• 4 Posts
  • 473 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Tbh I learned a lot about other cultures through tiktok and recently the US have proven that no matter how much chest pounding about freedom they do, they can be just as authoritarian as any other, even ignoring the invasion of other countries, literally murdering their citizens in the streets and abusing women and minorities, so the app being owned by a Chinese company was not really as big of an issue as others have made it out to be.

    Now that ownership has changed, there’s an active suppression of american sensitive topics on the platform, so that’s already a visible downgrade.

    I wish someone more neutral could offer a real alternative that people would jump on.


  • You made assumptions about my social media use that are wrong. I don’t interract with them because I don’t like the way they are run and the data they gather will for sure be used against me. I interact with the fediverse because it doesn’t start from a point of abuse, but it can very clearly be abused and I would honestly prefer that this particular information would not be available in any way since it is the most frictionless but also the most potentially exposing way you interact with this platform.





  • The number of times I needed something urgent printed in the evening when all the shops are closed has made my laser printer one of the most valuable rarely used devices in my house. That and the fact that printing is just a 30 seconds job instead of a whole routine of hoops lasting at least an hour just to get to the local printing shop.


  • My argument is that the shit that these countries go and have gone through is mostly self inflicted. 90s Romania was insanely corrupt with an “everyone for themselves” attitude like you wouldn’t believe. I was there so I know. People would give bribes even to the local pool to go in without paying a normal fare. Even the priests took bribes. The guy that was chosen as the first president was a former communist elite and he went to town on fucking the country over and people rioted over it. The poverty and suffering was fully internally manufactured.

    People nostalgic for the communist system are idiots. Looking at the data economically it might not look bad, but there were extreme supply issues, famine and the authoritarian regime were in full swing in the final years and were the catalist for the fall of the whole system. The years leading up to that is when Romanians learned to survive by any means necessary and infused the society with the corruption that led to the experience of the 90s.

    2000s is when people finally had enough and started aspiring to the European model and things started to turn around. You can totally see it on the GDP graph that you showed, 90s was not really capitalistic, it was wild oligarchy west where the only people with any opportunity were former communist elites with money and influence to create their local mafias. Those mafias continued to permate the society in some places to this day.

    My argument is that overall the EU has been a net benefit for Romania. Now if you want to get into how capitalism as a whole is not great, especially for the lower classes, then sure, we can agree on that. But this is not what betrayed Romania, Romanians betrayed Romania.


  • Relative richness, compared to how they started in the 90’s after communism. In 2000 Spain had an average salary of 1443€ and Romania 143€. In 2018 Spain grew to 2295€ but Romania to 965€ an almost 7 times increase.

    Current minimum salary in Romania is 814€. It was 40€ in 2000. Your average IT person in Romania right now makes ~70% as a much as a Spaniard but their rent and prices are less than half compared to Spain. Lower skill jobs are still lagging, but it’s been getting better and better.

    All of this success is partly due to the EU pulling strings on Romanian politicians in exchange for funds and partly having a political and justice system that has mostly been doing acceptable. If you compare 90’s Ukraine and Romania they had a similar shitty start and the same access to opportunities including the EU. One embraced that and the other did not.







  • Why not set an alarm on your phone when you start the machine so you remember to take out the clothes?

    When they get mildew they are kind of compromised, you’re not really cleaning them properly with just another wash, you should soak them in vinegar to kill the spores, then wash them again. I find that once a pice of clothing develops this smell from not drying properly, you can’t get rid of it completely without treatment, meaning just another wash is not enough.