is why, for example, many if not most countries have higher taxes on income from work than on income from dividends.

It’s not by chance that Social Mobility has collapsed to pretty much non-existence in most of the World, especially the US (were the saying “You can be anything” actually used to be true, but not anymore, not even close) - the Economy is so extremelly rigged for Money to make Money that the dumbest, laziest, most inept rich kid will keep on getting richer their whole lives no matter how much they fuck up.

Good, good - keep going, Mark.

Possibly even compounding, considering that there are more than just a Tech Stocks bubble and Realestate bubble at the moment (though those 2 are the largest) and any one blowing will probably cause the rest to blow.

On the “upside”, the Tech Stocks bubble is mainly in the US and countries with semiconductors as a large fraction of their Economy, such as South Korea.

If this one bursting ends the USD status as Reserve Currency, that would be great.

Painful, but in the mid and long term great.

This is going to be a mix of the 2000 Crash and the 2008 Crash.

Two things:

• GOG games DO NOT HAVE DRM to play. That’s their store’s unique value proposition. So if you still have that machine with that OS all working you can keep on playing those games forever even if GOG no longer exists. In practice in my experience of over 3 decades as a gamer, you’ll start having problems soon enough even if you refrain from updating that machine’s OS, as the OS version stops being supported as do the apps in it (for example, somebody from my family had Windows 8 until recently and eventually Google mail stopped supporting his browser version and there was no newer version of the browser that still supported Windows 8 - btw that person now has Linux) plus eventually even the machine hardware fails. Point being that an installed game is generally locked to the machine it has been installed in and the OS in it, since during installation it has probably configured a bunch of stuff in places like the registry (it’s not as bad in modern Linux were you can probably get away with just moving the entire home directory and hope for the best, but in Windows it’s still pretty bad). So you’re better off backing up the offline installers.
• I don’t used Heroic but I do use Lutris and the latter has an option to save the game installer when it downloads it from GOG during a direct “install from GOG”, so emaybe Heroic has it too. Given that the files Lutris lists as downloading when I “install from GOG” seem to be chunked just like the offline installer ones from my account page in GOG, I bet those files are the offline installer ones.

You want the Goldberg Emulator, which is basically a replacement for the steam_api DLL that lets you play those games offline.

Mind you, not all games using Steam DRM will work with it, but many if not most will by just replacing the game’s steam_api DLL with the one from the emulator.

Alternatively, just prefer GOG over Steam for games available on both stores and make sure you download the offline installers from GOG and back them up - GOG itself is not entirely immune to the kind of legal shenanigans that would force them to delist a game from their store and remove them from a buyer’s games collection but, unlike Steam, their setup makes it impossible for such legal orders to stop you from playing that game if you already have the offline installer.

This is the exact same argument that Russia does to claim that NATO is attacking them.

Logically, it’s either true for both Putin’s and Zelenskyy’s claims or false for both.