Hegar

Right to disconnect laws were first introduced in France in 2017… One critic at the time said: " the French may quickly discover that their most productive workers are routine “lawbreakers” who stay connected during off-hours." … A 2023 Australia Institute study estimated Australian workers on average were doing an extra 5.4 hours of unpaid work per week. … equates to an extra 281 hours’ unpaid work per year. This is estimated to be costing workers an average of AU$11,055 annually.

For employers, productive is just a polite synonym for exploited.

Public protest and unrest is a symptom, your society telling you something is wrong

This is something that the Chinese government actually pays very close attention to. Specific issues - food safety and pollution for example - they allow some protest so they can gauge how strong public sentiment is on the matter. Even when they arrest protest leaders, they’ll often make policy changes in the relevant areas. I’ve heard china scholars talk about how interested the chinese government is in public opinion and the roundabout ways they assess it in a system where it can’t be regularly expressed in open elections.

the appearance of a peaceful society without conflict is not the same thing as a peaceful society without conflict

For sure. I feel like as far as an authoritarian government is concerned though, they are functionally the same. Until suddenly they are not, of course. But again, the resilience of the CCP is due in part to working out what is up for public comment and what is most definitely not.

public unrest is a feature

Again, super agree. But I don’t think of public unrest as political chaos, at least not in the US context. The inability of the government to perform it’s most basic functions without brutally pointless culture wars, the myriad ways to gum up the works and prevent action, the increasing politicization of the public service, the willingness of so many to act contrary to the government’s own interests - that’s the sort of stuff I think of as All American political chaos.

Oh, that’s it? Thank you! I never would’ve gotten this. I think it was the whole of sponge bob used as a metaphor for a single body part that was throwing me off.

I’ll wear whatever you like 😘

Last week for me.

I still do not get it.

Are his eyes and nose supposed to look like testicles and a penis? They’re upside down if so.

Is it his eyes and the line extending from his head? There’s the square of his head in the way so it just doesn’t look like a penis to me.

I gather it’s somehow penis related, yeah?

How does that relate to the image though?

I could definitely believe that some weibo users are very interested in Biden’s stepping down. Xi’s decision to stay on passed the original term limit was quite controversial even among some of his supporters. Stepping aside when the moment requires it is the hallmark of that paragon of Confucian virtue, the Duke of Zhou.

But no one in the world “envies” our political chaos. We’ve done real damage to the global reputation of democracy and given example after example for the world’s autocrats to point to when they argue that democracy is self defeating.

Not on normal courtyard/community exercise

That’s almost certainly a backronym. There aren’t enough records of its use to say for certain, but nonce probably shares an etymology with “nancy” as in nancy boy, or possibly with “ponce” as in perfumed ponce.

But when you give fame and wealth to known child rapists like van de Velde, trump, or others who regularly appears in epstein’s flight logs, they can use that fame and wealth to attract more victims and cover up their actions.

There’s a difference between having a livelihood and being granted access to the power that nationwide recognition gives you.

I think the allusion is probably to clouds, given that project nimbus is amazon and google cloud updating the israeli government’s cloud computing and nimbus is latin for cloud. The israeli government is generally not as big on christian metaphors as the US government is.

Belief in the divine likely comes from our brains’ hyperactive agency detection system: our brains err on the side of seeing agency where there is none in order to keep us alive.

If a branch snaps behind you and you react as if someone did it but it was really nothing, you’re fine. But if it was a human or other animal and you react as if it was nothing, you might be food.

Property crime is largely a factor of poverty, but also social inequality. If you lack a need you will try to fulfill that need. If you feel like you’re unfairly “less-than”, you’re much more likely to engage in prohibited behavior to correct that. But also if you have power or wealth, your brain becomes less capable of empathy making it much easier for you to criminally hurt others - the rich do most crimes.

Religion is just using this evolutionarily beneficial flaw in our brains to justify the unjust social hierarchies which drive crime. So in a roundabout way, religion puts upward pressure on crime.

That’s one of the cleverest pronunciation guides I’ve ever seen.

This is part of Leonard Leo’s plan to re-mccarthy-ize US society and purge anyone left of fascist, same way he orchestrated the right wing take over of our courts.

You can say that people who identify as introverts use more concrete language, but there’s no reliable way to identify intro/extraversion because it’s about as scientific as an internet personality quiz.

Jung’s original definition that some people get energy from socializing while others have to expend energy to socialize doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. We’re social primates and sometimes we like socializing and other times we find it taxing but often it’s a little of both.

If you really don’t like socializing you may have some degree of social anxiety, and maybe you identify as an introvert. Which is fine of course - most people will understand what you mean.

But I think it’s important to remember that we’re not talking about a real thing that actually exists in our genes or brains. It’s just a vague description of your attitude to socializing.

Don’t Do What Donny Don’t Does!

A vast patchwork of incredibly different lifeways that you can flee to whenever then taxman and his goons come round.

If it’s a nation state, it’s already not a democracy.

The idea that choosing which particular rich people sit in a fancy building is somehow democracy is quite funny.

Free will.

It’s hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It’s like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it’s true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn’t suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.

I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.