It is for most scenarios in my life. And in many peoples’ lives I will wager.

For the people that are abroad I’d have to pay to call/text them each time, and I can’t even send them pictures/videos in a convenient way (no, convincing everyone to use signal just to talk to me is not happening)

And when my family/friends share photos/videos of important events in their lives that I care about I’d just have to accept I’ll be the only one missing out and be that awkward guy at family gatherings that’s all out of the loop.

And when my family is organizing events I would be the only one left out and have to convince someone to text/call me because I don’t want to be in the chat, being an inconvenience to everyone and also losing much of my input.

And I’m not even gonna mention how most workplaces and business expect you to be on WhatsApp.

And what would I get in return for being off WhatsApp? Nothing, that’s what. I’d just be the weirdo family member that never wants to interact with anyone online.

Do I like meta? No. But avoiding everything they touch is not worth being a nuisance to everyone else around me. I’ve just learned to suck it up like most people do. It’s not ideal but it’s absolutely unrealistic to expect most people to get off whatsapp/messenger when everyone has been on it for like a decade now. It’s unfortunate but it is what it is.

Ok, let me just cut off my entire family and friend circle out of my life just to stick it to some corpo that doesn’t even care about me. I sure showed 'em!

It is wild to me that in the US you’re not automatically registered to vote. The idea that you have to go through a manual process to exert one of your most basic constitutional rights is unfathomable to me.

Here when you turn 18 you can just vote. It’s that simple. No registration, no ticking a checkbox somewhere, you can simply go out there and vote the moment you’re 18.

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Yeah it’s not the perfect model for sure. Usually you did get updates to fix vulnerabilities and bugs, but any major version release would require a new purchase/license.

But any software that requires connecting to a server anywhere just doesn’t work in this model.

In the end there’s not much of a choice. Either you pay more for apps to compensate for the time spent on them, subscribe to reduce your costs and assure continuous revenue, or ads.

Anything that’s perpetually free, unless it has massive communities willing to maintain it, typically ends up like the tools we see here: abandoned/sold.

In ye old days the reigning model was a pseudo subscription where you paid for a version of a program and that’s all you got, if you wanted the next version of that program you had to buy it again. This made developing updates profitable and people who didn’t care to pay for the update could still use the outdated program. It wasn’t perfect by any means but I feel like it was one of the better compromises compared to everything else.

Sadly with the advent of mobile apps such a model is heavily discouraged.

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You can but some instances (like yours) don’t allow it.

No one is saying to vote dem and just sit on the couch waiting for a miracle.

Vote for democrats but organize, pressure legislators, local politicians, etc

Unionize so your voice becomes louder and you gain bargaining power.

Hold the the democratic party accountable for its BS. Try to steer it more left instead of right.

Educate those around you about the importance of a fairer voting system and the need to fight fascism and get them involved too.

Participate in all elections you can to make sure you give power to those who can actually help you.

There’s so much you can and should be doing beyond voting.

And the democratic party has in fact moved left, even if it doesn’t always seem like it. These things take years and decades, especially for a country like the US where all the stops are in place to make sure change never happens. So yes, reform is possible. It’s slow, painful, and sometimes it feels like you’re accomplishing nothing, but things are changing. They won’t be changing for the better if Republicans ever win though.

So telling people to vote 3rd party, at this point in time, when the US is constantly being bombarded with fascist propaganda, when the education sector is eroding by the day and people are completely politically disenfranchised because of it, is literally just splitting the vote without sending any message or moving the country forward and giving Republicans a win.

If you want 3rd parties to win, instead of praying millions of people magically switch sides, start by getting people actually interested in even caring about politics, because otherwise it’s never going to happen.

The other ranks just mean someone you wouldn’t mind winning too, more or less. You’re ranking from favorite to least favorite.

Your favorite is number 1 but if you had to pick another one it’d be number 2, and if you had to pick another one it’d be number 3, etc.

The idea is that as you go down there might actually be candidates with considerable overlap between all the voters, and that also gives chances to more than just 2 people. 3rd parties would actually have some viability in this system.

Here’s a quick example: 50% of voters put candidate A as their number 1 choice and the other 50% but candidate B as their number 1 choice. But out of the totality, 70% put candidate C as their second choice. In a ranked voting system C would win even though it wasn’t the favorite of either, because it was the candidate a big majority was willing to compromise with.

