Most definitely. It was purely economic than militaristic. EU companies are generally seen as superior just for being from the EU in Asia.

This is a very insightful comment, thank you. I absolutely agree with most of your points. Though one minor disagreement I’d have: it wasn’t Trump who brought on the waning of US soft power, but US’s failure in Afghanistan/Iraq/Yemen during 2nd Obama term.

Ultimately the expense in forging the US influence overseas during the Bush era came at the cost of ignoring those back home. Trump capitalized on all that resentment. In fact he still is riding on it. Coinicdentally Its a lesson Modi needs to learn from his recent election result at home too.

Sidestepping the whataboutism of US support of Iserali “invasion”, the US/EU soft power is clearly waning in the East. Sanctions are only as effective as long as everyone is willing to comply.

Others commented about misogyny etc. in India miss the fact that India is (a) not a monolith & (b) flights are too expensive for 80% of India’s population (yes, wealth disparity in India is that bad). So the men on flights are less likely to grope women than let’s say a man on a train.

I asked my Indian colleagues about this, and they said they’d use this preference for space (not purely safety). One of them also said men smell worse than women so she’d prefer a woman next to her.

On Indian flights you can pay to choose your seat or let the operator choose for you for free. I suspect the latter is where the preference choice comes in. So there won’t be a question of seeing where women are sitting.

Absolutely, this change makes it harder for people to quickly scroll away ads at the top & for ad blockers to seamlessly hide ads. With ad blockers your first page will be mostly empty & make google more annoying to use.

Also seems like a shitty get-outta-jail-free card. With no design in place, timelines and acceptance criteria can’t be enforced. “Of course we’re done now, we just decided that we’re done!”

They’ll Probably face a fine, a fraction of their quarterly profit. Most other consumer facing industries might suffer a long term/permanent loss in trust/image. But their customers are other companies especially management. My own extremely cynical view is, they’ll come out being viewed as “going the extra mile for the client” even if it means being unethical.

When you’re selling to psychopaths, showing them you’re just the same is good for business.

Not OP, but I think he (along with other billionaire’s) got rich off of tax breaks and subsidies that were tax funded. No person can earn his kind of wealth on their own and without some sort of exploitation, usually of poor people. Paying ~4% is understandably less than bare minimum.

I think a lot of memes are missing the main point of how it was caught, the exploit caused a spike in CPU usage for a network call. That made no sense to the guy Messiah who found/reported it. FOSS software’s strength is the number of critical eyes looking over each line of code you put out!

Absolutely

Nope. I remember i had added deus ex human revolution & assassins creed 2. I would open steam to open up uplay to open up the game. 14 year old me thought I was a “hacker”

Didn’t steam have a feature to add non-steam games to your library? Ofcourse it didn’t support all the steam features + it would allow steam gather data about “less-than-legal” copies of games associated with users 🤷

My dumb ass kid brain put all my “alternatively sourced” games to it thinking I was cool