Here’s another “insider’s insight”: The car industry is a tough business. The profit margin is not like selling bottled water, especially when you consider overheads in R&D and the regulation compliant measures they have to adhere to, to sell in the German/EU market. Cars sold in the US are cheaper to produce because they go through much, much less vigorous testing, but then they are loaded with stupid add-ons (screens behind each seat, more luxurious user interface, better speaker+subwoofer combos, etc)

Send them a head of white cabbage every week (can use an online grocery service.

If you have access to their dwelling, put all their bedroom furnitures in the living room

I also want to know. Same with Tony Blair. Alas, I’m not a legal scholar.

In Germany: Big car manufacturers do have round-table sessions where they share research informations with each other. However, they do not co-ordinate pricing.

When you feel like car manufacturers release models with similar specs within a short time frame, this could be why.

I think so too, but oh well, people disagreed and that’s okay :D

Hahaha, okay, that’s somewhat funny

It really depends on the kind of work you do. My mindset is, if you’re interested in it, invest time in learning about it. If not, then not. We don’t have to go all “kids these days…” or look down on people who aren’t as interested in techology as we are.

Coming from a simulation software company here, not everyone in my company will know how to deal with servers or IT security and I think it’s ok. The programmers and engineers are brilliant, creative thinkers, all highly educated, but some just never bothered to learn this one thing. It’s almost offensive how our IT department treat the engineers, as if we’ll break anything we touch, but I get it from a security stand point.

As a student, I used to work part time in server maintenance for our uni, that’s how I personally got that knowledge. But even people working in the “tech industry” don’t all have the same sets of skills or tech interests.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing

Really? But most consumer products work so easily nowadays.

What do you mean, I can plug this USB stick in and it works without me having to turn the system off and start another boot cycle? Then when I finish, I can just unplug it and it doesn’t break?

It’s like magic.

He didn’t invent it, but he did try to flatten every story into this masculine take of a heroic life, some screenwriters took this to heart and then we got Luke in the cave.

Sometimes I go through weeks of intensively reading mangas or go back to the Greek mythologies, Homer, Apuleius, and enjoy how different the story beats in these cultures are compared to, well, my boring person’s American hegemony entertainment.

I was truly, genuinely, surprised at how much I enjoyed the philosophy of Free Guy. At first, I thought it was just a feel-good movie, popcorn flick, but I was happy to be able to go to the cinema during Covid, middling, middling, middling, and, lo, by the end the movie had completely won me over. IT IS ABOUT HOW WE FEEL ABOUT OUR LIVES, regardless of our place in the cosmos.

I wished it had gone deeper into the ethics of creating conscious AIs, but that would have been too much to ask for that kind of movie. That same year I watched Dune in the cinema, and I kind of like them both. Almost equally, but in different ways. About 6 months later, I went back for The Matrix Resurrections and was sorely disappointed. Free Guy should have been The Matrix 4.

The Hero With A Thousand Faces

You might be interested in reading “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell. Also read the whole discourse and criticisms surrounding the work.

The story was beat per beat inspired by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell’s metaphorical inmost cave was translated into Luke literally going to a cave in Empire Strikes Back.

Not to take anything away from Lucas’ creativity, of course. But to me it was quite obvious that he read or at least was aware of Joseph Campbell’s theory of stories and that Lucas read Frank Herbert’s Dune

What’s this, a civil discussion on the internet? Well, I never… You’re both so wholesome, if I were still on Reddit and seeing this, you’d both get a badge each

This is about the Americas, yes? I believe its original roots was in Calvinism, that is, the brand of Christianity in the reformation era that was brought over to the Americas by early European settlers/colonisers as proposed by the theologian John Calvin. It’s something about how God chose its people and gave them the grace of worldly wealth. Wealth is good because it comes from God, so it follows, that poverty is due to a lack of God’s grace = immorality (laziness, lack of personal qualities, wickedness).

I think I read about this in a book about US American economy a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember which book it was.

You can view what Google “knows” about you on your account settings. I made my account when I was very young, I lied about my age and my gender, then it made assumptions based on my interests of my professional situation. I guess many people in my gender and age group, sharing my actual interests (tech, movies, culture, food) are also interested in the kind of content you described (Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Yiannopolous, etc). I keep clicking “not interested”, but the algorithm keep suggesting these videos to me. I don’t mind that Google doesn’t know my politics. I’m a feminist, but there’s really not a lot of interesting discourse about feminism on Youtube, so I just read and attend real life lectures instead.

It’s like the early days of Reddit, when people were just moving away from Diggs. We’re all still a bit polite. Just give it some time. We’ll get there on Lemmy one day.