Of course in reality how the choices are tallied varies and it’s not that simple but I hope I managed to illustrate the point.

You make it sound like you have any. From how the other thread you posted in looks, you basically just parrot the same thing over and over when everyone else gives you very reasonable arguments and explanations on why voting 3rd party in the current system is completely pointless and reform needs to happen first before that’s feasible.

Please understand that in a capitalistic hell like the US only the candidates with a lot of money and influence have a chance. No 3rd party has even a remote chance of reaching enough people to secure the votes you would need to tip the scales.

“what if all these people voted x” is a fun theory to have in your head but it will never materialize because the US system in its current form is designed to create voter apathy and politically disenfranchise people, making such goals impossible.

Like someone said above, make changes at a local level so you can start reforming the system, but by not participating you’re literally just making it worse for everyone. Stop letting perfection be the enemy of good.

Also, as if genocide is the only issue that matters here. Republicans are trying to violate every human right possible. If that isn’t enough to move you I don’t know what is.

And if I’m a genocide apologist by your logic then so are you for not voting while knowing that one of the 2 genocide apologists will be chosen. Have fun sleeping at night.

Not sure if this is enlightened centrism or not but avoiding voting all together doesn’t solve anything either because one of the 2 will be elected regardless.

In the US there are only 2 possible winners, a democrat or a republican. Not voting or voting 3rd party is the same as throwing your vote in the trash because of the way the US system works.

So your choice if you want to change something is to vote for the one that has the highest chance of working towards your goals, and that is a democrat, even if almost everything they currently do is awful. Because if a republican wins, your concerns aren’t even going to get into ear reach of them.

Either participate and vote to try to change something or accept that you’re discarding your already limited political power by taking this moral stance, and in the process also making the problems you’re concerned about worse.

Yes, there is a rhyme and reason, but because that requires actually delving into linguistics studying (plus etymology for all those edge cases that got carried over from Latin and other languages), most people don’t get too deep into it apart from shallow rules (eg: if word starts/ends in X then it’s male/female).

Not even natives of gendered languages usually bother learning the nitty gritty rules, they just pick it up as they go, that’s how all of us learn our languages.

On a practical level, it’s also much easier to teach a 6 year old in elementary that something is male/female just because, and to remember that, than to go into each and every individual case (morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.), which themselves typically have edge cases due to history and whatnot. Especially because that child will naturally pick it up as they absorb the language around them so it really doesn’t matter much.

And then there’s just those cases where we actually don’t know because the etymology got lost. Yeah, that’s fun.

In school I was never taught why something is male/female yet I can always distinguish them naturally in my. day to day because that’s how I’ve always lived. That’s just one of the amazing things of human language.

If you ask a native of a gendered language why they think X word should be male instead of female they’ll probably just tell you it sounds wrong otherwise, and that’s literally the end of it for most of us. We don’t think about it, we just intuitively know it sounds right or wrong. I’m sure that’s frustrating to hear for a foreigner trying to learn, but you can’t teach what you don’t know. In the end, other than very broad rules, the best way typically is to just start memorizing it one by one.

Also, “ends in A” is definitely rhyme or reason in Portuguese, that’s actually a rule. Although to be more specific it’s a tonic A, but even that has an exception if it’s a nasal Ã, but I didn’t want to get into phonology too, I just wanted to give a simple example.

At least for romance languages, there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets, so neologisms and borrowed words tend to follow the same logic.

For word morphology, as an example, in Portuguese nouns ending in a are almost always female, so new words that end with a are very likely to be female.

There are semantic rules too, for example brands and companies are typically (I want to say always but there’s probably edge cases) female, so even though Netflix and Amazon didn’t exist before they’re still female.

No. He’s just stopping weekly uploads. He’ll still upload on an irregular basis.

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You have to create an add-on collection first and then it’ll be available. (tutorial here)

A stern talking to and yelling are different I feel like. This study is referring to basically insulting and scaring the child.

Glad to see it finally being introduced in my country! Sadly they won’t accept trade ins for the 7, which means I’ll be passing on this until the 7 is EoL.