The status quo is people driving poorly.

It’s not people driving poorly, as much as it is horrible city planning, poor traffic design and, perhaps most importantly, not requiring people to be educated enough before receiving a driver’s license.

This is an issue seen practically exclusively in underdeveloped countries. In Europe road accidents are incredibly rare. Nobody here even considers self-driving cars a solution to anything, because there’s nothing to solve.

This is nothing but Tesla (et al.) selling a ‘solution’ to an artificially created problem, that will not solve anything and simply address the symptoms.

Anything is better than Roblox.

Or evidence of what they did the year before.

New ARM laptops coming out right now have their bootloaders locked. So yeah…

In short: those are pretty much the two only solutions.

Of course, there are different types of depression and they can all be cured in different ways. For some of them there’s no cure at the moment.

Matter of fact I had seen a study that suggest a very high percentage of people are drug treatment resistant (meaning that there depression would not get better with any prescribed drugs).

Therapist =/= drugs. First of all, a therapist cannot prescribe you anything. That’s the job of psychiatrists. Both a therapist and a psychiatrist may recommend drugs for depression if they deem it appropriate, but it’s by bo means the default or the go-to option (or at least it shouldn’t be). Sometimes depression is a natural response to events like death of loved ones and drugs do nothing to cure it.

I had seen studies that say that training or even just daily walks can highly improve mood, but I had never heard that they fully cure depression.

Both of those things are commonly recommended by regular people as well as therapists, because they’re known to be effective, and more importantly - they are completely free. For 99% of people, absolutely nothing is stopping them from doing a few pushups or walking to a park. The cost/benefit ratio here is insane. As for ‘fully curing depression’ - that would highly depend on the type of depression. Also, keep in mind depression is rarely cured with just one thing.

To summarize: people recommend a therapist, because a therapist is usually the best option for any mental problems, though it may not be cheap. While exercising, or just walking and interacting with nature, are basically free and always help, but may not produce noticeable results.

From Europe it has already looked like a 3rd world country for at least a few years.

Why yes, I’d love to pay an additional $250 fee to be shipped off to a gulag.

Except the ‘least bad’ party gets 0.8% votes and almost all the votes go to worst and second worst. What most people mean by ‘least bad’ is simply ‘less bad’, as in ‘less bad than the other one’. And even that ‘less bad’ classification can be troublesome to wrap your head around.

This is precisely why it’s every government’s top priority to cripple the education system. Or if it’s already crippled - either cripple it further or just keep it as is, depending on the circumstances.

Personally I live in the EU, so it’s not nearly as bad for me as it is for Americans. However, even in Europe most politicians and their parties get elected simply because people don’t know better and follow whatever their preferred TV station says.

A lot of Europeans also have difficulties separating personal feelings from politics. You criticize one politician and suddenly everyone is mad, because that means you must be a devoted supporter of their opponent. Sometimes it feels like everyone is brainwashed, because they can only do ‘white’ or ‘black’, as if there were no other shades in between.

Found the husband!

Sounds like a massive overreaction and abuse of century-old laws.

If those devices are so bad, why not forbid selling them in Italy, instead of punishing people who buy them completely legally. Imagine going through all of this because you bought a laptop and posted a review online.

It’s difficult to prove anything like that. From independent research we know that Intel, and likely AMD too with their counterpart, can remotely control your PC via IME. But they’ve never done that yet or have done so very secretly, because then a lot more people would know and that would be problematic.

Personally I think it’s reasonable to suspect that Microsoft has full capability to severely cripple your system at any given time. Maybe not ‘brick’ as that may be impossible without proprietary hardware inside the machine. However, even a simple Windows installation can mess up your UEFI. Given that, do you think that all those millions of fully secret lines of code cannot render you unable to use your PC, even if just temporarily?

We all see and hear what goes on over there.

Do we? We only get a little bit of news from there, and I wouldn’t be sure how reliable it is.

Why don’t any other countries step in to help those people.

Help how? Go to war and slaughter most of their population? They are already heavily mobilized, and no doubt they’d conscript a lot more in case of a conflict. Not to mention they have nukes.

Why do we just allow this to happen in modern civilization?

Who is ‘we’? No offence, but this sounds like some oblivious American patriot asking why America hasn’t saved the world yet.

Is just not lucrative to step in?

Most countries don’t have their own nukes, so they will never even consider getting into a conflict with a country that does have them. Most countries don’t have even a fraction of the resources needed for any sort of operation.

Plus, North Korea has powerful allies (like China) and is technically a member of the UN, so you can’t just disregard everything and conquer it.

I think this is true. Billionaires and their corporations are obviously morally bankrupt and have been manipulating all of us for long years. But at the same time, it seems to me that there is also some ‘consent’ on our part. There’s a lot of people who will still choose to be oppressed, even after having everything explained to them and seemingly having understood.

Perhaps thay’s how deep all the decades of social engineering go. Or maybe we just really like convenience, to the point where we’re willing to become slaves if it means our lives are convenient.

Kind of true, but the EU is not America, so don’t apply the same standards. In the US it’s extremely difficult to find a single politician that is not a completely corrupt criminal. The EU, on the other hand, is filled with a lot of politicians that also prioritize their positions and comfortable lives, but at least generally have somewhat positive intentions.

As for the European Citizens’ Initiatives - they are very serious and usually result in actual legislation. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this specific petition will lead to consumer protections. The only guarantee is that the European Comission will consider and talk about this. Afterwards, they’ll negotiate with the lobbies and sometime later we - citizens of the EU - will get to write public feedback about the Comission’s proposals in a post on their website, that may or may not be taken into consideration.

Overall it’s still a fairly corrupt, far from ideally functioning system, but it’s nowhere near the level of rot that the US is throwing out on full display. Despite the MEPs primarily looking out for their own best interests, we regularly receive more and more laws that benefit regular folk and not corporations. Meanwhile the last time the US has seen any real pro-people change was what, 40 years ago? The EU may be far from perfect, but please do not put it on the same shelf as America. There’s no comparison to be made.

The name is still silly. If it’s not about pride… then don’t name it pride? Why thay specifically? It’s not even positive. Does anyone enjoy the company of proud people? For me they’re insufferable.

I know it"s too late to change the name, but… maybe…?

I thought they didn’t care about the identity and just kidnapped whoever they felt like. Do they really need this?

To be more precise: it is actually beneficial for big corporations if you pirate their media, as opposed to you having never been born. The sole act of you ‘consuming’ their media is positive for them, since you’ll almost definitely see their logos (advertising to you), and you may spread the word to people who may pay for it (advertising by you).

As you said, it’s all pretty much propaganda to brainwash us into trying to be ‘good citizens’ (obedient consumers).

I think we should work more, for less pay, with occasional pizza. That’ll help, right?