CarbonIceDragon

Ive usually seen "Expat" defined as someone working in another country, but explicitly with the intent to be there temporarily and leave once their time at that job ends, rather than moving there with an intent to stay and join that society. Which, granted, doesnt seem to be what OP is actually talking about in this case.

to be fair, he had more checks on his power then, had less motive for revenge against the justice and electoral systems, and is now even more crazy. Im hoping it will be just some incompetence and international embarrassment, but Im worried that it might be more.

While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I've played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There's something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It's not a problem at all if I'm feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn't take that long, but if I'm recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it's probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

Theres someone I sometimes encounter in a discord Im in that makes a hobby of doing stuff with them (from what I gather seeing it, they do more with it that just asking them for a prompt and leaving them at that, at least partly because it doesnt generally give them something theyre happy with initially and they end up having to ask the thing to edit specific bits of it in different ways over and over until it does). I dont really understand what exactly it is this entails, as what they seem to most like making it do is code "shaders" for them that create unrecognizable abstract patterns, but they spend a lot of time talking at length about technical parameters of various models and what they like and dont like about them, so I assume the guy must find something enjoyable in it all. That being said, using it as a sort of strange toy isnt really the most useful use case.

"hey Google, download Firefox for me please."

-"Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that..."

The poor have always been treated poorly. But if you look at the people that actually have most of the influence in society, they've generally been mostly men. Not exclusively, and less now than before, but you can hardly argue the distribution of power has been anything close to 50 50. Talking about this isn't ignoring that poor men (and poor women for that matter) are and have been exploited for their labor- because that is simply a different conversation than the one on gender status. There can be more than one issue in play in society at a time, and it is not ignoring or denying the rest to talk about one of them without bringing up every single other one while doing it

Is there a reason that you use some character (I'm afraid I don't know the name of it) wherever you would otherwise use "th"? I can't guess if it's some kind of technical issue with federated text, something from a different language you're incorporating, or one of those "I think we should add x symbol to the language so I'll use it to draw attention to the effort" deals, like with the people that use the combined !? symbols whenever both are relevant at once.

being treated as an object of reverence to be kept and provided for rather than a person of equal contributions to be given the same status as everyone else, is itself a form of oppression. Consider that "revered and provided for" is also the status of a cat, and while we certainly love those, they arent exactly treated as anything like our equals.

I'm not sure that something like a public orgy would be a good idea, not because of "morals" (I tend to think modern society is far too repressed about sexual stuff), but because of the health implications that would come of encouraging sexual contact between large groups of strangers. That sounds like a recipe for STI spread unless you were very strict and thorough with testing, vetting participants, and enforcing protective measures, which inevitably not every instance would be.

I sometimes think about automats, and what a modernized version, designed to both be healthy enough to eat as one's primary meal source without ill effect and efficient enough to compete in price with home cooking, might be like. I suspect it would probably involve a lot of soup and chili and the like, just because that stuff is relatively simple to produce in large quantities, and uses cheap yet generally healthy ingredients

To be fair, regardless of one's stance on the utility of current AI or the wisdom of developing it, it is an extremely difficult and potentially world changing technical achievement, and given there isn't a computer science prize, physics is probably the most relevant category to it

Honestly, a car collector is probably the best kind of person to have one I'd bet, given that they now exist out there. They don't seem terribly safe for pedestrians and others to have around, so it they're going to be out there in individuals hands, them being kept parked in some guys garage as some weird curiosity vehicle of the 2020s is probably better than being driven around on the daily as a pointy oversized commute vehicle