third world countries where multinational corporations have been buying up land and propping up and collaborating with authoritarian governments for decades: first time?

in my language we have one pronoun for all genders(siya). it just morphs depending on context(siya/sila/niya/nila).

well obviously wet bugs are cleaner since they’re surrounded by water all the time

what if… the US invasion of Iraq and Saudi censorship of the press can both be bad?

it’s not about how easy it is to install it’s that it has to be installed at all. Over here we prefer phones as there’s a lot of cheap phones here that only cost less than $100, and since most phones here come preinstalled with chrome, even if firefox is free and all, why go through the hassle of having to go and install it when Chrome’s already there?

most people here have a mindset of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” which explains a lot of things wrong in this country.

well I mean, chatGPT actually does have some real world use. personally, I find chatGPT more helpful than Stack Overflow when it comes to finding problems with my code

I’m from the Philippines and I can explain why, at least here, most people still use chrome. Over here, we’re much more concerned about our money and time over our rights and privacy, which means we usually just choose the most convenient and cheap money-wise, which is why the majority of us still use chrome and why the government here can get away with so much shit. we don’t care about our rights not because we’re being given bread and circuses, but because we’re too busy making a circus out of ourselves so we can buy bread.

they’ve been in power in one way or another since the 50s. mainstream left-wing politics in this country never really had a chance at any point since we became independent. Going back to the McCarthy days of Magsaysay in the 50s, to Martial Law under Marcos of the 70s, to the Post-Arroyo right-wing dominated politics we have today(23 out of the 24 senate seats are currently held by the conservative government, the House of Representatives isn’t any better). Some families have been in power in their regions for centuries.

arguably the most leftist government we had was the post-EDSA C. Aquino Government, and even that was led by someone who was arguably part of the aristocracy, and even then her government suffered around 9 loyalist coups in 6 years until her government eventually shifted to the right.

non-american here. I knew the conservatives in your country were bad but holy shit

yeah but in this context it isn’t. I’m just saying, if people want to protest the site’s changes, it’s better for them to protest within the site itself rather going somewhere else and disturbing people there.

I didn’t say it was?

I find it interesting how gendered German is. In contrast, in my language the default for a word is gender neutral. you have to state the gender if you want to specify it, and you only do that if the gender is relevant e.g. “the driver handed me my change” would be “inabot sakin ng tsuper yung sukli ko”, but if you said “inabot sakin ng babaeng tsuper yung sukli ko” which means “the female driver handed me my change” then that means the gender of the driver is of relevance to the conversation.

an exception I can think of is spanish loanwords like “tindero/tindera” which is more commonly used to refer to shopkeepers and vendors here. we also use “ate/kuya”(sister/brother) when we talk to strangers e.g. “kuya alam nyo po kung saan yung pinakamalapit na sakayan ng dyip?” meaning “excuse me sir, do you know where the nearest jeepney terminal is?”.

overall, I find it interesting to look into languages with different ways of using things that seem complicated to me. really makes me think what “foreigners” might think is complicated in my language that I take for granted.

you criticize society… but you participate in society… curious

chatGPT doesn’t chastize me like a drill instructor whenever I ask it coding problems.

my language doesn’t have gendered pronouns so we just use “siya” for singular they and “sila” for plural.

I’m curious what other languages specify if “they” is singular or plural and how?

wasn’t there an anti-communist post that got like 1k+ here? the counter post to it got less I think. I think you just need to go to the right communities man, it’s a vast world out there

I prefer bikes

idk man, the Philippines has been trying capitalism for a while and it only empowered the aristocrats here even more and turned them into oligarchs.

don’t forget the US-backed Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr… he oversaw a borderline ethnic cleansing campaign against moro muslims in mindanao, had thousands tortured and killed and sometimes had their mutilated bodies strewn on public areas(this is what we call salvaging), created an oligarchy that lives on today and, with his wife and children and billions of public funds, was flown out of the country by orders of Reagan when his regime was toppled by the 1986 revolution.

and now his son, who continues to deny his father’s crimes and refuse to return the billions they stole from us, is president.

science bless us all